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through their pop-up players therefore direct links that are found will only work for a single session before becoming outdated.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.