KPBS-FM Turns to Stream Guys During Wildfire Emergency

Feb 5, 2008 2:51 PM

Arcata, CA – Feb 5, 2008 – KPBS-FM, an NPR member station serving the San Diego region, was knocked off the air on Oct. 23, 2007, when the Southern California wildfires destroyed power lines that fed its transmitter on Mount St. Miguel. The station, which had provided its listeners with terrestrial and Internet radio coverage throughout the emergency, scrambled to increase its streaming capacity to accommodate concerned listeners in San Diego and beyond. With assistance from the Integrated Media Association (IMA), a nonprofit organization focused on Internet policy, practices and service for public broadcasting, KPBS contacted Stream Guys of Northern California to handle the increased website traffic.

The station normally handles its Internet stream on its own servers, but because of the anticipated additional traffic from being off the air during an emergency, the station acted quickly. Stream Guys configured a new stream for KPBS across multiple servers to support 5,000 listeners using the existing KPBS stream for the source.