CBC's Early Streaming Audio Remembered

CBC’s internal blog marks milestones in the company’s history. 

This weekend Tod Maffin posted regarding the program RealTime and its early entry into streaming audio on the internet.  Tod asked if I could paint the picture of what that was like.  The full post at InsideTheCBC.com

Our entire connection to the internet was a 14.4 phone modem in our offices on C-floor. CBC had no corporate internet connection then. We’d encode the files, then Loc would run out of the control room during the news and start a command line FTP program to send the files to Seattle, where Progressive Networks would mount them and serve them…

Our boss in Vancouver, the late Susan Englebert, was brilliant in letting us squirrel away in the bowels of the CBC building and running interference when someone tried to shut down the work we were doing. Audio streaming at CBC would never have happened if Susan Englebert hadn’t made it possible, simple as that.