Quindecim

Issue date: 3/28/08 Section: News

Media Credit: Royce DuBiner Richard Simon '08 and Peter Danilchuk '10 have brought many innovations to the Goucher radio station in recent years. The latest is a live stream on itunes, which has increased audience sizes many times over.

From its tiny studio tucked away in a corner of Pearlstone Student Center, Goucher Radio is now audible on itunes, the music program ever-popular with college students.

Goucher is one of 12 colleges in the country to be accessible on the "college radio" portion of itunes. At press time, there were 13 streams on the program - the last is the Intercollegiate Broadcasting System which continually rotates between the programming of the other colleges.

Where Goucher's DJs once only reached a hundred listeners through QuickTime on its website, it now can reach anyone, anywhere.

"Everyone seems to be really happy about it and it's crystal clear to listen to it," Peter Danilchuk, '10, the radio's director of programming, said. "Everybody has itunes now anyway. As long as you have itunes and internet, you can listen to Goucher radio. It's making it easier - we've gotten so many more listeners just from that."

In the first 10 hours it went live, the stream had several hundred listeners from around the world, ranging from Canada to Sweden to China. According to George Capalbo, vice president of Backbone Networks Communication - the company which provides the radio's software - the station will get 600-700 listeners a day where before it reached about one hundred.

"We're still doing the QuickTime stream but something that was kind of bad for us was that 70-80% of our listeners would be able to connect flawlessly but some people had issues with QuickTime and it was always a problem that we had," Simon said.

The new network will increase visibility for the station, the college and the individual shows, he said. It is also easy to use. DJs don't have to do anything differently - everything happens through the software.

"What's so special about it right now in particular is that there are only, I believe, 12 stations up under college radio, so basically if you go to the radio section, you'll see a college radio tab and you double click it and there Goucher radio is," Rich Simon, '08, said. Simon holds an overseeing role at the station though he was director of programming in years past.

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