Digitally Imported Radio, (DIR), has been streaming its broadcast since early 2000, and has found a steadily growing audience for its Euro-Techno sounds. To meet the demands of this growing audience, DIR founder Ari Shohat wanted to offer live streaming broadcasts of special events. "Being on a shoe-string budget,” Shohat said, “we didn&singlequot;t have the resources to build up a sophisticated infrastructure, so our initial strategy was to make arrangements with providers in as many regions as possible. Usually we co-located a few of our servers at strategic locations where we had a good source of bandwidth. From these locations we set up relays from different global regions pulling and serving to the public. We had to pay very close attention to where we set up relays, as we wanted a great number of people to be able to access our streams with quality service."

The problem was the young company had only two Microsoft streaming servers based in New York. Streaming high-quality video and audio around the world would require more network power. DIR was understandably reluctant to invest in expensive servers that would sit idle between events. 

After a long round of research and shopping around, a “pay as you go” solution from Conxion Corp. of Santa Clara, Calif., to beef up its broadcasts across the board. Conxion provides additional performance on an as-needed basis by pulling content from its customers&singlequot; servers onto its own network. Utilizing this solution, DIR didn’t have to buy any additional hardware. Instead, it linked to the closest Conxion server to ensure the fastest arrival of streaming audio/video to each listener around the world.

Shohat is understandably excited about the collaboration: "Our broadcast power was dramatically boosted by accelerating our content through Conxion&singlequot;s network. We are now able to broadcast our events globally to our loyal fans at a performance level equal to what we would get if we bought expensive servers on our own," says Shohat. “One recent event reached listeners all the way to Slovenia without a hitch, and we didn&singlequot;t need to buy additional streaming equipment to do it."

DIR has doubled its audience in each of its three years, and currently reaches up to 10,000 concurrent listeners at peak hours across its radio channels. Nearly a quarter of the audience is in Europe. The site is also consistently the most listened-to station on AOL&singlequot;s Shoutcast.com radio directory.