Streaming real-time audio on the Internet became a reality with the advent of RealAudio in 1995; soon there were a large number of media streams available on the Internet ranging from music streams to live radio stations. But there was an interesting twist — for the most part, all of these media streams expected one to look at the screen, even though the primary content was purely audio (streaming video hadn’t arrived yet!). Starting in 1996, Emacspeak started including a variety of eyes-free front-ends for accessing media streams. Initially, this was achieved by building a wrapper around trplayer — a headless version of RealPlayer; later I built Emacspeak module emacspeak-m-player for interfacing with package mplayer. A key aspect of streaming media integration in emacspeak is that one can launch and control streams without ever switching away from one’s primary task; thus, you can continue to type email or edit code while seamlessly launching and controlling media streams. Over the years, Emacspeak has come to integrate with Emacs packages like emms as well as providing wrappers for mplayer and alsaplayer — collectively, these let you efficiently launch all types of media streams, including streaming video, without having to explicitly switch context.
In the mid-90’s, Emacspeak started including a directory of media links to some of the more popular radio stations — primarily as a means of helping users getting started — Emacs’ ability to rapidly complete directory and file-names turned out to be the most effective means of quickly launching everything from streaming radio stations to audio books. And even better — as the Emacs community develops better and smarter ways of navigating the filesystem using completions, e.g., package ido, these types of actions become even more efficient!