More challenges...

Just had a look of what the website looked like back in May 2003. It was something like this:

http://web.archive.org/web/20030501222621/http://www.swissgroove.ch/

There was lots of work to be done, every day, and, besides working for money.

I signed up for another server to provide a stream at lower bitrate so that modem and ISDN users were also able to tune into the station. However, the stream at lower bitrate, also after having it run for a longer period, never proved worth.

The guys at radiostreamer.com did quite a good job, especially when they merged with John Simkiss's company Beannet. The technical support was top-notch, mainly thanks to that man, who always took time to look into any problem that arose and was also a great guy to talk to.

On the other hand, radiostreamer.com was expensive to me as I paid everything myself. So I had to constantly check prices and test servers at other providers.

In July I came across radiostream.de whose servers were hosted at various locations around Germany. The had an offer for 250 slots at 128 kbps in the range of 200.- USD. I contacted them and was immediately set up with a test-server that, unfortunately, turned out to be below the quality I was looking for.

Their support was also very good and they really did everything possible to keep up with their promises. Finally, after a few days, they set up a new server at a different location/datacenter and things improved much.

I also got another good offer from a host in Luxemburg who thought that SwissGroove wouldn't increase their numbers of listeners quickly. It was an offer based on limited bandwidth. After only 3 days, I had about 100 simultanious listeners during daytime and that meant that the bandwidth limit offered with the server would be reached only 2 days later. So I had to cancel the account and disconnect the server in order not to run into a financial disaster.

Things at radiostream.de were very changeable. Some weeks their servers ran like clockwork. On others, things got out of hand. Finally, they moved servers back into a level3 datacenter and the performance was just amazing. Very quickly, all the 250 slots were taken during peak hours and again, I had to look around for another solution.

Besides all the technical difficulties, there had been more challenges to overcome with IFPI Switzerland, the International Federation Of Producers Of Phonograms And Videograms. In order to stream music legally, I had to have a contract with them and pay what they ask for.

When I read their contract, I could hardly believe what was written there. They asked me to offer my stream only to listeners within Switzerland. They would only let me stream using the Real Media format and they asked me to keep records from all the people connecting to the stream, etc. etc.

Besides that, they wanted CHF 5'000.- per year so that I was allowed to make the stream publicly available and to make copies of the CDs for streaming.

I called them many times in order to make them lower the amount they asked for but they never wanted to renegociate it. The only thing they offered me was a payment plan.

It was time to either quit or to put up with the rules, pay and keep going. Though I got myself a hobby I could hardly afford, it was also one difficult to just let go.

I paid the amount IFPI asked for but also kept my own rules concerning the technical and geographical aspects of an online radio station.

Besides, it wasn't just another radio station the internet accommodated already plenty of.

It was, after all, the planet's grooviest webradio!