Thousands of community radio stations would like to be able to archive, exchange and stream content over the Internet or make it available to mobile phones, but appropriate tools have not been available at an affordable price. They rely on exchanging content and expressed their demand to set up a robust distributed infrastructure with a technological solution which is flexible, effective and low-cost. StreamOnTheFly has gained popularity among a number of central European radio stations and is also serving the podCasting community. Now, with StreamOnTheFly, hundreds of radio shows on culture, arts, leisure, business, social, political or gender issues can be listended to more than once!

In 2005, the vision of narrowcasting has come true with the paradigm of “The Long Tail” in the recent discourse of personalised services. We have been contributing to this vision by designing a node-network for audio content, built on real use cases and open standards in 2002-2003 and we have helped a number of radio stations to adapt their workflow to make optimum use of StreamOnTheFly. In 2004 we have integrated Creative Commons licensing and some side projects have been launched, such as Literadio or Hyper-Audio-Learning. In 2005, we have added podCasting features and added more radio stations to the network. In 2006, we are extending StreamOnTheFly for several video codecs, serving now community TV stations as well.

The architecture is based on a decentralized network of software components using automatic metadata replication in a peer-to-peer manner and offers various interfaces. The network promotes a common RDF metadata schema, content exchange format and a topic tree. Nodes implement the basic infrastructure for the network. Each node hosts a set of radio stations. For each station the node archives radio programmes with a rich set of metadata and other associated content. Users get transparent access to the content of the whole network at any node. They can browse through radio stations or topic trees or search in the archive. Interesting items can be collected into a playlist for various interfaces, such as any streaming device (including 3G phones), podCasting clients or MP3 players. A experimental service with telephony access has been made. Users may listen or download audio content in different formats (e.g. mp3, ogg) and in different bit rates or quality. The network gathers and forwards information about radio programmes back to their creators. This involves the collection of various statistics (download, listen, etc.), the collection of comments, references and rating information.