This is the timeline of DI's life - it helps us see what we were, what we are, and where we are going. The correct order is to read it from bottom to top.

-Ari Shohat


November 12, 2006

And we launched a few new channels! Techno for Digitally Imported, and Christmas (seasonal), Uptempo Smooth Jazz, and Alternative Diagnosis for SKY.fm.

I probably forgot a post here from few months back oo, when we launched World, Urban Jamz, Classic Rap, and Oldies for SKY.fm

Radio Domination on target.

January 12, 2006

Happy New Year! Today we hit the 60,000 conurrent listener mark! Lot of traffic coming for the newly launched channels.

Things will be pretty crazy in 2006, we've got a lot of plans to revamp the site and to grow the community. Some ideas are pretty crazy and would make DI much more popular than already is. Let's see if we can do it 6-9 months from now!

October 20th, 2005

So nice to have school back in session, audience levels go back up after a big summer break! Today is the first time I've noticed our total concurrent lisener count at over 50,000, though I've been told it happened few days back too. Thanks as always for sticking to us for your listening pleasure.

Coming up really soon: more channels!

July 23, 2005

It has been quite a while since the last update! But here we are back at the timeline by popular demand!

So many things have progressed in the last two years and Digitally Imported has certainly matured and has been running as a professional operation. There are now 5 full-time people working for the company, and a whole load of new channels.

All combined we are now serving you with 20 unique radio channels (plus a premium Replay channel)! That's up from 9 channels just two years ago. And later this year we should be adding on a few more, why stop now?

Peak concurrent audience numbers reach 40,000, up from 12,000 two years ago. Thank you to all our fans once again for getting us here! We'll try to keep this place more updated.

October 19th, 2004

The launch of a sister site called SKY.fm, located at http://sky.fm. We have decided to separate all the non-electronic music channels to SKY, and continuing to focus on electronic music right here on Digitally Imported. But now we'll be treating both as our children, so expect new channels on both DI.fm and SKY.fm from now on.

April 21, 2003

This is the first update of 2003. I have to say, so much has changed, yet so much has remained the same. One thing I can say for sure: we sure did Mature.

The service is running more and more as a real company now, yet there is still nothing much but donations coming in. As the service continues to grow in popularity, we find ourselves stretched too thin at times even with a lot of additions to the team. There are at least two people dedicating their full time on the project, and the reality is starting to hit that we need to start putting the bread on the table if we are to continue this. In light of this, and the fact that the advertising market is still down the drain ever since the fall of the dot coms, we are pursuing to develop a premium subscription service to add on to the existing free service.

We finally launched a new version of our website, now it's blue - used to be green for three years. Basically we outgew the old site's purpose long ago, especially with the addition of 4 new channels!!!

That's right, we have a load of new people come on the team since, and we are upto having 9 channels. The new 4 are Deep House, Hardcore, Jazz, and DJ Mixes.

We also had various other additions to the team that help out, but I'll list everyone involved these days, full list, not in any particualr order: Ari, Gary (Entranced), Eugene, Oliver (Ciacomix), Johan (Irish), Duy (Doboy), James (Jiimz), Rob (Wavesound/Dymension), Jaes (LoneRaver), Alex (Legend), Henry, Jolene, John, Richard (Silver).

Boy, that's 15 people involved at least somehow, some more some less. We are yet to have a few more additions soon, as we plan to open more channels.

Oh, and these days we are reaching upto 12000 concurrent listeners at peak times, across all our channels. The Trance channel reaches upto 6000 sometimes, still the most popular :o)

October 29, 2002

Digitally Imported peaks at over 10000 concurrent listeners across its five music channels!

Trance: 5000, Hard Trance: 837, Hard House: 639, Eurodance: 1065, & Classical: 2662

In other news, the live shows are now more often done on Video as well as audio, so we are happy to be improving on that front. Also it has been about 2 weeks since we publically started testing a peer-to-peer streaming solution for Windows Media. This is an additional service to what we already have at this point. What's remaining now is to add Ogg Vorbis streaming in the future.

May 17th & 18th, 2002

On the 17th we had "the" DJ DEAN spin live for us at DI! Not only that, the whole show was also on live video feed for people to see and hear. We hope this was the beginning of a new chapter at DI. Guess we can start taking out the "Radio" part out of our title. We are trying our best to continue "pushing the envelope."

