By Becky Hurwitz
For people with busy or unregimented schedules, it is sometimes difficult
to tune into radio shows, which typically adhere to a set schedule.
One of the assets of the internet is that users can access information
and content at any time. www.comedyworld.com,
a 24-hour "independent entertainment network" takes advantage
of the constant access provided by the internet to deliver their programming
at any time. In this way, people can hear past radio comedy shows
as well as live radio, as well as viewing other content produced by
the network.
Comedy world offers recordings of all shows from the past six months.
Radio shows are divided into clips of about 20 minutes and most have
a brief description so that the user can select the exact portion
of the show that he or she wishes to hear. Thus, the user can choose
to listen to an entire show in-order, as it was originally broadcast,
or just to sections of the show. The divisions are probably made because
of the limitations of memory allocation, but the divisions do not
detract from the user's experience, instead, the divisions seem to
have been made to help the user to select exactly what they would
like to hear.
The site offers bios about the show hosts, multimedia such as short
animated movies, interactive games, jokes, and contests. All of the
content that is not radio clips or information about the radio shows
works to create one of the most full web experiences as a user can
access this extra content while listening to the shows. This extra
content, however, is not merely extra in addition to the radio shows,
as it could probably exist independent of the radio shows and still
be entertaining, engaging, and fulfilling.
Radio shows are perhaps one of the easiest conventional forms of
media to broadcast over the web as it consists only of sound clips,
which are much less memory intensive than video. Comedy world is a
great example of how the conventional form of media can be translated
to internet based media and how the internet can be used to augment
the traditional media.