What’s the deal with Clear Channel and a few others trying to hide the streaming url’s? i use this little internet radio player called Screamer and its much easier to switch from station to station(instead of opening each station’s media player) as long as i can get the URL of the source….
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Back in December, Tom Taylor asked for predictions for 2010 – my response to his request (he hasn’t printed any of them yet or I missed it) was to suggest that 2010 will be the year “big radio” has to come to terms with how to deal with non-computer streaming listeners. WiMax and LTE will become very visible this year as ways for non-PC devices to allow IP-based streaming of radio stations – but the business model of radio streaming is moving strongly towards trying to turn radio streaming into TV, with force-fed prestream video ads.
Ando media has been growing larger and getting more publicity about its internet streaming metrics, providing counts and listenership. I’ve also speculated at some point in time that internet ratings will become a proxy for “real” ratings, since they don’t require people to carry devices, open the ratings company up to lawsuits and Congressional meddling. The Ando metrics are being incorporated into the players of the big streaming folks, and that also provides tracking data for calculation of the SoundExchange royalty payments.
Clear Channel’s approach for now for non-PC listeneres is iHeartRadio which streams some of their stations (not all) to cell phones, but that doesn’t address non-phone mobile devices. They did send a person to speak at a conference in Las Vegas during CES about creating a standardized way for WiFi radios to “discover” and connect to radio stations, but existing devices may or may not be able to use that standard, when and if it is agreed to.
It all started a couple years back when a company called Streamtheworld discovered it could create a self-contained media player completely out of Adobe Flash. Flash is one of the most un-consumer-friendly media formats out there… it’s effectively closed-source, unlike HTML and most standard streaming audio formats. In other words, you really have no idea what it’s doing to your computer and you can’t reverse engineer the player to get around things like pre-stream advertising. Naturally, the streaming companies fell in love with the idea, and either jumped to STW or created flash players of their own.
There was at least one streaming company (Streamaudio) that once upon a time claimed that using a raw audio feed was tantamount to theft, and somehow jerryrigged their player to not play if it’s a raw feed, but will play in their HTML shell (and theirs alone, complete with prestream ads). Listenership was cut in half, and Streamaudio actually touted it as a good thing, calling that listenership stolen bandwidth.
I don’t necessarily object to prestream ads, but I do object to VIDEO prestream ads. For many years I was on dial-up (not so anymore) and it made it almost unbearable to try and sit through a 300kbit/sec prestream video ad just to listen to a 32kbit/sec stream (which, a little surprisingly, was never a problem for me).
thanks for all the responses….i prob should have said that the screamer thing is just a little software app that i run on my netbook and not an “internet appliance” as it were….its just getting frustrating with my 3 local Clear Channel stations(and even some non-CC elsewhere) as they seem to be using something that times out after a few hours – and i dont want to go to their noisy websites or use their noisy players..its like being bombarded with their trashy ads….on the other hand we have some big-time stations like KGO and KSFO that are more than happy to let us have the stream…i understand that the cost of bandwidth for some of the major stations might have been a problem in the past so they might have wanted to limit access to their region but i doubt that’s too much of a factor now…
Ah, that’s yet another aspect we talked about – when measuring listeners, the average listen time per session (one of the ando metrics) becomes highly unreliable unless there is some “challenge” to make sure someone is actually listening. So more of the players are limiting session length and requiring you to click to continue listening.
The distance between netbooks and cell phones is shrinking and Apple’s new tablet thingy might blur that even more. Apple is supposedly working on a stripped down flash player that developers could design to on cell phones and not destroy the purpose of the app store