On the 18th we also had our tag team DJs Ciacomix & Irish perform at Club Amnesia in Lund, Sweden. Digitally Imported broadcasted the event live from the club!!! I hope we will have more and more of this as well in the future. We did say "pushing the envelope" the day before, right? :) Now if we can combine the 17th and the 18th for a live video from a club... just wait.

May 1st, 2002

We've had numbers of over 8000 by now. But today we join many major broadcasters around the internet to lead what might be the great "Day of Silence" in protest over the proposed CARP rates.

January 9th , 2002

New record set by DI! We have over 6300 concurrent listeners across all our channels, wow!

Here's the breakdown of one snapshot. Total:6314, Trance:3574, Hard Trance:284, Hard House:390, Eurodance:478, Classical:1588.
I hope this isn't one of those "jump the shark" times, do we go for 7000 now? It will be a tough one.

December 15th, 2001

Digitally Hard Trance channel launched as promised! Dj Irish and Dj Ciacomix have joined the crew to bring the next level of entertainment to DI! We'll see how it goes on next update.

December 7, 8th, 2001

Digitally Imported Radio's second birthday bash!!! It has been awesome 2 years!

Friday afternoon opened with live sets till about midnight, and Saturday we had live sets from DJs around the world ALL morning to night!! This was a weekend to remember! Next year if we live to see third birthday, we should have 3 days of live sets! Thanks to all our beloved DJs and fans, you rule!

November 16th, 2001

We reach over 5100 listeners concurrently on all our channels!!! This number is sooner and higher than what I predicted by DI's second birthday. At this rate, who knows where we will be another year from now. Trance channel finally goes over 3000 listeners daily at peak time, while MostlyClassical offshoot is reaching almost 1500, amazing!

Dj Irish and Dj Ciacomix are in line to join the DI crew and bring us the new Hard Trance channel that will really be something people will rave about.

October 13th, 2001

Digitally Imported Hard/Tech House channel is launched. It was compiled by our main content producer, Dj Doboy. We shall see how popular it gets, I guess that's for the next update!

October 11th, 2001

One month since the terrorist attacks on US. DI once again sends its condolences to the friends and relatives of the vicitims.

At the same time, we'll use this opportunity to report our status. We have reached 4000 concurrent listeners. 2900 of those was on the Trance channel. Classical channel was about 800 listeners. We told ya!

September, 2001

We have two new spanking dual MS servers thanks to the donations. Digitally Imported adds WMA Audio (WMA) streams to its arsenal.

August 8th, 2001

Station is running along fine, a little tight on the bandwidth usage. Last recorded listener count was 3600 around a month ago, but with the bandwidth squeeze it will be some weeks or more before we come back to everything being so stready.

More than $4000 was donated in 45 days by our dedicated listeners! That will enable us to to build great new servers we need to exapnd more planned channels.

April 25th, 2001

State of the Station:
DI has over 2600 listeners tuned in at peak time on this day, and that is a regular figure around here already.

The Trance channel hits over 2100 listeners, the Eurodance about 250, and the new Classical channel keeps skyrocketing after just 10 days after start to over 250 listeners.

DI still uses servers from locations in New York, Virginia, and London (yeah, UK).

...that's pretty good! We have more channels in mind to launch, and digitallyimported.tv is still a dream we want to realize as well. Who knows, look up the timeline 6 months ahead, maybe we will have something :)

May 3rd: DI's 128K Trance CLUSTER on www.shoutcast.com breaks the 2000 record.

April 15th, 2001

Ari finally launches the new Classical channel after moving another machine to Intellispace. The new channel is part of DI and at the same time a separate station called MostlyClassical.com

(note: this later becomes a Very popular internet radio channel)

April 9th, 2001

Entranced, who has been a great help on the DI Forum board, joins the DI Crew!

This is a great addition to the team, as he will be in charge of heading the new editorial section for DI in the near future. He also will help with many technical things, keeping the service running smoothly, and helping to bring more live shows with DJs on DI, and much more Awesome guy and we are glad to have him!

(Note after 2 years since: Entranced turned out to be much much more, working very very hard to make DI better. He's now the right hand man for everything, and the VP of Digitally Imported, Inc.)

February 20th, 2001

Eugene turns on the first European server for DI in London!
(Note: later Eugene really gets burned as it turns out that the bandwidth wasn't free. DI owes him a big one.)

February 1st, 2001

DI has over 1600 listeners tuning in at the same time at peak hours (more than 1000 on average!). Uses an equivalent of an OC3 of bandwidth - Crazyyyyy!

