Cumulus puts both feet on the streaming bandwagon

Cumulus, who own stations from San Francisco to Kansas City have begun rolling out streams for all their stations. No Cumulus stations streamed until the company purchased Susquehanna Radio, which owned stations such as KFOG in San Francisco and 95.5 WFMS in Indianapolis. These stations had been constantly streaming over the Internet for many years so it was good to see Cumulus didn't abandon their streams after the purchase.

Since then, a few of Cumulus' smaller stations started streaming such as 103.9 WFAS in Westchester and 107.1 WA1A in Melbourne, while the bigger stations in markets such as Kansas City and Nashville remained offline. Now word reaches us that Cumulus are to stream all their stations in reasonable quality using their new Cumulus Radio Player. Already streaming through the player are stations in Nashville, Kansas City and Toledo while the majority are expected to be rolled out in 2008.

So that's the good news. The bad news is that this radio player is fairly poor and I have yet to get it to work in Firefox, but the backdoor stream links work fine in Windows Media Player so this shouldn't be too much of a problem.

Meanwhile, still no sign of two of America's biggest stations, will Hot 97 and Power 106 ever start streaming?

Feedback form issues

After some behind the scene changes wit TSC's host server on 6 November, the feedback form stopped working and we stopped receiving your messages. It's taken a little while but we've now got it back up and running but any messages sent between 6 November and 10 December through the feedback form have disappeared into cyberspace so sorry we can't respond to them.

Tis the season for holiday music

Once again, it's that time of year when radio stations across the country abandon their normal playlist and start playing all songs related to Christmas. And once again TSC has listed which stations have entered the into Christmas spirit. Some markets such as Salt Lake City are spoiled for choice as KOSY 106.5, FM1oo and 97.5 The Oasis are all playing seasonal songs while some of the bigger markets like Chicago and New York have just the one at the moment with 93.9 WLIT and 106.7 Lite FM respectively. Meanwhile the award for the station that started playing All-Christmas-all-the-time goes to '93 Days of Christmas' in Indianapolis. Spot any more stations playing all-holiday music that we don't have listed, please e-mail us and let us know

The importance of bitrates?

The vast majority of stations streaming at the moment use 32k bitrate, but over the last week or so Clear Channel owned stations in San Francisco such as Wild 94.9 and Star 101.3 have upped their bitrate to 64k.

So why is bitrate important for streaming? When you compare the station output on FM to the Internet stream with 32k bitrate, the difference in sound quality is noticeable. Previously, when most Internet listening came through rubbish computer speakers then this wasn't an issue. But now as listeners become more sophisticated by hooking their PCs up to stereo systems, using Internet radios or listening through headphones at work, sound quality is more important. Most people rip their CDs at 128k bitrate or more and songs purchased through iTunes use the aac encoding to deliver superior fidelity, meanwhile streams of terrestrial FM radio stations are sound more like AM stations with less hiss.

Internationally, most European stations stream at 64k or more. For example in London, UK, Capital Radio, XFM, Choice FM and Virgin Radio all stream at 128k, while Heart 106.2, Magic 105.4, Kiss 100, BBC Radio 1 and BBC Radio 2 all stream at 64k.

So, will more North American stations catch up to their European peers and improve the quality of their streams?

Clear Channel annoys the bloggers

From friend-of-the-site Bruce's blog is a great post on the frustrations of being forced to use Clear Channel's pop-up players and the response (or lack of) he's had from Clear Channel when raising the issue with them.

Read it here:
http://www.haveahectic.com/Blog.aspx?BlogEntryId=320

The Stream Center's most wanted

From the many messages we get about stations not listed on our site, the two most requested that do not stream yet are Hot 97 in New York and Power 106 in Los Angeles.

The common link between these two stations are that they are both owned by Emmis Communications. Emmis, up until recently was dead set against streaming, blaming the added royalty costs associated with putting terrestrial programming online. But after investors criticised Emmis for their lack of streaming, a fundamental element of radio's digital presence, Emmis changed their mind and signed up with Stream Audio to stream their stations online.

Movin 93.9 in Los Angeles became the first Emmis owned music station to stream followed by Q101 and The Loop in Chicago, their Indianapolis based stations and a few of their Austin stations.

However progress seems to have stalled and some of Emmis's largest stations such as Power 106 and Hot 97's sister stations 98.7 Kiss FM and CD101.9. Hopefully getting their remaining stations online will become a priority.

Updates and backlogs

Due to a recent lack of free time we've not been able to update the site as much as we would have liked resulting a noticeable number of broken links and a hefty backlog of messages to go through. If you've sent us a message in the last month and not had a response, you're message isn't getting ignored and if we haven't updated the station entry if needed already then it will get done soon.

