[icecast] bit/bytes

[Dale Ghent]

On Mon, 1 Mar 2004, oddsock wrote:

> Additionally, smaller broadcasters (with not as much momentum as DI for
> instance) can also deal with costs by <plug> using open-source  software
> such as icecast, coupled with patent/royalty-free codecs like vorbis which
> provide great sounding streams at half the bandwidth requirements of
> mp3.</plug>

All very true points (and that goes for the parts of your email I did not
quote here as well)

But Ogg Vorbis, for all it's quality and capabilities, is going to
continue to be limited to a comparatively small following of people.

Lets not forget that many of our listeners are not as technically inclined
as we'd like them to be. Many will look at you like you have five heads if
you ask them if they know what a "codec" is. Grandma just wants to go to
her NPR webcast station, click [>] and hear something. Confront her with
a "Unknown MIME Type: audio/ogg" message and she'll likely not realize
that she needs to download a plugin for whatever player she's happening
to use, which would likely what ever came as a part of the OS on the
computer she bought from Dell or HP. Worst case is that she decides it's
not worth the trouble and picks up her knitting. That's one less listener
for the webcaster.

My point in this is that Ogg Vorbis needs a long-overdue shot in the arm
in terms of marketting. That is, marketting to the people who supply the
popular media apps... Apple and iTunes. Microsoft Media Player. Audion.
WinAMP.

/dale
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