Distributed broadcasting for radio and Internet

I was speaking with a friend tonight and he mentioned how he was thinking of setting up a low power radio transmitter so that he can have music all over his house without the expense of WiFi, wireless speakers and the like. Hook up your computer audio-out to a low power transmitter and bingo, just turn on your radio and tune in. Okay, so radio transmitters with anything but trivial (say one yard) range tend to be frowned on by the FCC, but you have to admit its a good idea if you're happy to bend the rules a bit. After all, if the signal can only be received on your property then who are your hurting?

Which got me thinking about some articles I'd read about setting up your own private radio station. In principle anyone can set up their own radio station, if they have the money, the royalty free content to use, and the time and the energy. But in reality its much harder to do and the airwaves are crowded with ClearChannel RF spam, and if you don't tow the line, the FCC will be on you. However a good many people seem inclined to give it a try anyway. For the independent "pirates" of the airwaves, the DIY articles generally advised putting the transmitter in a parked car and changing location as often as possible.

Which got me thinking, why not have a network of transmitters that get their audio feed via the internet and then timeslice the transmission randomly between them. If you had enough you could probably enjoy the benefits of a fixed transmission base for a long time before your signal could be tracked down. I'm not sure what effect this would have on reception quality but with a strong enough signal and good synchronization of clocks it might work.

But perhaps after all people don't bother with pirate radio any more now they can set up an internet radio channel with relative ease. The main problem with such schemes is that unless you have gobs of bandwidth and hardware you're probably going to be very limited in the number of users you could support. Perhaps there is a way to do a similar distributed broadcasting scheme for internet radio too. If you could find a few thousand always on computers that could donate say 25% of their spare bandwidth you could probably put together several thousand idle machines in a net and support a very large base of listeners connecting to the station around the edges of the broadcast net.

Naturally that's exactly the innovative use of unused bandwidth carriers and ISPs would rush to try and block or charge extra for, but hey, its worth a try.