The question came up a few days ago of what it costs for a radio station to stream. If the station streams music, they have to pay the composers and lyric writers, and (unlike over the air radio) have to pay the performers royalties.
The rational way to stream is to have a streaming server located in a big computer center directly connected to the internet where bandwidth costs are minimal.
Shoutcast is the simplest “do it yourself” way to stream. “Do it yourself” means monitoring your own server to make sure it is working and handling your own support issues.
is a Shoutcast hosting service that I’ve seem some beginners using. The basic unit of bandwidth is the GB (GigaByte). A 64Kb/sec stream consumes about 30 MB per hour. 64Kb/sec is good enough for FM quality sound, overkill for news/talk…. 128 Kb/sec is typical for CD quality sound.
Their “Pay as you go” rate is $.40 per GB, so that works about to about $.01 per hour (per listener). If you had 1000 listeners, the price drops to $.10 per GB, or about 1/3 of a cent per hour per listener.
In comparison, if you have a 5Kw transmitter, your electric bill is around $1/hr (for the transmitter), or around the cost of 300 people streaming (very rough estimates). But if your alternative is to build a taller antenna, increase power, move to a different transmitter site, etc to reach people inside buildings… streaming doesn’t look so expensive. Most of the streaming is happening during the day while people are at work.
Podcasting is significantly cheaper than streaming since it isn’t as demanding on the performance. If the connections get bogged down, the podcast just downloads a little slower.
Note: for the radio geeks who will think I don’t know, FM stations are licensed based on Effective Radiated Power (ERP), which takes into the directional nature, polarization and other characteristics of the antenna system. a 100 Kw FM station is not actually using anywhere near 100 Kw of electricity.
