[BC] Audio Streaming

[Mike McCarthy]

If you have both on-air and streaming inventory to burn, Triton Media 
(Endo) will do barter. Our experience with them has been largely 
positive and up-time has been 99.99%. And our stream has a couple 
thousand unique listeners at any given minute during the day.  Granted, 
we're a voice product and not music. Never the less, we looked at doing 
in-house sourcing and determined support of that many unique streams 
would not be in our best interest financially and the local carrier 
largely incapable of providing facilities needed without extraordinary 
costs involved.  You need a minimum DS3 (45MB) and possibly an OC3 (3 x 
DS3) for anything truly meaningful in the streaming world commercially.

I will say their core tech support people are like many IP minded people 
and they just don't get the 99.99999 up time (5.25 minutes of down time 
a year) mindset we have for on-air operations. Add another digit to get 
it down below a half a minute. They don't seem to grasp the concept that 
we operate in chunks of minutes and more than a half- minute down time 
is an eternity/lost of revenue equal to their salary for the day or 
more.  We just can't throw another server at a capacity or service 
quality problem.

However, I have seen a change in that mindset as I'm hearing more and 
more senior managers of non-broadcasting companies directing their IP 
departments to provide absolute continuous uptime and response to 
correct is a 24/7 mission.  No longer is 9-5 the uptime the objective 
and these young IP whippersnappers are getting a dose of real 
world/there is no such thing as a time clock demands on service.

MM

On 12/14/2011 7:59 PM, Rob Landry wrote:
> On Tue, 13 Dec 2011, Tom Spencer wrote:
>
>> Try DIY.  Icecast2 is freeware, and easy to set up.  For doing a remote,
>> load the stream encoder on the laptop or whatever will be feeding, with
>> the IP address and port of the destination.  Since the stream server
>> (Icecast2) would be running on a local machine back at the station, the
>> only issue would be the link from the remote to the station...
> I haven't had very good luck having the encoder stream to Icecast across
> the public Internet. I would put both an encoder and Icecast on the
> laptop.