January 2001

Source machine (dual P3-733) gets upgraded with new HD and moves to Intellispace! Low bitrate Trance Stream servers and the Eurodance servers return (Thanks Eugene!).

Eugene (DJ EP) from Intellispace who has been working all this time in the background, making sure servers are there and working, joins officially as well.

"I cannot do this alone anymore!!" - Dj Doboy joins DI officially. Is now most responsible for content, and some source management of the station. I myself am doing everything else, website, managing, etc.

New hard drive and other stuff is needed. DI users donate upto $700 in roughly one day! Thanks DI listeners!

(you can start reading each update from top to bottom now, starting with the January 2001 all the way to the top).


December 6th 2000

DI is the most listened to station on Shoutcast.com station, if not on the whole internet (we just didn't count that, yet!)

Digitally Imported Radio is 1 year old! That weekend a live show marathon is held! (Thanks DJs!)

November 2000

c) Eurodance Stream closed again because I am back on the home DSL line. Lower bitrate Trance Stream servers close as well.

b) As a consequence, I loose the T1 line, and end up paying for the hardware expenses out of pocket as the dot com era is coming to an end. Too bad I returned those donations, would be useful now :)

a) I let go of the investors, DI is free once again!

August-Oct 2000

e) Live shows on DI are no longer unheard of (thanks to DJs such as Saul V, Dj Ganja, Dj Irish, and more people later like Doboy live himself...)

d) Eurodance channel opens, yes!! The original stream is now referred to as the Trance Stream. Trance Stream opens more lower bitrates!

c) DI gets a T1 line installed at home location to have more streaming out of source capacity + stability (Verizon trolls start to appear around the house regularly)

b) New box is made: Dual P3-733mhz on Win2K for the source (thanks Legend again!). Expenses supposed to go to investors.

a) DI has 1000 concurrent listeners. Dj Doboy is sure getting popular with those mixes.

June 2000

DI signs up with some investors (note: this was still the dot com era!), but nothing solid is signed. Pretty much all donations are therefore returned. CPhiber moves on elsewhere, Eugene compensates for the 128K capacity (supports quite a few hundred listeners).

Sometime

In desperate need of more hardware and resources. I plan to open a Eurodance channel if I ever get all I need. Shoutcast server software constantly creates problems on our 128K linux server on CPhiber's side, major pain. DI asks for donations for a new machine, over $1000 is collected.

Summer of 2000

Digitally Imported (DI) is in top 5 of shoutcast.com having regularly a few hundred listeners at the same time (max). Stopped using Live365.com servers for some time, but still list there.

Sometime

h) I hear a cut off Trancequility Megamix Volume 6 by Dj Doboy somewhere. I just have to find out who this Dj Doboy is. Get his contact info (thanks Tolik!) and Trancequility mixes just start coming and coming! All played on DI! (Doboy digs the idea of his mixes being played on radio, hehe)

g) Andrei hooks up DI with some RAM and a P3-600. New dedicated PC is made and Win2000 is installed - aahh, much better (Thanks Legend for helping with it all come together!)! 24K stream reopens (in addition to now constant 56K and 128K streams), but the machine cannot handle anything more than that, reached the cpu limit.

f) DI makes it into Shoutcast.com Top 20 directory listing. By this time Shoutcast auto-reconnects, but Win98 still freezes all the time (Win2000 is about here now). DI desperately needs an upgrade while having no budget.

e) About two weeks later the 32 maximum listeners fill up the server, capacity is slowly being added. Cphiber from California offers to add more bandwidth, it is done (thanks!).

d) Eugene of Intellispace (DJ EP) sends an email "Cool music, would love to hear it at 128K, I can spare some bandwidth for a server." - 128K test server of 32 max listeners is opened, 24K stream closes to save encoding cpu time on the rotten machine.

c) 24K stream opens. DI reaches Top 20 on Live265.com directory.

b) There is no auto-reconnect on the Shoutcast software used at this time. I have to reconnect manually every time something happens. Win98 box freezes every 30 hours or so.

a) About a week later DI has about 5 listeners at any given time. People start flocking to DI over time.

December 6th, 1999

Digitally Imported Radio goes live along with the website. Live365.com is used to serve at 56K only, connected by Ari's home DSL line. PC used is a Celeron 366mhz Win98 box. Just a hobby, Ari thought, let's see where it goes :)