WUOM had announced that, due to repairs being made on their transmitter, they would not be broadcasting on Sunday, 30 April, so I tuned the station in on the Internet. While it was playing, out of curiosity, I turned on a radio downstairs and found that the station was broadcasting a radio signal after all.

The WUOM signal coming through my computer was, however, delayed ten seconds behind the radio signal, and I'd noticed this same discrepancy a while ago while playing the CBC on my computer and on the radio.

Why is there a ten-second delay? Is the due to the fact that electrons travel very slowly through a wire (fractions of a millimeter per second), while radio waves travel at the speed of light? Or is it due to routing through some analog to digital convertor? Or is the delay deliberately made because of some policy decision?

Possibly an artifact of the conversion, and possibly (at least at part) on purpose. Some stations have different content for radio and internet (like cutting out or changing commercials).