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calling all streaming experts.......

F

fm-engineer

My company handles mostly RF, then studio troubleshooting, installs, etc. We understand and can work IT, but most companies have their own IT contracts. In this instance, a small FM station wants to stream. Is it more economical to stream in-house or let a third-party barter company handle the streaming? This one company in particular wants 8- 30 second spots per-day, and they will handle the traffic, processing, and stream generation. The station will have to provide a dedicated high speed connection. The stations automation can handle content regulation issues. Any opinions would be greatly appreciated. FM-E
 
If you get that barder deal I'd go for it. There are some nice cheap streaming companies out there but spot replacent and all the goofy Tisa reporting crap makes them less attractive than the companies that offer that along with the streaming as a package to real broadcasters with ota signals. The last thing I'd do is try to bring your own bandwidth into the building and play with your own streaming servers. It's a lot of fuss and it will be more expensive for little guys. The only time it begins to be a workable thought is at someplace like a university or someplace that already has a massive amount of extra bandwidth available or very, very big guys like cc, etc.
 
Most of my clients use 'Stream the World' or 'Securenetsystems'. You don't want to host your own, especially if your small. The bandwidth requirements alone will be a butt kicker. And the station will have to be in-charge of another hassle. Just buy a Barix Instreamer and send the audio over the internet to a streaming service. Especially if they're willing to barter!

"What's that you say? Your stream isn't working? Are the lights on your Barix green? Yes, ok, call you streaming service, the problem is on their end." Problem solved.
 
I think one of the earlier replies covered this... but it kind of got lost in all the details and flotsam being covered. The operator of a small station DOES NOT want the responsibility of keeping up with all the reporting requirements that go along with the fees for on-line music licensing. Let a service-bureau specialist do all that number crunching.
 
Thanks everyone for the info! :)

The one company that wants air-time for barter is Crystal Media. I have read some about Liquid Compass, they seem to be the most popular. Can anyone provide a ballpark monthly fee figure for say securenet systems, liquid compass, etc that have no barter? Thanks again,
 
Goat is correct. The bandwidth costs by themselves will eat you up. Best bet is make sure you have enough bandwidth to consistently and reliably send out one stream to a provider and let them distribute it.
 
Take the barter deal from Crystal. It's the best deal out there. Streams sound great, they take care of the data collection, give you a subscription to Spacial audio's streamads and SOS software, and they even pay soundexchange fees. Depending on your market size, if you pay for a streaming provider, spot replacement software, and pay the fees yourself, you are likely looking at at least several thousand per year.
 
It all depends on your revenue situation...that's A LOT of inventory, in our case!!!

We use streamaudio.com and pay less than $200 per month and have an AAC+ stream that sounds fantastic. We're happy with our players, we can post podcasts, the RIAA reporting is pretty simple. Their support isn't as good as larger vendors, my only point is...is it worth less than $200 to give up THAT much inventory?
 
If it's a barter deal, does it mean the streaming company gets 8 spots on the FM station or just 8 spots on the stream?
 
You can't afford to stream on your own...

The markups for retail Internet make it all but impossible to roll your own with streaming. As an example-a friend of mine has a medium sized data center (about 1500 customers). He buys a terabyte of bandwidth wholesale for about 33 dollars-or 3.3 cents a gigabyte. This isn't the cheapest available either-he uses premium ISPs, not the likes of Cogent. The cheapest retail price I have seen for bandwidth is Amazon pre-emptible bandwidth which is about 15 cents/gB. Comcast gets about 50 dollars a month for a maximum of 250 gB of bandwidth from customers, which works out to 20 cents per gigabyte-assuming that you use ALL the bandwidth you pay for. HOWEVER their overage charges are more then a dollar per gigabyte! Now, since Comcast is the third largest retail ISP in the USA, I have to believe that they buy bandwidth for less then HALF what my friend pays for it-so you can see just how high the retail markups really are.
 
A station I do work for just started to stream. They are using Surfer Network (www.surfernetwork.com). The stream sounds good and the station seems to be pleased. I don't know exactly what the deal they got was, but this might be a place to look for small stations, since it appears to be a turnkey installation
 
Sgeirk said:
Whatever you use, whatever you do, just make sure you stream AAC+, minimum 32kbps, 48kbps is preferable.
Click to expand...


How does one encode aac?
 
Jay77 said:
Sgeirk said:
Whatever you use, whatever you do, just make sure you stream AAC+, minimum 32kbps, 48kbps is preferable.
Click to expand...

How does one encode aac?
Click to expand...

AAC is one thing. aacPlus, more correctly HE-AAC (or in a mobile world common AAC+) is another thing. Two different codecs, different quality at different bitrates and two different applications. Use aacPlus for very low bitrates, use AAC for higher bitrates to get the best audio quality.

There are audio processing/real-time encoding solutions from Omnia (A/XE) and Orban (Opticodec 1010).


Regards,
Goran Tomas
 
The easiest way to encode AACplus is to use edcast, a free program, make sure you use the most recent winamp aacplus driver, and I use Breakaway to process our internet streams. It sounds pretty gosh awful good at 32kbps.

There are a hundred ways to do it, but using a more expensive solution to process isn't necessary or even better...like any processing solution, it depends on who has dialed it up.
 
Thanks for the advice. I will give this a shot. What is "best" for a talk format?

I have had a basic Windows Media stream with no processing. I would certainly love some because many of the programs are at different audio levels, I just have no idea how to set it up (first time for everything!).
 
Jay77 said:
Thanks for the advice. I will give this a shot. What is "best" for a talk format?

I have had a basic Windows Media stream with no processing. I would certainly love some because many of the programs are at different audio levels, I just have no idea how to set it up (first time for everything!).
Click to expand...

24 kbps AAC+ stream would work perfect for a Talk format.
 
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