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blackpearl81 -> RE: Dear Moderators 1-16 (9/11/2009 1:50:04 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: BKSir
Some of the problems with having a radio station on the site would include copyright and fair use issues, especially in the case of music. Play one Metallica song and they'll sue your ass for millions. Maintenance, making sure someone is always there to keep an eye on it so it doesn't go down and, as you say, suck. Cost... streams aren't expensive, but, they're not free either. And with as many people as are on this site at any given moment, that could easily equal out to a $500/month or more. Bandwidth, a lot of sites that have their own dedicated radio station on them, especially things like 1.fm, sky.fm, and radio station websites shell out thousands of dollars per month on hosting and bandwidth fees. Staff, need program manager, dj's, like I noted earlier, someone watching it 24/7 so in case the stream burps or something that it's back up quickly, lawyers for the questions about "Are you paying the royalties to use this song?" that always come up, and to field "This was offensive to me and I'm going to sue you all!" that would be inevitable with any kind of talk show venue.
Don't misunderstand me, I think it's an awesome idea, and would love a radio station attached to this site, but... expensive and a pain in the ass if they were to do it legally and correctly.
Well, you bring up a few good points, however, some streaming providers take care of the royalties in the monthly plan. (I actually used to run a radio station about a year or two ago, right around the time the royalty board jacked up the rates - that was actually why we closed down)
One server provider that comes to mind that does this, is LoudCity, but there are a plethora of other options out there. This would also address the bandwidth concerns you brought up. Most server providers offer servers at xx number of listeners @ xx kbps stream
For example, a 100 slot server, streaming at 64kbps (the bare minimum for decent quality) is 85/month
Depending on the software you use to broadcast (such as SAM) it might have an "auto start" feature. It works just like it sounds - if for some reason it detects a silence in the stream (lets say 10+ seconds) it'll automatically start the stream.
quote:
ORIGINAL: sappatoti
Sounds like a good idea... as long as present infrastructure can handle it. If it's a feature that I couldn't turn off (as I would never use it) and it slows the response time of my browser trying to visit an already slow responding site (CM), then I would not be a happy CMer.
Well, it ultimately depends on how they'd deploy it. When I ran my station, if you clicked the "tune in" link, it opened up a playlist file (.pls or .m3u), which, would open up its own media player - Winamp or Windows Media Player, respectively. So, you could tune in/tune out whenever you wanted.
The only other thing they'd need is a seperate box to run the database (thats where the song collecton would be stored), broadcasting software and then they could link to it from both sides of CM - the profile side & the forum side.
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