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.
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!
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!
still a hetzner dedicated host would be as low as 25Euro/month and has unmetered 1Gbit which would be 324 TB . (i use them , but not affiliated - was just making calculations aloud)
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?
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.
Yeah that's roughly correct. I actually hadn't found hetzner when I was doing my initial research but it definitely looks like I should be moving over.
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.
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.