Online Audio A Little History.

My name is Mike Stewart and my passion is helping marketers use audio and video to improve their businesses online and make more money.

I have been online for over 10 years, but in professional audio and video production for
over 30 years. I have been branding myself for years now as the Internet Audio & Video Guy pulling from those 30 years of advertising and corporate communication production
experience, I made a commitment to learn how to bridge professional quality production skills with internet marketing to create improvements in the performance money making websites. It was obvious to, me in 1995; the internet was the new technology of broadcast. This was the night I got it. I saw Bill Gates on a David Letterman episode talking about the then, brand new internet.

LETTERMAN: I can remember a couple of months ago there was like a big break-through announcement that on the Internet or on some computer deal they were going to broadcast a baseball game, you could listen to a baseball game on your computer, and I just thought to myself, does radio ring a bell? You know what I mean?

GATES: There is a difference.

LETTERMAN: There is a difference?

GATES: It's not a huge difference.

LETTERMAN: What is the difference?

GATES: You can listen to the baseball game whenever you want to.

LETTERMAN: Right. Oh, I see. So it is stored in one of your memory deals?

GATES: Exactly.

LETTERMAN: And then you can come back a year later and –

GATES: That's the ram thing you talked about earlier.

LETTERMAN: Yeah, yeah. Do tape recorders ring a bell?

You see, Dave was like everyone else in broadcast world as he did not get the big
picture of how the internet was going to be the future of broadcast of audio, and obviously video to follow as it did a just few years later.
He was making fun of Bill’s vision. But when Bill said there is not a huge difference between radio and the internet, I heard him say in my mind, the internet is the new radio and TV. It was at that point, I wanted to learn how the internet could broadcast audio and video. I wanted to know what tools made broadcast quality content. I have lived to see the internet is radio and TV that anybody can learn to create and benefit their businesses, lives and pocketbooks. All the marketing strategies that worked in years of advertising on radio and TV do work online. With testing done over the last
few years, myself and other marketers have discovered powerful tactics that combined with direct response marketing, audio and video messages crafted correctly can get increased responses in cases up to 300% better than without audio or video.

In 1995, I had a 486 Acer computer and a 56K dial-up modem. But I after the Bill Gates
interview, I noticed it was not a computer monitor, but a TV set. It had speakers for
sound. Why were people not using the audio visual power of this device to communicate, teach and sell?

Because not many people at that time thought of that old computer and slow connection as broadcast. It was primitive and unusable for marketing they thought. In fact, most people put those annoying MIDI files on their web pages, the ones you could not shut off and did absolutely nothing to help the website get a response, except how to do I get away from this page!
They were the people who invented our medium of broadcast, - streaming
media. Rob Glaser worked at Microsoft and broke away in 1995 to form Real Networks.
Real Media was the first way to broadcast real time and recorded audio over the internet, even at dialup connections speeds. It was in August 1995 when Rob broadcast the ballgame between the Seattle Mariners and the New York Yankees that Bill Gates and David Letterman were talking about on his show.
I quickly learned, if you could make recorded digital audio, anyone could have an internet radio station.

This was unbelievable! I knew to have a “real” radio station would have meant you needed millions of dollars of capital for equipment, an FCC license, music licensing and a huge staff requiring salaries, programming issues, and no way to make money instantly unless you could prove tens of thousands of listeners to sell advertising.
But with internet radio, you could have just a few listeners or unlimited, you could broadcast when you felt like it, the content was timeshifted or on-demand, and the cost was owning a computer, a microphone, recording software, internet connection and webhosting account. Your call letters were your .com name! Who could be your advertiser if you got listeners? Duh… YOU, ME!

You see the same model that makes money in radio and TV works on a micro level online. The cost of entry is pennies today; the production tools have never been easier or cheaper. (I paid $25,000 for my first Pro Tools Digital audio editing system in 1993, and SonyAudio Studio does more than it ever did for $79)
The road I saw for people was to get over the fear and intimidation of creating the content. Get the tools, see how easy they are to use and create programming that builds an audience. Those who have taken action, including myself, have seen so many benefits that would have been impossible without streaming media.

I am the David Letterman to my niche. Dave needs 10 million viewers plus to make money or CBS would cancel his show. I am the network, I am the producer and I am the star and advertiser of my shows. I am in control of my broadcast success. It works when I take action. Oh, I forgot to mention, my broadcast area is the world and it is growing bigger every day.

In this column, I plan to cover the tools, software and case studies of how our new
medium of internet broadcast works. I plan to answer your questions about pro-audio and pro-video solutions for the web. Just submityour questions to me and I promise to get those answers in future articles.