Rhubarb Radio Archive


As many of you will know, I used to do a show on Rhubarb Radio. Between July 2009 and November 2011, I was the stations “webmaster”, in charge of ensuring all the shows got recorded and were available for Listen Again. When I joined I set about looking for ways to improve the service we were giving our listeners.

As a station our on demand vs listen live was typically around 3:1, so making sure everything ran smoothly was the most important, and sometimes most difficult part to get right. Having done a bit of research, I settled on using Amazon S3 as not only a backup service but also as a Content Delivery System for listeners using on demand. The prices were cheap, a lot cheaper than our host wanted to charge us, and it meant that we could take the load of our server, which was prone to falling over when having to stream on demand and live. It took me a good few months to set up the system, but in the end once a show had been recorded by the server, it was automatically uploaded to S3 and the link to it on the website  was replaced by the one on the CDN.

When the fortunes of Rhubarb Radio changed, we weren’t able to keep funding S3, simply because there was no money coming in and the Director of our Parent company had moved on to his new venture. Times were tough, and a few months after I left in November 2011, Rhubarb was closed down.

Yesterday, I got an email from Amazon with a monthly statement for S3 attached to it. For some reason, I’m still investigating as to what, the account had been linked to my most recent login and I had been charged $60 for one month of storage (nearly 500gb). I sent a short, polite email, explaining what had happened and asking, as a complete shot in the dark, if I would be able to have access to the account again so we could move our content off the service and distribute it to ex-Presenters.

Surprisingly, within a couple of hours I had a reply, permission to access the account and the promise of a refund once I closed down the account. Having dealt with Customer Service in the past, I was pleasantly surprised at how speedy and how helpful they had been. So, “what does this all mean?” I hear you ask. Essentially, I have “most” of the Rhubarb Radio output from 2009-2011. I’m assuming that after I left, the shows weren’t backup up to S3, so anything after November 2011 is probably lost forever.

I’m going to be download as many shows as I can and will probably end up sending out DVDs for those that want theirs. If you have any specific requests, please let me know. Once I close the account, that’s it.

Rhubarb Radio from Fourseventy Media on Vimeo.