In case anyone missed today's news...

[Eli Goldberg]

As I recall, when I posted about 3.5 years ago proposing narrowcasting of
filk events like conventions, I got fairly reamed for being a total nut,
both on the technical side ("You'll NEVER have the bandwidth!"), and on
the organizational side ("Who would ever want to broadcasting their
event? Who would show up, if they could hear it over the Internet").

For anyone who missed it, a reasonably groundbreaking event just took
place today, specifically, all of the physical infrastructural pieces of
doing event narrowcasting (whether filk or not) just came together with
the release of Shoutcast (http://www.shoutcast.com).

Specifically, it's the first free (for non-profit use), high-quality,
cross-platform streaming media solution out there, using MP3 encoding.

In combination with widespread DSL access and proliferation of the Linux
operating system, it's now absolutely trivial for an individual to run a
serious streaming media server supporting as many connections as would be
realistically used for a filk event --- for free.

(Okay, there's the small issue of getting a live data stream from the
facility to one's server, but it can be done, worst-case, by a
low-bandwidth, choppy Ricochet connection in most metropolitan areas. Or
just time-delay the event by a week, from tapes.)

Now there's just the organizational side.

Needless to say, when tiny event after tiny event ends up gaining
international publicity and attention from folks who otherwise wouldn't
have ever considered attending their event through free publicity from
narrowcasting (just like how hundreds of small bands are using mp3.com to
get wider attention to their work), it'll be a no-brainer.

In the interim...don't be too surprised if Prometheus does a
proof-of-concept narrowcasting of the next live event that we organize.

Welcome to the 21st century. ;)

--- elig
taking a break from layout engines to pontificate...