The Internet has changed the way the many people experience entertainment. One of the many popular additions to our lives is the advent of free radio stations that are streamed online. This allows listeners to experience a much wider range of music than they would hear on their local radio waves, as well as giving them the ability to find very specialized stations that better cater to their tastes. However, things haven’t been entirely smooth for Internet radio, particularly in terms of royalty fees.

Radio stations that stream over the Internet have never been the most profitable business plan. Many are actually labors of love for the owners. These stations were able to exist because the from 1998 to 2005, the royalty rate was only $0.000768 per song. However, in May of 2007, the United States Copyright Royalty Board approved a rate increase for royalties paid to stream music online. This decision is currently under appeal, as it would force the closure of a large number of stations, or at the very least a major upheaval of their business plan. According to the revises rates, the owners of affected stations would be required to pay as much as $2.3 billion in royalties this year. This number is actually four times the amount that traditional radio stations pay in royalties.

One plan that some stations are opting for is to switch to broadcasting from foreign territories that are outside of the jurisdiction of US Copyright law. In order to protest the proposed royalty rate changes, many online radio stations participated in a Day of Silence on June 26, shutting down their broadcast for the day. A bill known as the Internet Radio Equality Act has been proposed and has already been introduced to both the House of Representatives and the Senate. There are currently over a hundred co-sponsors in Congress.

Newcomers to interactive entertainment inevitably want to know how video games differ from computer games.
Industry pro Seamus Blackley offers a musical analogy: ”Think of console games as rock videos and PC games as symphonies.
”If you look at the kind of games that are successful on consoles, it’s an incredibly high-speed, adrenaline-rush experience, like Ridge Racer or Tony Hawk Pro Skater. Read more

Avisit to the local computer game store has been a disturbing experience of late. Never mind the predictable brutality and gore of the games. Here’s the really creepy part: Fewer and fewer of the latest titles will run on a PC.

The explosive success of Sony’s Playstation 2 gaming platform, and the less spectacular but sizable demand for Microsoft’s Xbox and Nintendo’s GameCube, has recast the computer gaming market. PC users find themselves feeling a little bit like owners of Apple Macintosh computers. For years, many popular games were issued exclusively for the PC, with the few exceptions appearing in Mac versions long after PC owners had tired of them. Now it’s PC users who sit with twitching fingers, waiting for PC versions of hot titles like the renowned action game Halo, presently available only on the Xbox. Read more

GAMERS will do what we must to get the best of computer gaming. And the things that limit us are basically time and money. Although we would love to lose ourselves in our favorite games for days on end, we have to eat, sleep, study and work. This means that our gaming interests cannot be too diverse. Lest we would not be able to be good at anything. Read more

If someone took a poll of the nation’s computer industry employees, northeast Indiana probably would not top the list as a magnet for software developers and computer programmers. However, there is at least one local firm that is successfully promoting the area’s image by building a diverse list of clients, computer consulting services, and innovative computer programs and, in the process, is attracting and keeping some of its industry’s best and brightest talent. That company is Aptera Software. Read more