Many people enjoy Internet radio for two reasons: it gives them variety and allows them to listen their favorite stations away from home or their hometown.
“Internet radio offers the ability to reach an audience beyond the limits of terrestrial radio,” said Will Robedee, creator of Save Our Streams Website. “It gives the public an alternative to homogenized formats found on the air today.”
Over-the-air radio stations that broadcast via the Internet are known as terrestrial stations and sites that offer their own broadcasts, such as Yahoo, are Internet-only stations.
Streaming, also known as stream fishing, is the technology that allows such broadcasts or webcasts.
Unlike downloading, which requires the user to wait until a file has been received; streaming lets the listener hear the file as it is being delivered.
A PC sound card and an audio player like Windows Media Player or Music Match Jukebox is needed.
Internet connection determines the sound quality of the webcast or broadcast. Computers that do not have broadband (services that include voice, data, audio and video) and use 28.8K or 56K will hear skips in the audio streams, unless they find stations that stream audio at rates lower than their modem connection speeds.
Donald Biggs, Flinn Broadcasting general manger, explained how the process works at his stations.
“We provide the audio streaming to Yahoo and they set up computers at our offices and broadcast the audio over a network of phone lines called TI lines,” Biggs said.
Flinn Broadcasting, like many other terrestrial stations, used to simulataneously broadcast their programs on their own stations.
Streaming also allows listeners to personalize the music they listen to, by way of subscriptions.
Subscriptions are requested from websites like Music Match, Radio MX and MusicNet gives subscribers a chance to customize their own radio stations for a monthly fee.
