Internet Live Audio Streaming

emagine

Hi folks,

Anybody had any experience with live audio streaming on the Internet?? Radio station wants to put its sounds out to the world.

What are the best formats, browser plugins, infrastructure req'd or who indeed can provide the infrastructure? Advantages of Real Player vs MS Windows Media Player vs or any other formats out there?

Cheers....

FreeHost

The infrastructure could be supplied by most hosting providers. First there's common misconception that all you need is a domain name and a small server connected to the Internet. (Technically that's correct) But streaming media gobbles up recourses.

Choose a good physical server with a min, dual processor, 2 - 4 GB RAM. This will allow decent streaming quality.

Choose a hosting solution in a Data Centre that can give you plenty of bandwidth, the amount of bandwidth will determine the amount listeners to your station. Remember everybody who logs on is using data transfer, so that’s probably the most important.

Lastly, even though I’m a Linux fan, I thing Windows has the edge on media.

emagine

It's a local radio station, so the server will have to be located within the broadcast range of the station. I don't know too much about this, but I presume there is some sort of FM recevier (a stereo or something) connected to the streaming server???

So I'm restricted to local hosting providers???

FreeHost

Not necessarily, the station can beam out its FM signal as usual, but it must also be able to broadcast in digital. The digital broadcast is separate from the FM broadcast. The server you locate in a data centre becomes the Internet broadcast, the best way to connect to would be by a digital line. A dedicated ISDN line can connect from the Station to the Data Centre and in turn your server broadcasts to the Internet community.

Alternatively, your radio station could setup the server in house and do away with the Data Centre altogether, but if you choose this method, you’ll need a decent dedicated line into your station, at a rough guess I’d say a minimum of 1MB, check the price with eircom or esat for that type of line.

yossarin

you can capture the stream at source and upload it to a streaming server.
or
you can pick up a pc aerial card, and get the feed off that.
it means that the digital stream is dependant on sucessful FM broadcasting, but it provides an out of band comms to get the content to your server (less bandwidth used == more for listeners)

you will have to tailor what you serve according to your needs.
issues are:
the format that you serve content in
-> licensing (€€€) you'll have to pay
-> the lengths that your listeners have to go to to use the station
the quality that you encode said content in
-> how low a quality can you broadcast in before its too poor ?
lastly, what is your intended audience ?
-> what size, usage pattern, etc.

bandwidth costs money. Servers can only host so many sessions.

If you are have thousands of listeners, then you can set up mirrors, redirection, etc. for effiency over time.

if you are looking at dipping your toe into the water ,then have a look at shoutcast and similar sites to see what others are doing

emagine

Its a relatively small operation, local listenership only. Thanks for all the info folks.... very useful! I have plenty of options to work on now with the client.

Thanks