KONA Radio is Back

Good news for fans of GoSpeed Racer and KONA radio. The "cleverly named" DJ recently informed the Newser that her radio stream is back in business. "We are now affiliated with SONIXCAST.com out of Canada," she told us, "They pay royalties to SOCAN which is the entity that collects and distributes royalties in Canada. The station is now free of many restrictions including not having to run ad breaks. Also, more good news. We are now listed in iTunes under the '70s Retro category."

For GoSpeed Racer, this is the best news in months. In January, facing skyrocketing "insane" royalty fees, she made a deal with Radionomy to keep broadcasting, But as she stated in the KONA blog, it "hasn’t been a fun ride to say the least" with server outages and poor communications. Finally a lawsuit by Sony resulted in Radionomy blocking it's stream to a number of countries where KONA had listeners. So GoSpeed reluctantly made the decision to close KONA as a station. But it was just days later she made a deal with Sonixcast, "They are a Canadian based company that provides streams and royalty coverage. It’s not a free service but the monthly cost are very reasonable compared to the other alternatives. We are looking forward to spending many productive years with them and keep sharing the music!"

For more information, or to just hear the tunes, check http://www.konastream.com/.

Bixyl Shuftan

Responding to Readers: Why Is Second Life Banned on Twitch

One of our readers, followed by a few others, posed a question on Facebook recently: "Why is Second Life Banned From Twitch?" For those who don't know, Twitch is a streaming service aimed at gamers. But not everything can be streamed on there, as one New World Notes reader commented in a letter she shared in which Twitch temporarily banned her for streaming Second Life. Taking a look at the Kotaku article cited by our reader, and the list given by Twitch itself, Second Life finds itself among some rather odd company with games such as "Battle Raper" and "The Guy Game," which involve lots of sex, violence, or both.

So why is Second Life on this list? Sadly, it has to do with the griefers and trolls.

Most every experienced Second Life user is familiar with griefers harassing people and trying to shock people with adult content, such as the obscene particle attacks that yours truly has witnessed at a few sandboxes. Unfortunately, not content just to troll people, sometimes the griefers post their dirty deeds on youtube. Plus there have been a few instances of live recording being interrupted by such griefings, the most known example being the "flying penis barrage" that happened when CNET tried to interview Anshe Chung, the noted Second Life Land baroness. So despite everything else that had, and has, been going on here from charities, to Dungeons and Dragons style roleplaying, to education classes, what Second Life is best known for to many who have yet to set foot inside and know about the virtual world only through what they've heard now and then through social media is that people use the place for "strange and weird porn."

Twitch would not respond when New World Notes tried to contact them, though Hamlet Au commented that they had a former employee of Linden Lab among their staff shot down arguments that Twitch was operating solely through bias, saying despite places being designated as G-rated, violent and pornographic content can potentially appear anytime and anywhere, "no matter what the region rating." But critics of the ban who are familiar with MMO survival gaming can always point to Rust, in which players start out nude, male characters with their genitalia exposed, and the game is not banned from Twitch.

Fortunately there are other options for streaming. Ciaran Laval pointed out one named "Hitbox," which did respond to questions about allowing content from Second Life, "We are more than happy to allow broadcasters to stream Second Life on hitbox granted they are responsible about the content being presented to the viewers. We don’t tolerate our broadcasters to present mature, sexual content that isn’t the intention of the game. ... we are okay with broadcasters streaming Second Life as long as it’s done responsibly."

But for the use of the more popular Twitch, the issue seems not up for discussion, which is a shame. Just as there's more to Amsterdam than it's red light district, there's a lot more to Second Life than just the shenanigans of a handful of trolls and griefers.

Sources: Twitch, Kotaku, New World Notes, Warcry, Ciaran Laval,  

Bixyl Shuftan

GoSpeed Racer's KONA To Halt Public Broadcasting

Yesterday, the staff of the KONA radio station in Second Life and Internet radio stream announced they would no longer be continuing as they were, bringing their broadcasting to a close.

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With a sad heart we must inform you that KONA Stream will cease broadcasting publicly. Due to the unfair royalty rates imposed by the CRB we've had to leave StreamLicensing.com and shift to Radionomy. Now a lawsuit by Sony has forced Radionomy to restrict their exposure leading them to geo-block wide portions of the globe. Countries like Canada, Ukraine, Brazil, Japan and many others cannot tune in my station. The station listener level has dropped some 60% since the start of the month. I simply do not see the point of continuing operation in this environment. Once certain parties are notified I will stop the stream and delete it from Radionomy.

  Is this the end of KONA Stream? Hopefully not. While it looks bleak now there may be hope. There is some effort to get the voice of the small webcaster heard by the Copyright Review Board. A few US Senators have heard of the plight and there may be legislation forthcoming. Cross your fingers. In the meantime we will investigate other ways to share our music. There are other music services that we could operate through but we want to be sure that the station's character is not fundamentally changed by massive omissions to the playlist or burdensome ad breaks. If you want to keep informed of our status then you can continue following us here on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/KONAStream/), Twitter (https://twitter.com/KONA_Stream), or contact our virtual secretary, abba@konastream.com so we can update you directly by email.

  So why is it a big deal if small webcasters are shut down? It boils down to diversity, exposure and preservation of music. Small webcasters play a wide variety of music not commonly heard in larger media outlets. We are also a great venue for emerging artists to get heard. A lot of commercial stations simply will not play an unknown artist. Finally there is a huge back catalog of music that no longer gets played on mainstream stations. KONA Stream has a Classic Hits format (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_hits) and we play a very wide a deep selection of music from those decades. The larger and more popular stations using that format have only a few thousand tracks in their playlist. We had over 15,000 tracks (Plus over a 1,000 Christmas tunes) that a true music lover would envy. All that will be lost to the general public.

  For our Second Life fans do not despair. We will still be active as DJs and be available to DJ your community events and private parties. Just let us know what your needs are and we'll fill them to the best of our ability.

Sincerely,
 The KONA Stream team

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In January, Second Life Newser talked to GoSpeed concerning the huge increase in fees for broadcasting radio streams due to regulations, which did not distinguish large and small broadcasters, KONA now having to pay more than double what it had before. While KONA cut a deal with Radionomy, which covered their fees, they had to raise their listenership by about 50% if they wanted to remain covered. KONA was just one of a number of Second Life radio stations which had to adapt to the skyrocketing fees.

Contacting GoSpeed, she explained she would be continuing as a DJ, and her performance at Bay City on May 15, four days from now, would continue as scheduled.