Mnyb;455850 Wrote: > The swedish public radio networks does a good job of sending every > channel in 96k wma a hint to BBC , who was a role model for SR (Sveriges > Radio) in the 70's apparently they are lagging behind with horrible real > audio broadcast's ugh. > If listening in UK, BBC streams for national stations (as opposed to On Demand) are available at 128k WMA (192 for Radio 3). Has been since early July - following a period of experimentation with a variety of bit-rates. BBC run at a lower bit-rate when listeners connect from abroad. It looks like the RealAudio is going to be switched off to be replaced by WMA. BBC local radio is still being worked on.
Of course, with higher bitrates generally come higher quality and higher bandwidth consumption. People with capped bandwidth limits from their ISP need to carefully evaluate. Just an hour a day for a month at 128kbps is around 1.7GB. Imagine how much bandwidth is used by someone who listens to a lot of radio. Sure - they could pay more for a higher limit or uncapped service - or they could use FM. Given Logitech's expertise in providing multi-function devices, including with FM then I would have thought that including FM in the Squeezebox range wouldn't be such a big thing to do - even if only as a hardware switch (i.e. not necessarily implementing in software). > Mobile internet is a very far cry from being useable in this context > yet. I'm looking forward to the day when streaming from my server to the > car is viable. Increased bit-rates for stations plus heavier bandwidth caps on mobile phones (some contracts specifically prohibit streaming) make mobile use very hit-and-miss. So broadcasters probably need to persist with having different bit-rates so that the listener can choose the most appropriate. Take a look at Moodio ( http://www.moodio.fm ) for a transcoding service aimed at mobile phone users. I still have not worked out how they are going to pay for their streaming costs - but for now at least - it is free. -- Paul Webster Paul Webster http://dabdig.blogspot.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Paul Webster's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=105 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=67502 _______________________________________________ Radio mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/radio
