The primary factor in our quality rating is the delay between when a listener clicks on Listen and when the programming starts streaming.
A large majority of commercial radio stations are using Microsoft’s Windows Media Streaming to do their streaming. There is a feature in your streaming server called “Fast Streaming”. Details about it and how to turn it on are located Here on the Microsoft Web Site.
Turning on the Fast Streaming feature bursts the few seconds of content so that the listener hears the programming right away – rather than “buffering” the content as it arrives. This makes streaming radio feel “almost as fast” as pushing the radio button in their car – which IS going to become people’s expectation.
For those listening, be sure your preferences are set correctly in Windows Media Player. Under performance, make sure the speed is either automatic or close to the real speed of your connection – and let buffering be automatic.
If you are listening on dialup, none of this well help (much). For Fast Start to work, it has to be able to deliver packets faster than the “normal” rate, which dialup may or may not be able to handle.
For radio stations – if you want to be serious about streaming, the server doing the streaming should NOT be located in your station or transmitter. Once you get more than a few listeners, you’ll saturate the bandwidth of your station, interfering with other operations (or vice verse – like your stream going down because someone in the studio starts playing a video).
Hosted streaming is not all that expensive, and it outsources all the headaches to someone else. Your local server encodes and sends a single stream to the hosting service, and they do the rest. If the stream goes down, they have staff 24/7 who can detect the stream going down and correct the problem or notify someone that something needs to be fixed.