I listened to the Larry Magid interview with Rob Glaser of Real. They were talking about the tenth anniversary of streaming RealAudio. I’m pretty sure I heard Glaser claim that they were the first to do it, which is patently false. Both WREK in Atlanta and WXYC in Chapel Hill were streaming 6 months before the time Glaser cites as their “origin date”.
I used to think that WREK had a claim for being first to stream as they were both on the same day but now I believe they have ceded that claim as WXYC was released to the public the day WREK went beta. So, WXYC was first but WREK gets the geek points. WXYC was using off the shelf packages and had help from Sunsite while WREK’s client, server and protocol (CyberRadio1) were written by the guy who was the general manager of the station, a guy named John Selbie.
Regardless of all that, a lot of people were streaming before the time Glaser claims that Real originated audio streaming.