UNESCO’s New Delhi office has just published a booklet “Forging Innovations: Community Multimedia Centres in Nepal”. The publication includes a collection of case studies on the Community Multimedia Centres (CMC) in Nepal and is intended to showcase the interesting and diverse growth of this initiative in spite of conflict and the lack of community radio regulation in Nepal.
Monthly Archive for December, 2007
I found an article about London pirate radio stations first published in Sunday Times magazine in September 2003. In it the author, Matt Munday, tells how mobile phones and SMS are being used at Xtreme FM to keep contact with listeners:
A show is in progress, the DJs taking turns to mix records together and exchange banter in a cockney pirate patois. The music veers from chunky hip hop to saccharine R&B - like most contemporary pirates, Xtreme champions “urban” sounds, a term that originated as a euphemism for black music. When not DJ-ing, they fiddle with their mobile phones: texting, reading texts, taking calls. Everyone has a top-of-the-range handset.
There is a studio mobile too. It vibrates every few seconds like a faulty alarm clock, as listeners call and text. Scrolling through its inbox, I notice scores of “missed calls”. Big N explains that this is how pirates gauge a record’s popularity. If listeners like a tune, they call in and then ring off, so the studio mobile registers a “missed call”. This costs callers nothing. If Xtreme receives over 20 missed calls from different numbers before a track ends, the DJs play it again. This is why teenagers listen to pirate radio: it’s interactive in ways legal stations can’t match.
There is not much information on the site, but Dialup Radio claims to have been specifically designed for use by human rights activists in the deveoping world, with particular attention to security and keeping costs down. From the brief description, I think it could also be used as an alternative distribution method for radio news where stations don’t have access to the internet, but do have a telephone. They would simply call the (open source Asterisk) tepehony server and “order” news from a menu of options.
“Dialup Radio is a tool that distributes human rights and independent media via telephone. Brief radio-style audio files are uploaded and managed via the Dialup Radio website. These files are immediately available to callers who phone the project phone number. Our software automatically generates interactive voice response (IVR) menus that enable callers to naviage audio content using their telephone keypads. Dialup radio works with any telephone, and can be adopted for a variety of activist campaigns.”
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