INTRODUCTION

STREAMING MEDIA

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Streaming media have exploded since the last Next 5 Minutes. Three years ago the prediction was that the amount of
livestreams which are available now would collapse the net. But it did not. Interestingly enough the net seems to adapt
time and time again to new demands, no matter how much it is burdened by them. How this happens, nobody really knows.
It is the subject of much speculation. Every now and then we receive rumours that organisations which are crucial players
in the shaping and maintaining of the internet want to initialise taxes or fees for heavy traffic. Until now there is no clear
indication of if, when and how this would happen. Furthermore, the internet and with it the streaming media, is opening it-
self up to larger parts of the world. Despite the fact that internet access is still a privilege, cheaper and better technology
offers attractive solutions for example projects in third world countries, Think of the project we hope to present in our
forum, in which the Panos Institute has helped the production of a website which is used to exchange in-depth radio pro-
grams from nine French speaking African countries. All programs are entirely available online, with background informa-
tion.

The obscurity concerning the decision making and who ultimately has the real power on the internet leaves us with a large
vacuum in which a lot is happening and has happened the last three years. Especially audio has manifested itself in all
kinds of shapes, but we expect video, (or motion pictures, or television) will catch up in the same numbers soon. WebTV
developments are currently accelerating, and like net radio, WebTV is most often a part of a cluster of activities on the
Computer screen or within a project. The texts of Raul Marroquin, Drazen Pantic, Menno Grootveld and Derrick de
Kerckhove all refer to this, next to their individual emphasis on aspects of organisation and legislation in the field of we-
beasting and traditional broadcasting media.

It is impossible to speak of radio and television on the internet separately from the same media outside of it, the ‘tradi-
tional media’. Even though for instance a lot of alternative net.radio projects are about small circle communication and ex-
speriment, ‘traditional media’ have caught on to the idea of audience feedback, and are using the input of audiences to
shape programs. Also larger alternative net.radio projects like Interface (pirateradio.co.uk) offer far more than pleasur-
able music: its website has involved its audience closely from the beginning, thus acting as a kind of meeting place.

What ultimately is most interesting about streaming media is not so much their features as such, but their content. This is
what the streaming media forum will mostly try to focus on, and this is what Micz Flor, Tetsuo Kogawa and also Drazen
Pantic write so passionately about. From different backgrounds and with perhaps different but nonetheless overlapping
goals (political, artistic, social), the issue of tactical media is mostly one of content, or: what are we doing it all for?

In the NSM3 streaming media forum Freespeech TV will also present its work involving a large number of activities, in-
cluding an online activist video archive. Drazen Pantic, former head of the internet department of B92 from Belgrade, start-
ed to put his energy into disclosing remote and politically suppressed communities (like B92 has done for the opposition
in Serbia), using all media available, from radio to video to satellite and internet. His work involves a critical examination
of the entire media-landscape. Veran Matic gives a view into the present actual situation of B92 and Serbian media poli-
tics. Tetsuo Kogawa and Micz Flor could both, regardless of their differences, be called art-activists, as they are occupied

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