the founding netzradio.de was founded in the winter 1997/198 by accidentally being reserved by the culture & arts sponsoring consultant working at contrib.net who overheard a talk between me and someone i do not remember about establishing poetry slams via real audio with multiple locations used as input sources while being accessible world wide. he later came to me and told me that he had already reserved the domain and that in order to fulfill the sponsoring contract - otherwise i could and would not have been able to keep the domain - i would only need to run at least one real audio event. this type of sponsoring was pretty typical for contrib.net at that time as they wanted to be seen not only as bandwith / network provider. funnywise, the only bigger real audio / video event i did took place within the tacheles arthouse and it was born as an idea by SILKeSCREEN - the former tacheles web designer and silk screen printer - which would have turned out to be a mass bandwidth slaughter(6 times 128kB) which even contrib.net could not provide to us using the given single ISDN (64kb) landline that connected the house to the internet that time^*. so the whole event was run using a free real audio server (max. 25 listeners, one AV line-in) and a simulation of six (5 stages plus a mix) lines being organized via a yamaha 01 digital mixing desk capable of midi controlled input/switching. the whole thing was called RaVEN (Realaudio and Video Event Night, i guess it had to do Neal Stephenson) and i do not remember much of it apart from cables and screens but at a point i returned from the restroom the guards did not let me in the theatre hall as i could not proove of having a ticket until someone from the team inside came and stated that i am the one paying them (indeed, we did break even, thanks to a busload of scandinavian tourists who did not know before what they would be presented :-). the early years netzradio used to host a variety of micro website for projects run by sam auinger (and as o+a together with bruce odland) until they managed to run their respective own domains. during this time netzradio was co-located in hamburg and elsewhere and contrib.net was purchased by a different company and eventually came the moment i wanted to move it to a web hoster when i realised that i was named as responsible person in the whois database but not as the domain owner. i was lucky to get in contact with the chairman of denic.de which is the responsible board on solving domain name disputes for the DE gtld. since then well, until recently (march 2025) the site has been online and run by me, daniel scheffler, hosted by Host Europe which in all their overwhelming wisdom decided to pull the trigger: all email accounts will be moved to Microsoft 365, starting by may 2025. they claimed that this would be an improvement to synchronization between my devices and i'll be supported by experts (probably if i would run windows on my iphone ?), furthermore 2fa and i could upgrade (from 1€/month per mail account, something that was free until then). anyhow, i have choosen to vote with my purse and netzradio has changed location from cologne to nuremberg. * fun fact: this isdn landline was sponsored to tacheles from 1997 to mid of 1999 as a semi-permanente verbindung (that is, at times you have to make an outward call, like ping, to keep it alive). only after one and half year they had given up this lease model without telling us. and after about another half of a year they presented us the bill: 29k deutschmarks! i wrote a harsh letter to accounting and copy to the board that we would sue them for not letting us know of this in advance as it would have ruined the tacheles (an arts organisation powered by donations) to pay that.