Internet talk radio
Internet talk radio is audio that is broadcast over the Internet. It works like radio, but over the web, so people can listen from almost anywhere. Some big networks limit listening to certain countries because of licensing and ads.
The idea started in 1993 when Carl Malamud launched Internet talk radio, a weekly show where he talked with computer experts. In the early days, Internet radio wasn’t widely streamed; it often delivered audio as files you downloaded one by one. Malamud helped push multicasting, a method to send the same audio to many listeners at once. In late 1994 his Internet Multicasting Service planned RTFM, a multicast Internet radio news station, and in January 1995 RTFM added live audio from the U.S. House and Senate floors.
In the UK in 1995, Marc Eisenstadt and the Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute, together with the BBC, ran an experiment called Maven Of The Month. It featured interviews with experts in areas like human-computer interaction, new media, and artificial intelligence, and used a mix of streaming audio, web chat, phone-ins, and live video. The first event, on October 18, 1995, was an interview with Henry Lieberman of the MIT Media Lab. It used common technology of the time—14.4 kbps dial-up modems, Netscape, RealAudio, CU-SeeMe, email, web forms, and chat—and connected listeners by landline telephony to join the live audio after providing their phone numbers.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 18:34 (CET).