
The tech behind building an independent, internet radio station - oggadog
https://watsonsmith.com.au/building-an-internet-radio-station
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jedberg
Ha too funny! I haven't heard the name Icecast in a long time. I know the guys
who created Icecast. They did it because they wanted to run a radio station
but according to them Shoutcast sucked, so they rewrote it from scratch as
open source.

The reason it is called Icecast is because it was replicating the Shoutcast
protocol, so that people with Winamp could play Icecast streams (Nullsoft made
both Winamp and Shoutcast). The Shoutcast protocol used what were called ICY
responses (which stood for I Can Yell) so they called their Icecast since it
made ICY responses too.

This post unlocked that little corner of my memory. Fun!

ps. One of the Icecast guys worked on Ogg Vorbis because he thought that "mp3
sucked" and the other one is now a professor of Computer Science at USC.

~~~
oggadog
This was super interesting to find out, I always assumed that Icecast and
Shoutcast were 'allies' or built by the same org. I've had a few things topple
over during streaming but it seems that Icecast is the only one that's run
without any issues, guess they proved their point!

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blantonl
I own and operate Broadcastify.com, which is arguably the largest icecast
implementation in the world.

We've been using 100TB.com for our audio streaming infrastructure, which is a
softlayer reseller. I've been unable to find anyone else that provides better
pricing for bandwidth than they do.

All of our Web infrastructure, provisioning, archiving, etc is spread between
AWS and Google Cloud though.

Audio broadcasting on the Internet is indeed an interesting field to be in!

~~~
southerndrift
How does 100TB.com beat Hetzner? Their $5 virtual server comes with 2TB
whereas Hetzner offers 20TB.

~~~
blantonl
I don't know - but I'm not deploying infrastructure on $5 virtual servers that
are marketed and designed to support a personal blog.

Paying 200-300/month for 100TB of data transfer on a dedicated host is where
I'm at with 100TB.com

~~~
FDSGSG
> Paying 200-300/month for 100TB of data transfer

FWIW most providers can easily beat that. OVH in Canada offers good quality
unmetered Gbit at below 100/mo with the hardware included.

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MulliMulli
Take a loot at Hetzner is Traffic is an issue, they offer 20TB for $5.
[https://www.hetzner.com/cloud](https://www.hetzner.com/cloud)

~~~
oggadog
This is fantastic, I thought I’d found the best deal with DigitalOcean but
this looks great, cheers

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buboard
128 Kbps would amount to 30-40 GB monthly

So, digitalocean gives you ~30 users capacity? I think hetzner offers 1Gbit
internet without quota which would serve thousands of users.

~~~
squarefoot
I always thought that online media services used multicast protocols, that is,
after the initial point to point connection all data packets should be
transmitted once, then replicated at router level for every subscribed user.
If that's the case, 30 users seems a pretty low number since it would
translate into maximum 30 concurrent connections while the generated traffic
from the server point of view would be just slightly higher than a single
stream for a single user. Or maybe carriers bill multicast traffic
differently?

~~~
detaro
Some ISP-run and or company/network-internal ones do, but over the public
internet there is no infrastructure for that, so the vast majority doesn't do
it.

~~~
yusyusyus
funny enough.. my team probably killed off (one of anyway) the last tier 1
internet multicast deployments over the past few years.

Multicast has dataplane resource scaling issues and, frankly, CDN has become
the solution to what multicast solves.

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Nux
Nice article, played with Icecast in the past, good to learn about LibreTime
which uses it.

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nisa
With LibreTime it's also possible to stream in Opus and AAC+v2 so you can get
decent quality on 48kbit.

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amelius
> A single user listening to a 128kbps stream, non-stop for a month, would use
> about 300GB of transfer. Just one user!

Is that how broadcasting works on the internet?

Is there not a more efficient non-proprietary protocol for broadcasting on the
internet?

~~~
pessimizer
I remember some years ago that people were pirating radio stations through a
peer-to-peer streaming client, but I can't remember what it was called and I
never looked at the internals.

~~~
Nux
Sopcast?

~~~
pessimizer
I dunno, but thanks for the recommendation.

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Ciantic
1TB is not enough for Internet Radio, it's not even enough for most podcasts.

~~~
rhizome
Hosting is easy, it's still the transit that'll kill ya.

