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WXYC

WXYC 89.3 FM
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
919-962-8989

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Templeton

A message from Brad Templeton in response to WXYC's press release. Templeton is the founder of ClariNet, Newsedge and rec.humor.funny and current Chairman of the Board of the EFF

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sat, 10 Dec 94 18:02:55 PST
From: Brad Templeton <brad@looking.********.com>
To: online-news@marketplace.com
Newsgroups: office.onlinenews
Subject: Re: PRESS RELEASE: WXYC BROADCASTING ON INTERNET (fwd)

I certainly hope this is NOT the start of a trend. Multicasting is an interesting thing to play with, and has applications in some special cases, but the internet was meant to be point to point, and it would be a shame to see its bandwidth wasted by broadcasting, which should, of course, be done with broadcasting technology and not packet switched networks.

Imagine if even a tiny fraction of the radio stations in the world tried to do this, or anybody who thought they would want to be a radio station. It would quickly swamp things that are much better used for interactive communication.

Yes, we could increase the capacity of the pipes to add this, but what's the point. This sort of thing is far better done by broadcast technology like satellite.

Actually, the information network of the future will be a combination of broadcasting and interactive point to point communications. But the broadcast things (like netnews, radio etc.) should go by broadcast channels andt he interactive things like browsing, e-mail and input related stuff, should go through the internet style channels.

I hope that things like WXYC are stopped as soon as possible, particularly if they get small numbers of listeners, but in fact, after the trial stage, even if they get lots of listeners.