Greek Radio Network is Canada's FIRST online webcaster
and the world's FIRST Greek webcaster.

The founder of GreekRadio .NET, Dimitri Papadopoulos, began experimental Internet Broadcasts from Montreal Canada in 1994 in the DSP TrueSpeech format. Regular webcasting was launched in January 1995 and a few months later, we began broadcasting video on the web in the Vivo format. That was the time that Netscape and Internet Explorer were still on the drawing board as most people were using NCSA Mosaic and Gopher. In those days, broadcast video production was still being done in 3/4" U-matic analog and encoding it into a digital file format that i486 computers could process was quite challenging, yet finding a way to put in on the then pretty unexplored web!

In Christmas day of year 1994 the gap was finally closed: A traditional analog studio was successfully interfaced to the Internet world and audio was flowing live from Montreal Canada to the world.

Dimitri Papadopoulos has an extensive technical broadcast expertise. He worked in various major national and international Television, AM, FM and Shortwave stations, as such, the audio/visual broadcasting technical standards which governed GreekRadio.net since the beginning were of strict Broadcast Standards.

Just like many "firsts", GreekRadio .NET started as an [expensive] "one man show" venture. And since in those days Internet multimedia books haven't surfaced yet, most early webcasting undertakings were pretty much uncharted territory. Dimitri Papadopoulos spent endless hours tweaking analog broadcast gear and adapting it to do something it wasn't designed to do: Webcasting. (VoIP, digital streaming protocols, etc, were still predictions of the future). Before switching to Vivo video streaming, early experiments were done with CU-SeeMe video reflectors in Black&White! 12 years ago, using CU-SeeMe for video over IP and a special order full size ISA CT6000 dinosaur encoder card, we were we were able to transmit 4-bit grayscale motion pictures over the Internet! The first Black and white video webcast was a greek documentary about Orthodox Easter in Jerusalem. For authentication purposes, we traced one of our 1995 messages about our early webcasts on The Google News Archive [here]. (As the headers indicate, it's a forward of an older forwarded message) As expressed in these messages, receiving an Internet audio broadcast in those days was thrilling! The experience was quite unique. The World Wide Web, as we know it today, in 1994 was in its infancy and anything related to "Internet audio/video" was extremely sparse.

In 1994 mainly universities were connected to the Internet as very few homes had a connection; and those few homes were on dial-up. The messages we received were overwhelming. Greek students around the world were e-mailing us in total disbelief. They couldn't believe their ears that Greek Audio was possible via the internet! What we take today for granted, in the days that GreekRadio.net pioneered Greek audio webcasting, was quite an accomplishment. In those days, the website was hosted on http://www.infobahnos.com/~dimitri.

The difficult years

In these early days, due to the fact that literally all Greek worldwide Internet users relied on our website to listen to Greek audio news, we were consuming excessive transmission bandwidth which caused severe strain on the servers of [our then] webhost Infobahnos. As a consequence, by mid 1996, Infobahnos pulled the plug on us. We fell victims of our popularity. Several attempts were made to host the website on a public server streaming audio news from public broadcasters in Greece. In the summer of 1996, a last attempt to offer Greek streaming news free of charge was made during a visit in Athens. All attempts failed as the Internet penetration was tiny and wasn't known very much, especially in Greece. Online audio/video and webcasting was clearly way ahead of its time and no bureaucrat was open or willing to embrace it. Finally, after posting some public messages to save the one and only greek webcaster (at the time) running, HRI.org answered our call. In late 1996 the site was then moved the servers of the Hellenic Resources Institute in MIT’s Media Lab with the URL being http://hermes.hri.org/chrb (woking link for historical purposes) and in 1998 the Greekradio.NET domain name was registered.

Partnerships with International Broadcasters

Although any early attempt to do any form of partnership with Greece to relay Greek Audio or Video News webcast free of charge was totally ignored, we had excellent partnerships with Cyprus, Germany, Russia and the USA. We were encoding and webcasting programming online from The Cyprus Broadcasting Corporation, The Greek Service of Deutsche Welle, the Greek Service of the Voice of America and the Greek service of the Voice of Russia and this until they each launched their own respective Greek webcasts. The Greek service of The Voice of Russia is still being relayed exclusively from GreekRadio.NET's servers.

The present

Our website is presently hosted in the powerful servers of 1&1 and is self sustained. Taking advantage of the new shared technologies, GreekRadio.NET uses Google Video, YouTube, SHOUTcast and FlashVideo, to stream most of its multimedia streams, thus, taking a significant load off our servers. Various automation scripts pick up satellite or microwave links to record broadcast programming from various local and international stations for netcasting from our servers.