Newstalk vanished from Internet radio

Hi Imogen

No help unfortunately but same issue on our Logitech radio.

The Newstalk satellite outlet was not intended for listener use, it was their very expensive way of feeding and backing up the various FM transmission sites.

I remember when we were setting up Phantom legal, we had discussions with Newstalk about them possibly providing a news service for us. Dan Healy was in charge at the time and we got around to talking about satellite platforms as Phantom had almost applied to operate as a satellite based programme provider, just before the FM license was then advertised.

We had looked into costs and quickly discovered that being on the Astra 28.2E platform was incredibly expensive - because it is the dominant service footprint for Ireland & UK and so you have a very large potential audience with their dishes already pointing at it. You pay dearly for that potential. Newstalk were paying very big money for simply sending a feed to their transmission sites and there were cheaper ways to do it. They fell into the trap of the time in thinking that a satellite service for Ireland had to come from 'Sky' (28.2E).

We had met with the Astra sales team and had identified a satellite serving Iran and the middle east, that could be received in Ireland - it would need a slightly bigger dish than a domestic Sky and of course, it would have to be pointed in a different direction. That didn't matter for us, as we intended to only use it as a distribution link for European cable providers to receive from and then push through their cabled network. The fact that anyone in Iran could pick it up directly from satellite, because their dish was already pointing at it, made no difference to us, they were not our intended audience and so the carriage cost would have been about €15,000 per year, as opposed to the €60,000 + (IIRC) that Newstalk were paying.

I presume they eventually dropped the satellite platform distribution when internet streaming became higher quality, more reliable, and cheaper. The professional transmission sites now used for national FM distribution have an internet backbone feed available.

None of that though, explains why they have now dropped off the aggregated internet radio carrier services, except that Bauer Media (owner) have been cutting back on internet provision, taking many of their UK and European stations offline, or geo restricting them - to save costs and to serve their specific local audiences only. While it is nice to have your station available worldwide, it is hard to make money off an international service and so it is probably a significant cost for a large multiple operator, like Bauer.

Same issue for me on my Logitech Squeezebox. I emailed Newstalk but no reply so far.