I was excited about Al Franken’s new show – “The O’Franken Factor” – which launched Air America Radio today. I got to the office a bit early so I could listen online (they don’t have a Seattle station yet). Apparently, even though Al was on the cover of the NYTimes magazine a few weeks ago, they were surprised by the volume of listeners and the experience has been pretty bad. I couldn’t even connect for the first 45 minutes. Now, either they’ve added more servers or enought people have given up that I can at least listen. However, I can only listen for about a few minutes at a time before the connection drops and I have to manually press play to (hopefully) reconnect. I hope Air America Radio and their hosting partner get this fixed so I can enjoy the shows until it comes to Seattle.
Update: I was able to listen to most of the last hour without constant interuption, though I’m guessing that was primarily due to people dropping off more than anything Air America or their hosting partner did. Also, Franken’s show replays from 8pm-11pm pacific time so I have it on as I type this and apparently they had a ton of technical issues to start the show – basically the first fifteen minutes has been background noise, concurrent playback of multiple audio streams and multiple news casts. I’m not even sure if what I’m listening to now is previously recorded or live – I just heard someone tell someone else to “have a good night”. Hopefully, they’ll get these issues worked out shortly.