Back in 1997, my band ‘reel’ did a show “Live” to the internet.  In 1997, this was no easy task.  There was no UStream or any other service like it, and our connection was dial up.

What we did was, using a logitech quickcam, we took a picture of the live performance every 15 seconds, then uploaded the pic to our webserver and ran a javascript to refresh the image every 25 seconds.  For the audio, I had to contact a company in California to let us use their RealMedia streaming server.  This fed the webpage with the audiofeed that the user first had to download real player.

Here is our original blog post about the event:

February 14th: Johnny’s Rocket Room. Our live show on this web site. This show had a couple of new events for the band. The first being the debut of the newest song to the reel live set, “I hold crush” and the second being reel’s first live show on the internet. We would like to thank the following people who helped make the show happen: Nick Linedecker at Kern Internet Services in Bakersfied, CA, Copyland Systems for supplying the hardware to make the show be broadcast. We would also like to thank the following people who helped to promote the show: Chris Gordon and Karen Murray from 103.1fm “The Hawk” for having us the program “London Live”. Janice Zolf at BBS Communications for the spot on Entertainment Desk on TV-London. And last we would like to thank all the people who came out to the show and tuned in on the internet.

The blog post on WayBack Machine: http://web.archive.org/web/19970422164648/www.execulink.com/~reel/reelnews.htm

Here is the CFPL news coverage:

Sometimes, it is nice to walk down memory lane….