Well, this is a shocker.
Cumulus radio is going to make its stations available via iHeartradio, the streaming platform of their rival Clear Channel.
That’s enough of a critical mass that other smaller owners may be forced to migrate to it. Don’t underestimate Robert Pittman.
I was stimulated by the recent posts to browse the web looking for information about using cell phones to receive audio (radio) streams. It seems obvious that most of the development effort has been to facilitate high quality streaming music. This requires a wide bandwidth to provide the desired CD quality audio, which increases the per hour listening cost because of increased cell phone data usage.
I’m only interested in talk radio streaming. The band width required to provide decent talk radio audio is probably only about 20% (or less) of the normal streaming radio bandwidth for high quality music.
Is anyone aware of existing applications which allow reduction of the bandwidth to better match the talk radio audio bandwidth requirement (thereby reducing the hourly cell phone data usage cost).
Wil Schuemann
Since the station controls the bitrate of the stream, that would be up to them. Passing the stream through a device that downsamples the bitrate would be a copyright problem unless it was something you did yourself.
I suspect iHeartRadio may be bitrate sensitive, but that’s only a hunch – since it came out when streaming was still kind of new..
ooTunes has an option to “limit 3g/Edge bitrate” if you’re using an iDevice – in order force the stream to lower bitrate versions where one is available.
Everyone streaming using bidirectional TCP/IP is really the wrong answer for streaming on mobile devices – it needs to be like Sirius XM or the DAB system in Europe that multiplexes digital signals in a geographic area, so each stream is only sent out one time. But for now, it works. 4G would help a lot also if Clear would reflect the better effiiciency of 4G in their pricing. There is no reason to go to 4G if the $/GB is the same as 3G.
There are rumblings again about the cable companies getting involved again in usage sensitive pricing (the “Netflix tax”)… Roku is killing the business model of Cable TV. Comcast wants you to buy programming from them, not direct from the source.