Interstellar Transmissions

It's not often that we give a Wizard Site award out to a site more for what they do off-line than on, but Interstellar Transmissions probably falls into that category.

Interstellar Transmissions is a US radio show broadcast between 7-8pm every night on WNN Health Talk Radio and it covers an eclectic range of SFF subjects.

Think of the show as a Wayne's World for the SFF radio world. Produced in a cost effective manner, but in a format where the fan's love of the genre shines through.

Nice site, if a little ... well, dark on the eyeballs.

Now their actual site isn't chock full of content and articles, like many we've reviewed here in the past, but Interstellar Transmissions do offer the most important thing a radio show web site can offer ... a streaming online version of the show.

Unfortunately for us 'Nesters in a timezone challenged part of the world like the UK, the streaming show goes out live in parallel with the radio show; evening for our colonial cousins, but the small wee hours for nightshift workers in London and Edinburgh.

For those in the US of A of course, bingo!

You'll need Mr Gate's WinAmp to listen to the show, and this may take a bit of fiddling to get it working on older PCs, but show some perseverance in the face of Uncle Bill's foibles and you're in for a real treat.

Oddly for such a small site, some of their web pages are in PHP, an advanced web-based scripting language which can handle SQL database calls and dynamic content. Overkill at the moment for what they're doing online, but it'll put them on a very good footing if they should ever want to expand the site in a big way.

There were a few areas of Interstellar Transmissions' site which looked like they should have contained some archived show material in audio file format, but there was a 'coming soon' promise on these pages, which is a pity.

Hopefully one they'll get around to rectifying shortly.

Audio libraries online are difficult to do well; not least I suspect, because the size of audio files, the diskspace to store them and the bandwidth to stream them out, does tend to make web audio a plaything of the internet rich and famous.

You're more likely to find streaming content on Madonna's site or BBC Radio 4's micro-site for the Archers, than you are on the likes of the 'Nest, SFsite.com or Infinity Plus!

Still, this is fantastic attempt to put the multi in multimedia for the online science fiction and fantasy genre, and Interstellar Transmissions have put together some of the best audio material outside of the Science Fiction Channel's site (and - it goes without saying - at a fraction of the cost).

To get a healthy taste of SFF on the radio, tune the dial on your PC's web browser over to:

www.InterstellarTransmissions.com

Stephen Hunt