One of the great pleasures in life is to listen to Radio 4's PM programme while shaving in a Seattle hotel. How come?
Simple: Radio 4 now streams its programmes over the Net.This is incredibly useful, and not just for those who are homesick in Seattle. Most of us, for example, listen to the Today programme with only half an ear while trying to locate missing socks. By the time we've twigged that an item is interesting, it's usually ended.
For example, that clip on Thursday morning in which John Prescott seemed to maintain that the US had not abandoned efforts to combat global warming. Surely I imagined that?
In the old days, it would have vanished into the ether. But all I had to do was log on to www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/ and there was Prescott - large as life and still inflicting grievous bodily harm on the English language. There is also a searchable archive of sound clips. A search for 'Richard Branson', for example, turned up innumerable interviews with the great man about trains and planes and national lotteries.
Radio 4's website is not only a good example of what public service broadcasting is for, but also a reminder of how revolutionary the technology of streaming audio has been. Like all great ideas, it was stupendously simple. It's always been possible to transfer audio files across the Net, but you had to wait until the entire file had downloaded before you could play it.
But suppose, mused Rob Glaser one day in 1994, you could compress the file, download the first bit of it and then start to play that while the rest was downloading. He reckoned that this would transform the listener's experience of internet audio. And he was right.
With some notable exceptions (for example Ireland's RTE) conventional radio broadcasters were initially sniffy about this disruptive technology. The audio quality was dire, they pointed out; more like old-fashioned short-wave radio than proper FM signals. Who would want to listen to that stuff?
It turned out that countless thousands of people wanted to listen to it - especially those scattered in diasporas across the globe. RTE, for example, found that its servers were swamped on big days like the All-Ireland Hurling Final, when my countrymen in Seattle and Tokyo and Cape Town tried to hear the game live.
RealAudio (as Mr Glaser's product was called) became a lifeline for those who emigrate but want to keep in touch with home.
As time passed, the speed of internet connections increased and streaming software improved, to the point where the technology could deliver good audio quality over broadband links and quite tolerable reception even over dial-up connections.
At this point the objections of traditional broadcasters mysteriously evaporated and many of them began 'simulcasting' - streaming - their programmes over the web as they were going out on air.
Like everything else related to the internet, the practice has mushroomed and there are now some 10,000 stations doing it worldwide. Or rather, were, until last week when some big US domestic broadcasters abruptly pulled the plug on their simulcasts.
The reason? Some legal eagle had spotted that the settlement terms of the 1999 strike by the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists included a 300% bonus fee payable to voiceover artists whose commercials are run on the web. Advertising agencies, which are liable for the fees, demanded that broadcasters pull the affected commercials off the Web.
The broadcasters opted to shut down their streaming operations entirely. Which only goes to show that while technology is wonderful, it still pays to read the fine print.
