The Standard recently had an article about software and online services that let people create their own radio stations over the Internet — in this case software like IceCast and services like Shoutcast and Live365.Com that stream MP3.
Shoutcast didn’t do much for me, but I was impressed by Live365.Com (though I have to wonder if either service will find much in the way of profits.) Now if there were an equivalent for video streaming available. Most of the comparable services I know of, such as FreeSpeech.Org use RealServer for video and audio.
A bizarre tidbit in The Standard story is that the Digital Millenium Copyright Act makes it illegal to post playlists in advance of a radio broadcast. That doesn’t effect me much because I’m not interested in broadcasting music, but that’s a pretty pointless restriction. There seem to me so many ways to get an illegal copy of any given recording that something like the inability to see advance playlists isn’t going to put much of a dent in the problem. Meanwhile, it hurts legitimate users — for example, if I knew when the station I’m listening to was going to be playing a boy band I could quickly switch to another channel (in fact I could script the change to occur automatically for specific bands and/or songs).