[Icecast-dev] Icecast stats.xml

[Roger Hågensen]

(see forwarded mail further below)

Shoutcast v1, Shoutcast v2, Icecast-KH are all "compatible" with the way 
info is collected by StreamLicensing.

Some may wonder why bothering to humor StreamLicensig, but the thing is 
that other licensing/royalty collectors did it the same way.
StreamLicensing are now sadly the only ones that cater to small 
independent station that do not wish to be a pirate radio. (LoudcIty wet 
belly up and Radionomy who know owns Shoutcast and WInamp does things 
differently, Live365 also do their own thing.)

It is a shame that Icecast v2 can't be used/supported. Today Icecast v2 
is not an option due to te lack of those stats and Icecast-KH is not 
that well supported. Result is that people are either stuck with 
Shoutcast v1 or Shoutcast v2 (if they want some Icecastlike features).

Would it be possible to provide Icecast-KH style stats maybe via a 
config option/flag, and then decided if this should be enable by default 
or not!?
Later a proper stats login account could be provided that meet the 
criteria of the PROs.

Thoughts anyone?


Roger Hågensen.



-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: 	Re: Re: [Icecast-dev] Icecast stats.xml
Date: 	Tue, 11 Nov 2014 15:22:33 -0600

	

	

Thanks Roger. We couldn't work with those solutions because of the 
agreements we have with the pros. I could respond to each item but it 
would seem to be a waste of time if the developers have no interest in 
making it happen.

Briefly though: These things are standard output on Shoutcast 1 and 2 
and have been for years. We toss out connections less than 90 seconds 
per our agreements with the PRO's. We need the IP and player info in 
order for our software to determine if we have duplicate tunein's, we 
need the ip of the player in order to determine if the data is subject 
to licensing, should we choose to exclude certain non-licensed countries 
from our fees. We don't accept compiled reports because that puts us at 
the mercy of the compiling software, Etc. All we are asking is for 
instantaneous stats that we poll as he mentions in the last paragraph, 
but not compiled stats for the reasons already mentioned.  Thanks for 
trying!  Marvin


On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 2:01 PM, Roger Hågensen wrote:

    Going through old emails I think I forgot to forward this to you
    Marvin, sorry about that.


    -------- Forwarded Message --------
    Subject: 	Re: [Icecast-dev] Icecast stats.xml
    Date: 	Mon, 27 Oct 2014 12:00:05 +0000


    Hi Roger,

    > The way StreamLicensing.org does it, is to login (authenticate) as admin
    > on the shoutcast/icecast server, and in the case of Icecast-KH they just
    > retrieve the stats.xml

    Login as admin is not ideal for this purpose because you may not want
    your stats provider or licensing authority to have that much control
    over your Icecast instances. It would be better to have a 'stats'
    login/password that could only gather stats, nothing else.

    > I.e: The IP, the ID, the Connected info. (and preferably the UserAgent too)

    There are privacy issues here. Is it really necessary for the licensing
    authority to have the timestamp/IP address/user agent of each listener?
    Imagine the radio station might have political content which could get
    listeners into trouble if the government of a certain country knew who
    they were.

    It might be better to look up the geolocation for each IP, then delete
    the IP from the record. In most cases I know of, the licensing authority
    only requires the headline numbers (such as aggregate tuning hours for
    listeners in the US, in the case of SoundExchange).

    Also, there are issues with polling stats every 60-90 seconds. This will
    miss a lot of short duration listeners, which can give you useful
    information.

    For example, if a particular user agent has lots of very short
    connections, there could be a compatibility issue with the stream format
    which you would want to know about. Or, people in a particular country
    don't like your content as much as listeners in another country, so they
    manually disconnect in the first minute.

    One solution is to provide instantaneous stats by polling, so the radio
    station has some live feedback, but for the detailed reports compile
    daily, weekly or monthly stats from the full log.

    Cheers!

    Daniel



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