News Release

By MARY CATHERINE HENDRIX
UNC News Services

CHAPEL HILL — WXYC, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s student-run radio station, will celebrate a decade since becoming the world’s first radio station to broadcast live on the Internet. Anniversary events Saturday and Sunday (Nov. 6 –7) will include the release of an online MP3 compilation, a promotional concert and a panel discussion.

The MP3 compilation, titled "Bandwidth: Celebrating 10 Years of Internet Radio on WXYC-Chapel Hill," will feature 23 songs by area artists, including Shark Quest, Etta Baker, Cold Sides and the Moaners. Internet users can download the compilation for free starting Sunday (Nov. 7) from www.wxyc.org.

A WXYC-sponsored concert will be held at the Local 506 on Franklin Street at 9 p.m. Saturday (Nov. 6). Bands slated to perform include the Moaners, Spectac and Jett Rink.

WXYC officials will hold a panel discussion and media briefing about the history and future of Internet radio from 3-5 p.m. Sunday (Nov. 7) in room 3203 of the Frank Porter Graham Student Union. David McConville and Mike Shoffner, who configured the original 1994 Internet broadcast, will be joined by Paul Jones, their supervisor in information systems at UNC during its conceptualization and completion. Jones is now a clinical associate professor in UNC’s schools of journalism and mass communication and information and library science.

WXYC will broadcast the Sunday discussion via radio signal and Internet stream.

It took two months for volunteer lawyers to make sure that WXYC had satisfied Federal Communications Commission rules governing radio stations. "We had to find out what the rules were because no one had ever done this before," said Jones, also director of ibiblio.org, a digital library and archive that now hosts WXYC’s live webcast. "The technology was ahead of the law."

In April, the WXYC name appeared on the TV game show "Jeopardy." The answer was, "It's believed that in 1994 WXYC in Chapel Hill in this state became the first radio station to webcast." The correct response was "What is North Carolina?"

Shoffner, now of UNC’s Information Technology Services, said he is amazed by the progress made in the 10 years since the first webcast.

"Now it's just as easy to listen to a station halfway around the world as it is to listen to a local one, and there's a lot to choose from," he said. It's a big win for the radio consumer."

Shoffner and McConville, who now owns his own Asheville-based mulitimedia production company, worked on the technical aspects of the project. They collaborated with Jones, then in charge of UNC’s SunSITE (one of the first Internet servers ever created and forerunner of ibiblio.org), in fall 1994 to test the possibilities of online rebroadcasting with Cornell University’s CUseeMe utility (software used for Internet audio/videoconferencing).

"We were working with CUseeMe, and we decided we could turn it into a radio broadcast on the Internet," Jones said.

The team began testing the system in late August 1994 and made the final product available to listeners worldwide by Nov. 7.

For more information, contact P.J. Disclafani, UNC alumnus, WXYC disc jockey and coordinator of the webcasting anniversary events, at (919) 933-4307, schwa_e@earthlink.net or visit http://www.wxyc.org/about/first.

ibiblio.org, "the people’s library," is a diverse and expansive collection of information on the Internet, created and maintained by the public for the public. The site offers software archives, music archives, large text database projects and special exhibits.

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(Hendrix, of Durham, is a UNC senior double-majoring in psychology and journalism and mass communication.)

News Services contacts: Print, Lisa Katz, 919-962-2093; broadcast, Karen Moon, 919-962-9585