Broadcasting on the Internet: The Early Years

In 1993, as acting Associate Director of Broadcasting for USIA, I moved to put the Voice of America and WorldNet on the emerging 'Internet.' 

I was impressed that there were more than 1.7 million computers world-wide hooked up to the Internet.  Here's the memorandum I sent to the USIA Director, Joe Duffy, informing him of our plan.

United States Information Agency

INFORMATION MEMO

October 12, 1993

MEMORANDUM FOR: The Director

FROM: B - Joseph B. Bruns

SUBJECT: Internet Delivery of Broadcast Schedules andProgram Materials

Summary

As you know, the Bureau of Broadcasting is actively investigating

new methods for delivering our products to supplement our

traditional delivery media of direct shortwave radio broadcasting

and program feeds to USIS Posts and affiliated stations. In

particular, we are interested in offering broadcast schedules,

program transcripts and digitally-encoded excerpts of our

broadcasts to users of the international research Internet. This

 memo provides a brief overview of our current thinking and

direction.

Background

 Until now, the Broadcasting staff has used the Internet primarily

to gather information. An electronic gateway, established several

years ago between the Internet and our computer System for News and

 Programming (SNAP), serves as a channel of communication between

SNAP users and news sources: our Polish broadcast service receives

a daily "newspaper," Donosv. directly from its "publishers" in

 Warsaw; at least one commercial news provider, Baltic News Service,

sends its product to the VOA central newsroom via the Internet; the

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Daily Report is electronically

transmitted each morning from Munich to Bureau of Broadcasting

recipients.

Perhaps the most dramatic use of the Internet as a source of

information occurred in August 1991, during the attempted coup

 d'etat in the former Soviet Union, when democratically-inclined

computer scientists established a clandestine relay between their

internal computer network and SNAP. VOA received more than 100

 electronic mail messages in Russian and English, including the full

texts of Russian President Boris Yeltsin's official edicts-which

sometimes reached us hours before their English translations were

disseminated by the commercial news agencies.

The Internet has proved itself to be a valuable source of

 information. Now we are beginning to tap the potential of the

Internet as a medium for disseminating information. For example,

we currently use Network News (a.k.a. USENET) to distribute program

and frequency schedules for our radio broadcasts. More ambitious

projects are currently being planned.

Current Plans

The rapid growth of the Internet-now more than 1.7 million computers in

more than 100 countries were connected to the Internet as of July

of this year—makes it an increasingly attractive vehicle for

disseminating transcripts of our programs and audio "sound bites"

from our radio broadcasts along with marketing information and

program schedules.

Until now, we have had no way to offer VOA and Worldnet products to

Internet users on demand. But with the assistance of the Agency's

Office of Technology, we are preparing to connect SNAP directly to

the Internet next month. This will make it possible for us to

provide interactive services to a worldwide audience of Internet

users in academic institutions, foreign governments and the news

industry.

Before the end of the year, we will establish a public file server

on the Internet that will offer a selection of program and

frequency schedules, marketing information and selected English

transcripts of VOA and Worldnet programs. We will also undertake

an active public relations effort to notify Internet users of the

availability of these products. We will secure clearance from the

Office of the General Counsel before making any program materials

available through this medium to make certain our actions conform

to the restrictions on the domestic dissemination of Agency

products contained in the Smith-Mundt Act.

We intend to extend this service next year by providing short audio

selections in various languages that will be encoded into the most

popular digital audio file formats for industry-standard personal

computers. (At this time, dissemination of video through the

Internet appears to be impractical for technical reasons.) We are

also investigating the feasibility of offering foreign-language

radio and television scripts to Internet users by encoding them

into Unicode, an emerging de facto standard for multilingual text.

Other Vehicles

In addition to using the Internet for program dissemination, we are

exploring the use of existing satellite communication channels to

offer textual materials to affiliated stations. We are completing

preparations for a pilot project that will use current leased audio

circuits to transmit program content and schedule information in

Spanish and Portuguese to VOA affiliates in Latin America. We are

also investigating the possibility of developing a much broader

foreign language newswire service using the multilingual character encoding

system described above.

We believe these efforts to utilize new communication technologies

will help us establish entirely new audiences for the Bureau of

Broadcasting's program products, significantly increasing our

ability to serve as a full-service news and information provider to the world.

jb