Filipinos are always known for its resilience. I want to geographically point that the country has always been a target of the most trying situations.  The Philippines is facing the Pacific Ocean in the east, making it prone to typhoons and storms. And we’re rubbing elbows with the most diverse and hostile cultures in the north, west, and south. The Philippines is like the Israel of the middle east.

Since I’m a radio blog, I’d like to share the story of RadioPilipinas. com. It’s another internet radio station, yeah, but once you hear their story, fingers crossed, you won’t look at internet stations the same way again.

I salute the pioneers, the brains, and the hands behind RadioPilipinas.com, for surviving such an economically challenging internet radio industry, all for the love of  music, great love for Original Pilipino Music.

Here is their story, lifed from their site RadioPilipinas.com

Radiopilipinas started in 2005. It was first called Fatalradio. The internet radio was a partnership of young american djs in USA and filipino djs in the Philippines. The 24 hour streaming time was divided into 12 hours for the USA and 12 hours for the philippines. Each would broadcast during daytime of their respective timezone. The main organizers of fatalradio were Jamez Strickland, Jake Williams, Michael Walker, Nolit Abanilla and Alexis Moreno.

The american side played mostly hiphop and alternative music. Among its regular djs include the brother of Evenesense drummer who also has his own band. The Philippine side on the other hand played mostly pinoy rock of the 90s as well as new wave stuff. Kuyakurt was the main dj for the filipino stream. The filipino partners took charge of designing and managing the site while the american partners did the technical as well as financed the radio.

Towards the end of 2005, cultural differences and persistent tug of war on streaming time brought out a split in Fatalradio. The american partners decided to setup a new radio of their own. The filipino staff went on streaming with Fatalradio until financial issues forced the server to shut down. In 2006, fatalradio continued to stream from an unstable free shoutcast server. However this was limited to a few listeners thus marketing the radio was futile.

In 2007, kuyakurt and nolit decided to revamp the internet radio and decided to name it radiopilipinas. Jeffrey McAdder financed the acquisition of the domain and nolithosting provided the site. Getting a new dedicated shoutcast server was hard as financial issues continue to plaque the staff. So the staff decided to run its site with a simple player of serverside mp3 files and let the listeners choose from a playlist whatever they want to play. The staff still continued on using the free shoutcast server with limited listener capacity from time to time.

Towards the end of 2008, nolithosting has acquired the ownership of radiopilipinas domain and got a shoutcast server installed in one of its collocated computers on a datacenter in dallas, USA. The new development paved the way for kuyakurt and nolit to redevelop radiopilipinas as a full internet radio running on shoutcast server. Radiopilipinas is currently running on one source server with two backup servers all running on state of the art centovacast software. A total of 4 relay servers are also running – three are on 64kbps with hundreds of listener capacity. One server is on 32kbps which is intended for listeners with dial up connections. This server runs on a random playlist not synch with the main server but of similar content.

Staff
Radiopilipinas is run by a handfull of staff with the following officers:

Alexis Moreno – Station Manager
Nolit Abanilla – Program Director
Wayne Perez – Research & Development Coordinator
Wendel Quinto – Events Coordinator
Chi Asprec – Technical Officer