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The tech behind building an independent, internet radio station
- Nux 7y agoNice article, played with Icecast in the past, good to learn about LibreTime which uses it.
- buboard 7y ago128 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 7y agoI 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?
- cnorthwood 7y agoThere's essentially no multicast over the public internet
- rhizome 7y agoThat was the idea once upon a time[1], but it's been dead for ages. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbone
- detaro 7y agoSome 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 7y agofunny 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.
- oggadog 7y agoYeah 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.
- MulliMulli 7y agoTake a loot at Hetzner is Traffic is an issue, they offer 20TB for $5. https://www.hetzner.com/cloud https://www.hetzner.com/cloud
- nisa 7y agoWith LibreTime it's also possible to stream in Opus and AAC+v2 so you can get decent quality on 48kbit.
- blantonl 7y agoI 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 7y agoHow does 100TB.com beat Hetzner? Their $5 virtual server comes with 2TB whereas Hetzner offers 20TB.
- blantonl 7y agoI 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 7y ago> 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.
- buboard 7y agostill 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)
- rhizome 7y agoCan you not move to using SoftLayer directly? The closest page IBM has to something like a sales page is unclear. https://developer.ibm.com/startups/ https://developer.ibm.com/startups/
- Ciantic 7y ago1TB is not enough for Internet Radio, it's not even enough for most podcasts.
- rhizome 7y agoHosting is easy, it's still the transit that'll kill ya.
- jedberg 7y agoHa 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.
- utopian3 7y agoThanks for sharing this bit of history trivia! Had no idea about he origin of Icecast or Ogg
- oggadog 7y agoThis 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!
- amelius 7y ago> 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?
- d0mine 7y agobittorrent
- pessimizer 7y agoI 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.
- amelius 7y agoI was thinking more about something at the same level as TCP/IP.
- Nux 7y agoSopcast?
- pessimizer 7y agoI dunno, but thanks for the recommendation.