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How reliable is your stream?

R

rickityone

I'm curious as to how reliable other internet station streams are.

Should I expect the streamer to provide 100% reliable streaming 24/7 or should I expect intermittent drops from time to time.

What is your experience with your streaming company?

Since going on the internet in 2006, we have been plagued with technical problems. Slowly we have isolated them and dealt with them and have gotten a pretty reliable stream. But, then, like for the last four days we go through what seems like net storms - where our dsl line works perfectly, but our software can't "resolve host name" over and over. We have three computers that can stream and two dsl lines. When this is happening we can't get the stream to stabilize on either line or with any computer, then it goes away and may work for weeks perfectly.

These interruptions are hell on the listening audience - what fun is it to listen to buffering?

So, I wonder what other streamers experience and if they have had such problems, who did they settle on as the most reliable streaming company?

Thanks for any help.

Rickity
gulchradio.com
 
You can't blame it all on the streaming company. Here's my small tale of streaming and it's pitfalls.

Having my source in Connecticut and streaming to a provider in California is the pits. It seems parts of the main backbone for the internet goes through two companies, Level 3 and Cogentco. There seems to be a weekly occurnace where I have an issue of either one of these two networks failing (be it high latency or other equipment or network failure) causing my cume to drop. I noticed this is independent of the streaming provider. Yes, I'm sure there are ones who are better than others so that may fall into the mix as well.

Past experience for me is that StreamGuys is tops and MediaCast1 was the pits when I last used them and I would never, ever use them again - they may have gotten better, but once burned I don't give 'em a second chance. The non-comm FM I help out is using StreamGuys and they are very happy with them. I'm using Live365 only becuase of the royalties being rolled into the monthly stream charges.

My advice is to try to find a streaming company close to where you are (as far as network hops go) and that should improve your uptime.
 
Alot of people DONT KNOW HOW TO STREAM!!

There stream have either LOW LEVELS or HOT LEVELS (Too much),some have clicking in them.....

Its kinda sad in a way.......
 
The Dude said:
Alot of people DONT KNOW HOW TO STREAM!!

There stream have either LOW LEVELS or HOT LEVELS (Too much),some have clicking in them.....

Its kinda sad in a way.......
Click to expand...

Of course, I was assuming that people who are streaming know how to stream, but I suppose that always isn't the case. I too have heard my share of streams from people where it sounds like they have no business doing what they are trying to do.
 
Well - I'm not sure how one learns to stream other than do it and be dedicated to the thing, constantly checking your audio quality and so on.

I appreciate the clue concerning intermediary carriers, which I guess there is nothing we can do anything about.

We have learned that streaming isn't just throwing a computer on line and a couple of your favorite songs on and hoping the world beats a path to your door, because they won't.

Anyway, thanks for the tip, I hope some other folks will write with their experiences.

Rickity
gulchradio.com
 
I have been streaming since 2001 and have been with Live365 for all that time. The fact that
the royalties were included in the monthly payment clinched my decision.

When my stream first started, it was at 32k, I believe. I had a contemporary Christian format
and actually did very well with it for about 3 years.

Then, locally, pther CCM stations began signing on in our market and after watching the numbers drop
for a few months, I decided to make a format change. Considering I was emloyed at a local Christian station until 2004, this was not an easy decision.

The format I ended up going to was classic country. A friend donated TONS of it from his former
commercial AM station which he had since sold.

We have relatives who live in the boonies. They kept saying they couldn't listen to the 32..I went down
to 24..and finally to 8k.

Now, I know. This is not supposed to work. But even at 8k I have more listeners than I did before.
I also have a humongous playlist and over 2600 songs..and have hundreds more to rotate in and out.

The stream never missed a beat, except for the occasional "Day of Silence" events.

But..the stream is for fun and play. I do copywriting and marketing from home when its time to work.
 
rickityone said:
We have learned that streaming isn't just throwing a computer on line and a couple of your favorite songs on and hoping the world beats a path to your door, because they won't.
Click to expand...

Don't be so sure that everybody has learned that lesson! I've heard streams where the effort put into it certainly showed by the number of listeners ... or is that the lack of listener numbers! There are so many who have rolled their own streams without putting a great deal of effort in the resulting output and they can't understand why they don't have more listeners.
 
rickityone said:
I'm curious as to how reliable other internet station streams are.

Should I expect the streamer to provide 100% reliable streaming 24/7 or should I expect intermittent drops from time to time.

What is your experience with your streaming company?
Click to expand...

Never ever expect 100%, You should be able to expect 99.9% but to try for 99.99 or 99.999 will cost exponentially more and to obtain high QoS (Quality of Service) you need to consider dedicated infrastructure!!

Over the last 3 years I've had my own dedicated servers, used stream providers and been with Live 365 and probably seen most of things that can happen. My cable modem feed is on a small business contract which gives me higher QoS than residential and also gives me 4 hour response rather than "we'll get to it".

As a rule avoid any data center that uses Cogent, that tends to get oversold, you want one that tries a mix of carriers, and avoid a certain data center (FDC) in Chicago, whilst they offer cheap bandwidth, you gets what you pays for. A 10 second disruption means nothing to web servers, meanwhile all your listeners are dropped. Windows Media Player is quite robust as it will try to reconnect, Winamp can be set to reconnect and iTunes just plain sucks as reconnecting, so, my station which relies on iTunes, will lose the lot. The Graphs look impressive.

When you do get a drop, trying to determine where can be fun, could be the data center, could be your own ISP or anywhere in the middle. One hell month I ran Pingplotter and identified a router in the data center, but they just plain refused to admit fault. Even a route from my server to a friends server in the same data center would drop every four hours (both ways), didn't even hit the public internet, so I took my business elsewhere. I've had days where 25% of my listeners get dropped, we found that to be a Cogent router in Kansas!

I ran all my streams out of Paris and Amsterdam for a month and that worked well, 64k was the max tho', 128k just had too much latency across the Atlantic on weekdays. That ended when the Data Center in Paris (OVH) fell out with my stream provider!!!

Currently I'm with Mouse to Mouse and my streams are co-located in Texas and have been rock-solid, last uptime has been 8 days with no drop, although it can vary. Fast-Serv is whom I would recommend as well, when I was with them, I had an impressive uptime of 21 days, no drops (not them nor by cable co, I was impressed).

You can do stream tests and find out more here.

http://www.radiotoolbox.com/hosts/

Bottom line, expect the unexpected and you wont get disappointed.
 
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