I’ve been really involved with radio again and I love it! I’ve been really lucky and have done about 45 live shows since September between DCUFM and Hot Country.
DCUFM is great, it has given me the opportunity to try out an idea and prove that it would work, as I did with Culture Cafe.
On Monday of last week, our stream was stopped by Redbrick, the society in DCU that stream our station. To stream an online station here in Ireland, you must pay a licence fee every year. DCUFM’s licence was in the process of being renewed and IMRO, The Irish music Rights people had allowed us to continue as the licence was being reissued.
On Wednesday night, a voiceover by a former DCUFMer, was put on a loop by Redbrick stating “Due to non payment of an IMRO licence, Redbrick has been forced to discontinue the streaming of DCUFM until further notice.” This implies that we didn’t pay our licence and that we were infact breaking the law. This isn’t true.
DCUFM has had to remove a listen live link from DCUFM.com and because we don’t have an FM licence, would be broadcasting to the room if programming were still going ‘out’.
This Defamation of character, really hurts. Since before the academic year started station management, Denis McEvoy and Alan Regan along with News Director Steve Conlon have been toiling away to make something of DCUFM. The quality of the programming is high and everyone involved in the station is taking this really seriously.
DCU seems to be full of red tape, almost too much to cut through sometimes so DCUFM will have to look for an alternative server/stream provider to get up and running again. Seeing as its now Week 12 and we’re off for Christmas on Friday it looks like DCUFM wont be on again til 2010.
Hopefully we will be back stronger and more determined to make DCUFM the best possible college radio we can.
I just can’t believe that one College society would do this on another. It’s just childish, selfish behaviour.
…nessy out!