Here is an early version of the new streaming audio service. Since we are limited to about 500 bits per second, the audio must be very simple. Does anyone know what chiptunes are? Credit goes to @Tysonpower for his cleverness in making this work.
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There will eventually (soon-ish) be a new home page. One idea is to allow users to upload chiptunes music and upvote music to create a playlist.
Truthfully, I don’t see the point of adding audio to an already severely crippled bitrate (2kbit/sec is already incredibly slow).
That’s a valid perspective! Here are a few pieces of background information.
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2 kbps is definitely laughably small which yields about 20 MB per day of content. Funny enough, we don’t use all of that capacity at this time.
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To date, those interested in Othernet have largely been hobbyists and those with a technical interest in RF/radio/satellite communications. We really need the service to be more oriented to normal users. There will be a small branding change to Othernet Satellite Radio so that everyone immediately understands at least one, tiny facet of the service. Once we have a small bit of attention, we can explain the rest of what is offered. The purpose of the MIDI-stream is to enable us to call it satellite radio, which everyone understands.
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Within the MIDI-stream there will also be a SNR-beeper. This allows for hands-free pointing of the antenna. Just listen for either the beeping or the quality of the audio and make slight adjustments to the antenna based on that.
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Once we are in regular sales again, there should be enough cash to increase the bandwidth and bring back the newscast.
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When will you start sending the audio stream? So far I only see the files stream.
The concept is intriguing, though i doubt ist will be much of an added value. ‘Radio’ on a device with the target of bringing knowledge to developing countries will be associated with educational programming and not music. If you could use the stream to power a good TTS-System (e.g. text instead of midi notes) that would address that concern. But then again you could simply use a screen reader for the wikipedia content.
I know very well what chiptunes are, I even run chiptune radio at zxm.cz:8000 
But if I understand it correctly, this will be a MIDI stream, which is not chiptune per se. It’s just music notation played by your local synthesizer/sequencer (mostly software one, but you can just connect a real synth to your PC and play it). This makes sense, because chiptunes are binary data and you can’t squeeze them in this low bitrate, if you want them in any universal audio format and I’m looking forward to tune in!
Newies Take Note
Currently Othernet is providing a large collection of RSS News feeds from 11 sources in 4 languages, and a daily 5 minute audio News Summary from VOA found in the Uplaods Files of the File Manager. These offerings go a long way to providing non-techies valuable content. The proposed new capabilities will also be welcomed by many. Ken
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