No new MTCB this week? How come?

IRH has again reached a point of critical mass.

I reached one of those hindsight kind of things this past week. Regardless of the fact that StreamAudio kept going down all the time, maybe I should have stayed there. We have new problems. Problems that a lot of operators with budgets and backing would love to have. The IRH audience is growing almost exponentially.

So many people listen to the IRHLive stream that the costs for bandwidth have skyrocketed from what I thought would be a manageable transition from our StreamAudio experience to a point where one month's bandwidth payment could very well wipe out all the funds. It has gotten so that the amount being donated will not cover the cost for the number of users and all the listener hours - it's that simple.

Today (1/13/02) the Bandwidth -Athon which needs to raise $3700 or more this month is stalled at $1485. If I can't raise enough in donations or figure out something else, it will be really quiet around here come February.

95% or more of IRH listeners still have the mindset that everything on the Internet should be free and are reluctant to help or are just plain selfish. Today I had one of our German listeners rail at me by email because I hadn't restored the 32k stream yet. He's never donated and told me he listens all day but wants to hear the better quality stream.

Earlier this week I had actually convinced myself that I could be ok with an end to IRH and it's failure. I rationalized, rationalized, rationalized. I resigned myself to accept that year 8 might not happen for IRH and that year 3 for the livestream may also not happen. I became resigned to that. I was at peace with it. I was ready for something else or nothing. It's just reached the point that I am weary of trying to cajole, beg, squeeze support out of folks every month over and over in this never ending cycle.

After 7 years, I thought to myself, it appears that I am no closer to having enough sponsorship, underwriters, co-brand arrangements, sales people or assistance than I did when I first started doing this this back in May 1995. I still have my five to six day a week day job just like most of you. IRH has never reached that magic dream point of success where I might consider going at it full time. Strangely, every year it feels farther and farther away.

Sunday 1/13/02 I decided to fight on and not to give up - I decided to take another shot.

I devoted what turned out to be far too much time re- configuring one of our Windows 2000 Servers so that I might be able to do several things with it ;)

1) I hope to be able to set up and encode a new 32k paystream IF VitalStream's payment and media management stuff really works - they say it is ready now - and the only way I will know is to try and set up such a stream and see if it really works.

2) I hope to be able to encode a windows media version of either MTCB or a weekly sampler which may have to replace the 24/7 freely accessed IRHLive stream and reconfigging the Win 2000 server is crucial to that.

3) and I had hoped to actually begin to reorganize and clean out the studio which needs a good spring cleaning anyhow. I never did get to that.

Har har har! Good one ;)

Music To Cruise By takes at least eight hours to produce, encode, distribute, write pages for etc...and I just didn't have the time this weekend.

Sorry.

Rabbett