[vorbis] Virgin Radio launches an Ogg stream

[Mark Hills]

On Tue, 17 Jun 2003, Lawrence Wade wrote:

> >Check out http://urn1350.net/ where we've been broadcasting live in Ogg
> >Vorbis for just over a year along side our normal AM radio. We're a
> >student station in the UK, and a number of other student stations have Ogg
> >streams too.
> 
>     What sorts of traffic do the Ogg streams get, versus the other 
> available formats?

During busy time our streams will handle maybe 4-500 connections in a day.
Of these, about a third are Ogg at 64K, and the remainder from our 48K MP3
stream. Real and 24K MP3 are negligable.

Although the Ogg streams nearly the same amount of audio as the MP3 stream
(in seconds of listening time, not in data), so the typical Ogg listener
tunes in for longer.

Picking an Ogg listener at random, it is more likely that they aren't from
the local area -- based on the fact that Ogg listners IP's are less often
from Campus or from NTL (who supply cable modems to most of this area). I
think it's probably the case that many Ogg listeners found the station on
the internet by it's association with Ogg Vorbis.

I guess the above stats show that at the moment Ogg is just a little too
obscure to capture the `average' listener. We offer stereo 64K Ogg
compared to mono 48K MP3 as an incentive to get people to try Ogg -- for
people just looking for a higher bitrate without realising they get more
for their money already. At the moment `MP3' is synonymous with `music', 
and that's a problem getting people to try the Ogg stream.

The other issue is the software support. I've seen people try Ogg and it 
doesn't work, so they go to the MP3 and it does. Not a problem from the 
point of view of the radio station, because they're still listening, but 
I'd rather they were listening on the Ogg stream :)

Mark

-- 
Mark Hills
mark.hills at urn1350.net
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