I originally asked this question over at the Western Standard Blog in a comment, but I’d like to know why those on the right of the political spectrum in Canada haven’t considered setting up their own Internet radio station? It seems http://westernstandard.blogs.com/shotgun/2004/09/e_read.html#commentsto me that this would be much more productive than the continual carping about the CRTC and the inability for Canadians to get FOX programming in this country.
Instead of bitching, why not do something about it? The cost of bandwidth isn’t a concern—a P2P streaming solution like Peercast would take care of that. Software need not cost anything either. Peercast supports the SHOUTcast streaming media standard, and there are many, many absolutely free applications that can be used to stream to Peercast. The initial investment shouldn’t require much more than a $300 PC and a high-speed connection for the person initiating the stream.
Individual members of the group publishing the station could pre-record their content and upload it via FTP to the central server that streams it out. I’m not yet sure how to handle phone-in shows, but see no reason why people couldn’t interact live with the host of the show via a text interface using IRC or IM.
The technological problems are easily surmountable. The problems of co-ordinating people, less so, but still workable. And the CRTC? They don’t apply to Internet broadcasts, so no worries on that score.
I don’t have the time or energy to launch this myself, but there are quite likely many people out there who would be interested in doing such a thing if they knew how to go about it. Nick at Ghost of a Flea has already expressed interest. Are there others?
Please feel free to discuss this idea.