Another issue we're dealing with is the reliability of the proxy services we're using to allow international users to listen to Clear Channel stations. It seems that some services are less reliable than others resulting in a number of malfunctioning pop-up players. So now we're replacing them with two links, a regular one for those lucky enough to live in the United States and a link labelled International, which uses a proxy service. If you find any pop-up players that aren't functioning then please let us know using feedback form.

Clear Channel Update

I've now updated links to the Clear Channel pop-up players for the Top 50 radio markets, these are:

1. New York
2. Los Angeles
3. Chicago
4. San Francisco
5. Dallas
6. Houston
7. Philadelphia
8. Washington
9. Atlanta
10. Detroit
11. Boston
12. Miami
14. Seattle
15. Phoenix
16. Minneapolis
17. San Diego
18. Long Island
19. Tampa
20. St Louis
21. Baltimore
22. Denver
23. Portland
24. Pittsburgh
25. Riverside
26. Cleveland
27. Sacramento
28. Cincinnati
29. San Antonio
31. Salt Lake City
32. Las Vegas
33. Charlotte
34. Orlando
35. San Jose
36. Milwaukee
37. Columbus
38. Providence
40. Indianapolis
41. Norfolk
42. Austin
43. Raleigh
44. Nashville
45. Greensboro
46. West Palm Beach
47. Jacksonville
48. Oklahoma City
49. Memphis
50. Hartford

We're using a number of proxy services and some are more reliable than others so please let us know if one is not working and we'll replace it with another. You can send us a message by clicking here.

Clear Channel station

As many of you may have noticed, many Clear Channel owned station stream links no longer work like they used to. This is because Clear Channel have taken a corporate decision to force all listening to go through their pop-up players therefore direct links that are found will only work for a single session before becoming outdated. To further complicate the situation, Clear Channel continue to block access to their pop-up players for users with IP addresses registered outside the United States.

In a semi-official statement to Sonos users, Gerrit Meier 'Senior Vice President and General Manager for Clear Channel Online Music & Radio' said this:

We sincerely hope you will recognize and understand the reasons which have led to the recent decision to protect our streams as several companies have started to add value to their own businesses and services on the back of the unauthorized distribution of our radio programs.

As loyal listeners to our radio stations you will know that in order for us to keep our programs free, we support ourselves through revenue derived from advertising. Unlike terrestrial broadcasting, revenue and cost related to web-based streaming increases with each additional listener.

While our distribution and licensing cost remain the same, the services in question significantly reduce our revenue by eliminating advertising which we run and display on our player and our websites. Consequently, you are being offered a service which operates without authorization to use our content and without compensation to our radio stations which, every day, spend significant resources to create consistently great free programming for our listeners.

We value each and every listener – our audience defines our stations. It is regretful that, without any fault of yours, you have to tolerate the consequences of your service’s unauthorized use of our content. To change this, we suggest you let your service provider know your wish to keep listening to your favorite radio station and ask them to obtain the necessary rights to do so.

Again, we appreciate your continuing loyalty as valued listeners and hope we can count on your support to make our radio stations available as widely as possible. Please do not hesitate to contact me directly should you have any further questions or comments.

While I appreciate that Clear Channel felt they needed to act to protect their revenue streams, I feel that the mandatory use of pop-up players is a little short sighted considering we are now in the iPhone age with many people wanting to listen to their favourite stations through their PDA or other wireless device. Sadly at the moment iPhones and the majority of PDAs and phones cannot handle the flash and embedded streams used in these pop-up players and so cannot listen. In the long term as Wi-Fi and WiMax become more prevalent, listening through webstreams will probably overtake AM/FM listening. If radio wants to maintain it's relevance is should make sure it is on iPhones and PDAs as soon as possible (or right now).

For the record, while we do have advertising on the site, this is only to cover hosting costs. The Stream Center is not a business and we are not seeking to add value off the backs of Clear Channel and any other radio operators, we only want to act as directory to make it easy to find their stations and listen on whatever device you have.

On the main Stream Center site we are now linking to the Clear Channel pop-up players for the Top 20 radio markets listed below. Entries for Clear Channel stations are being removed from the Kinoma directory and tuned.mobi directory.

Corrected Clear Channel stations (20 July)
1. New York
2. Los Angeles
3. Chicago
4. San Francisco
5. Dallas
6. Houston
7. Philadelphia
8. Washington
9. Atlanta
10. Detroit
11. Boston
12. Miami
14. Seattle
15. Phoenix
16. Minneapolis
17. San Diego
18. Long Island
19. Tampa
20. St Louis

I'll update more Clear Channel station links over the next week.

Introduction

With all the recent developments in the realm of radio streaming, I thought I would create this blog to communicate what's going on and why we're doing what we're doing. In posts coming very shortly I'll explain the situation with Clear Channel, CBS Radio and Nassau Broadcasting owned station streams. Thanks to everyone who contacts us to report new station streams or broken links, we appreciate your input. Even if we can't reply to every message, we'll respond where necessary. You can send us a message directly by clicking here.