[BC] Mobile streaming - who needs IBOC?

[Harold Hallikainen]

It'd be interesting to look at total bandwidth requirements to get
anywhere near the number of listers a typical radio station has. If the
system supports some sort of multicast protocol and thousands of people
are listening to one stream, it seems that you can serve a lot of people
without a whole lot of bandwidth. Without multicast, it seems like it'd be
very difficult to support anywhere near the number of listeners a typical
radio station has. If, however, due to the capability of listening to
programming from around the world, instead of just that present on local
stations, people spread their listening out a bit more, bandwidth
requirements again get high, even with multicasting. Though bandwidth is
definitely getting cheaper, I still don't think it's free. Each additional
listener costs more in a non-multicast environment. Each listener
listening to a new stream that no one else on the local node is listening
to also costs more.

Internet radio is pretty neat, but is it really cost effective? It seems
cost effective to support a small number of listeners in a widely
dispersed area. But, to get a single stream to a few million people, an AM
or FM station may be more cost effective.

For those of you that are running both on air and internet streaming, what
are your costs per listener for distribution? On the radio side, I'd
include the costs of electricity, transmitter site rent (or equivalent
costs), transmitting equipment depreciation and maintenance, etc. For the
internet side, I guess it's mostly bandwidth costs. So, based on the
number of simultaneous RF and internet listeners you have, what are you
spending to reach each of them?

Harold

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