[Icecast] What Does Icecast Do

[Ian H Stewart]

As a national broadcaster, ISDN is definitely NOT
cost effective compared to IP based transport.

It does buy you reliable transport and reasonable delay however.
For us to get to StarGuide and our affiliates, we have
to use ISDN. We spend a lot of money on these lines and have driven
our rate down to 4 cents per minute. But we DO NOT broadcast 24 hours  
a day.

I would consider an ADN, Fract T1, ATM or Frame Circuit if you have  
tight timing requirements.

Our show and some of our new 24 hour stations are going on Icecast  
servers soon
as the end user delay is not as big an issue as compared to traditional
AM/FM timing requirements.


Ian H. Stewart  -  ian at smartfamilymedia.com
Product Discovery and Engineering

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look for and click on the El Capitan image
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On Jun 30, 2005, at 4:25 PM, Geoff Staples wrote:

> If you are broadcasting the same feed on all three stations, then,  
> you can encode at a high bit rate (FM quality - see the Icecast  
> documentation to decide format and bit rate).  Then, use Icecast to  
> serve the feed and your stations can then attach to the feed and  
> receive their signal. You can use authentication, or even an  
> obscure mount name (If it isn't published anywhere, how could  
> anyone guess that your feed is on http://232.156.023.232/uTe8GQ64.ogg)
>
> But, here's a practical consideration: If you stream a private feed  
> for your other stations to pick-up for rebroadcast, you will have a  
> latency caused by buffering and other factors. So, you won't be  
> able to have a program at a remote station start at exactly 10:00,  
> for example. Nor will you be able to have the three stations  
> synchronized.
>
> The big advantage of streaming technology is that the origination  
> point and the access points can be literally anywhere the Internet  
> is available with no advance planning. You can even use wireless  
> Internet technologies for broadcasting or receiving. But, it sounds  
> like your origination point and your three access points are fixed  
> locations - and there are only three of them.
>
> Since you're talking about fixed locations and especially if you're  
> broadcasting 24 hours per day, you may find that ISDN telephone  
> lines are more reliable and less expensive (or at least  
> competitive) than Internet technology.
>
> Of course, you would still use Icecast for streaming to your  
> audience as you mentioned no matter what you do for the links to  
> your three radio stations.
>
> Geoff