[Icecast] Bandwidth Consuming

[Geoff Shang]

Hi,

This is normal behaviour for Unicast streams.  In this sense, Internet 
radio is not really broadcasting as such, as a stream needs to be sent to 
each individual listener.

There are several solutions to this problem.

1.  Software like Peercast (which I've not personally used) allows 
listeners to send the stream to each other.  However, my understanding is 
that each listener has to be able to send the stream to someone else, so 
for it to work well, each listener needs to have 128kbps uplink available 
if you want a 128kbps stream to work well.  My understanding is that this 
approach often doesn't work well in practice.

2.  A variant on the peercast idea is Iceshare 
(http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/IceShare) which is unicast streaming mixed 
with bit torrent.  A great idea, but it appears no-one is currently working 
on it.

3.  Multicast - the true solution.  IP Multicasting will solve all of our 
problems, but it requires special handling and is (afaik) currently not 
supported in Icecast.

So as far as I know, at present you need to be able to serve the full 
bitrate of your stream for each listener who tunes in.

Geoff.