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Thomas Riha, Editor ORF Upper Austria #74 Who was first to enter the livestream? As early as the late 1980s, the ORF Regional Studio Upper Austria was concerned with the transformation of the media landscape into digital realms. Not least due to the close cooperation with the Linz-based "Ars Electronica," they were confronted extremely early with the first digital start-up attempts in art and culture. The great challenge at the time was to make these topics comprehensible to the public. From the mid-1990s, digitization began to penetrate the lives of more people. The Internet was increasingly accessible to a larger audience.

In order to gain experience as early as possible and to be prepared for the challenges of the future, ORF Upper Austria put its first homepage online as early as 1995. At the same time, the then purely analog radio was brought into the digital domain. As the first radio station in Central Europe, RADIO OBERÖSTERREICH could also be heard as a live stream on the Internet as early as 1995.

The Internet, and with it the digitization most clearly experienced by the general public, did not really take off until the turn of the millennium. More and more content from ORF's "old" media was incorporated into the digital domain. Directly associated with this were changes in production conditions. Radio said goodbye to analog tapes and only digital audio files were used. Soon it was also possible to produce purely digitally on television. In the meantime, digitization has progressed so far at ORF Upper Austria that many employees only know tapes and videotapes as relics from the distant past.

At the same time, more and more digital content was available for distribution on the Internet. The annually increasing access figures are proof that for the audience the analog/digital barrier no longer exists. And with the staff always completely open to the latest technology, digitization has never been seen as a threat or a challenge at ORF Upper Austria, but rather as a means of getting the most interesting content to the audience better and faster.