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?
