It’s vitally important to recognize that every time a new audio distribution technology comes along, the word “radio” comes along for the ride. When the first live audio streams went online in the mid-90s, did everyone call this “streaming internet audio?” No, they called it “internet radio.”

In the early 2000s when Sirius and XM first lit up their satellites hovering above the earth did they call it “satellite audio?” That’s right, they called it “satellite radio.”

Sure, “podcasting” doesn’t have the word radio in it. But the one-time neologism was built upon the conflation of “iPod” and “broadcast.” The latter word is certainly very related to radio, which was the first form of electronic broadcasting.

What this all means is that we see radio as a thriving, evolving and growing set of media united by the common application of distributing–or, broadcasting–audio programming to masses of people. Radio is the transmission of audio entertainment, information and art across a variety of media and formats.

Reading this one might wonder, “well, then, doesn’t that make records, CDs, audiobooks and album downloads some kind of radio, too?” My answer is that they’re close to radio, but don’t qualify as radio.

While services like Spotify and Rdio have blurred that line between listening to an album and listening to radio, radio is still a different experience. Music radio, in particular, is about delivering a curated experience that is more spontaneous, less processed, and more ephemeral than an album, which is comparatively crafted and composed. Sure, progressive rock radio often featured album sides, but the more frequent programming were carefully chosen DJ sets. Music radio is about the mix. And even though Pandora and last.fm deliver a mix programmed by an algorithm, the listening experience is more like that progressive rock station than a CD.

It’s not for nothing that Spotify calls its automated music streams “artist radio,” and Rdio is a semi-contraction of “radio” that needs to buy a vowel.

A point that’s hard to avoid is that these forms of radio all hearken back to the modes of presentation first pioneered in broadcast. The DJ, talk show and music set all originated with broadcast. Internet and satellite radio unambiguously crib these forms with the only big difference from broadcast being their method of transmission.

Podcasting is a particularly curious case, because in my opinion its invention reignited interest in radio forms by making it so much easier to distribute programs. Podcasting also gave listeners a kind of radio TiVo by relieving them of having to tune in to a station or stream at a particular time. The clever innovation of the automated download freed radio from the tethers of the cable and the electromagnetic wave, be it FM, AM, wi-fi or cell.

In fact, the rise of podcasting breathed life into forms of radio programming that had barely been heard from since the 70s, like radio drama and long-form comedy. Turns out that the international reach of podcasting means a particularly esoteric show can find hundreds or thousands of listeners, even if there may barely be a dozen potential fans in the broadcast radius of a single station.

This is just my long-winded way of saying that here at Radio Survivor we take all forms of broadcasted and transmitted audio programming. We think that makes our website unique. There are plenty of sites that do a good job of covering the broadcast industry, a particular radio personality or music and radio. But we haven’t found any that consistently look at the whole wide world of internet, satellite and broadcast radio. To us, it’s all RADIO.

This also means we intend to keep expanding our coverage, writing more about new online services, ways to improve the listening experience, new radio technologies, along with our continuing coverage of broadcast. In particular I hope to see us write more about podcasts and podcasting, since we’re seeing more artists, personalities and producers make the decision to completely bypass the broadcast and satellite gatekeepers, self-producing and distributing podcasts directly to audiences.

Back in August we made a call for writers and contributors, and we’re still looking. If you’ve considered writing about podcasting, satellite radio, internet radio or other radio forms–not just broadcast–then drop us a line.

RealAudio circa 1995

If we get into the wayback machine and set it for 1996 we’ll find that it was a time before MP3s, when online video was nearly an oxymoron and broadcast radio was, by-and-large, a healthy and profitable business. Online audio, including live streaming, was a new technology relying on high degrees of compression in order to force the stream over a 56kbps modem connection. If you were listening to online audio back in 1996 it’s most likely you were using RealPlayer to listen to RealAudio.

Although the company behind this platform, RealNetworks, is now considered an also-ran in the world of online media, back in the 90s the company was a pioneer led by CEO Rob Glaser, who suddenly announced his departure from the role this past week.

Rob Glaser

A lot of commentators are now too young to remember those early days of online media, and to them RealNetworks is remembered more for having an increasingly complex player application that seemed to take over your computer and nag you constantly than for being one of the creators of the online media industry. StreamingMedia.com’s Dan Rayburn takes the youngins to task and gives a bit of an historical tribute to Glaser’s accomplishments.

Another forgotten side to Glaser’s and RealNetwork’s biography is how the company provided an early leg up to get a lot of politically progressive radio programs onto the internet. In fact the company was originally named Progressive Networks with one of its goals being to distribute politically progressive content online. Nationally syndicated community radio programs like Pacifica’s Democracy Now! and FAIR’s Counterspin were made available online by the company, using RealAudio. Glaser himself has served on the board of the progressive muck-raking magazine Mother Jones and contributed funding to Democracy Now!, the National Conferences for Media Reform and Indymedia.

RealNetworks is a very different company now, and it’s fair to argue that it made quite a few strategic mistakes that caused its profile in the online media world to suffer. it and founder Glaser deserve props for giving voice to the internet, a medium that was mostly silent before RealAudio. If Glaser had never introduced RealAudio to the world we’d still be listening to radio online, but who knows how much longer it might have taken. Even then, eighteen months was an eternity in internet time. So the next time you fire up Pandora or your favorite live stream from hundreds of miles away, think of Rob Glaser and the original Progressive Networks.

Everybody knows that the trick to getting Internet radio past the early adopter crowd and into the ears of Ma and Pa Kettle means getting into it into cars. Commercial broadcasting seems ready for that to happen. How do we know? The National Association of Broadcasters sent us a profile of Autonet Mobile.

Autonet calls itself the “first wireless internet service provider designed for your car.” It creates a Wi-Fi “hot spot” that pretty much turns your auto into an Internet cafe via a 3g wireless connection. The company says it runs over the “nation’s largest 3g network,” but doesn’t say which one that is . . . presumably Verizon?

Anyway, the car is the Holy Grail, Internet radio wise. The courageous are hooking up iPhones to their FM receivers . But everybody knows that the true mass audience for streaming radio doesn’t come until Mr. and Mrs. Luddite can do it real easy.

Autonet has still has a big problem. It’s expensive. Almost 500 USD a copy and 29 a month for a 1GB plan. 59 for 5GB. And if it runs like 5GB Verizon does on my Blackberry, it may be kinda slow. I have to wait quite a while before the next tune on my Pandora app fires up.

The other sticky wicket the company faces is that it has partnered with Chrysler, which has been sloughling off auto-dealers almost as fast as California is dumping school teachers. But their search engine indicates that plenty of dealers are selling this thing—a whole boatload of them in Los Angeles, for example. And it looks like the outfit has some Toyota dealers as well.

So we’ll see where this goes. In the short run one can expect the pioneer crowd to drive off bridges while surfing the Web on the freeway. In the long run, as prices come down and the economy comes back up, maybe this is one more step towards bringing streaming audio to drive time.