Simple Guide To Broadcasting On The Web

To broadcast your station via the World Wide Web, you will need two things. The first is a local encoding PC, which converts the audio output from your station into a digital data stream for transfer to the World Wide Web. This PC is typically a Windows™ NT or 2000 machine with a standard soundcard such as SB Live. The PC takes the incoming audio from the sound card and encodes it using whichever method you have selected. The three most common methods of encoding the audio streams are Real Media, Windows Media and Quicktime with native MP3 streaming proving a popular fourth alternative with some broadcasters

Each encoding method has it’s own advantages and disadvantages but of the three, only Windows Media has the advantage of running on all Windows™ machines without the need to install a separate program. Windows Media is also a cost effective solution as there is no scaling charge for the amount of streams that you are hosting. Real Media does have a scalable charge for the amount of people listening to the service and requires the Real player to be installed before people can hear your service, but Real is still the most popular method of media encoding and as such should not be dismissed. Quicktime is free to use (like Windows Media) but does require the Quicktime player to be installed. MP3 streaming offers a low cost alternative because services such as Shoutcast allow smaller scale broadcasters to host stations output on the Shoutcast site for a very small fee. This removes the need for any other web hosting other than the encoding PC and the link to the web, but it does not really cater for stations wishing to increase their ‘on line’ listenership beyond a certain level.

The second thing you will need for your ‘on line’ service is an ISP that will host the station on your behalf. You need an ISP to do this for you because unless you have a very big link to the Internet from your stations premises, you will not have the bandwidth capacities needed to feed your station’s output to several people at once.  The ISP takes the encoded audio sent from your encoding PC and re-broadcasts it to whoever wants to listen, the link on your website is to the ISP so nobody but the ISP connects to your encoding PC, which is why you only need a small pipe out of your building and you do not need a super computer to do it.

You can connect to your ISP by either a direct leased line or via a third party ISP over the web. If you have an ISP that can ‘re-broadcast’ your station geographically close to you, then a single leased line can be used to connect to them. If your ‘re-broadcasting’ ISP is a little further away, then you can use the Internet to get your encoded audio to them via a more local service such as that offered by cable companies or ADSL by BT. In this case, you have a leased line or an ADSL link to the Internet and the encoded audio gets to your ‘re-broadcasting’ (or web hosting) ISP over the Web.

The diagram above shows a typical set-up with station output being converted from audio to data before leaving the station premises. The data goes via a leased line onto web, this is provided by a local telecoms provider such as BT, NTL or a local ISP. Once on the web, the ‘re-broadcasting’ web server ‘listens’ to the station output and re-broadcasts it for general use.

If the local ISP or telecoms provider can also ‘re-broadcast’ the audio or a leased line goes directly to the ‘re-broadcasting’ company (Planetwide Radio) then this obviously simplifies the model considerably.