Internet Radio Blog

It is now 2009!

Our new Website is launching on www.wavestreaming.com/ in the next week or so! Keep your eyes peeled!

Yet MORE social networking! This one will actually be a bit more informative. We are going to be making videos, to talk about all things streaming. James Mulvany our client manager here at Wavestreaming, introduces the new VideoCasts…

http://www.youtube.com/Wavestreaming - Subscribe!

Cheap SHOUTcast Servers

We have just secured 100mbit extra capacity for our customers with services in the USA. Due to the excellent pricing we have managed to get on this, we will be offering some substantially discounted streaming deals on high capacity 128k SHOUTcast servers on our US network for you guys which will be made available within the next couple of weeks.

Our INSANE pricing is as follows:

50 @ 128k SHOUTcast Server - ONLY $54.00/month (3 Available - Half Price!)
100 @ 128k SHOUTcast Server - ONLY $107.50/month (2 Available - Half Price!)
150 @ 128k SHOUTcast Server - ONLY $177.50/month (1 Available - Half Price!)

As you can see, we’re only going to offer 6 lucky people the chance to take advantage of this excllent pricing and its not very often we do a promotion on this scale. If you want to take advantage of this - you can book your server in advance, please contact our sales department via the form on our website and use subject ‘Blog Offer’.

www.wavestreaming.com/?i=support

The pricing shown above will be honoured on a monthly basis for the first six people to order. Servers will be made available on a first-come-first-served basis.

There is a limit of one per customer.

Dear Webcaster,

Sorry that we haven’t updated this blog for a little while, but we thought we’d inform you as to one of our most recent features, which is vital if you’re using PPL and PRS/MCPS for music licensing and royalties in the UK with your SHOUTcast server.

As you may know, it is a requirement from PPL (Phonographic Performance Limited) that all of their customers report quarterly listening hours as part of their Small Webcasting Licence agreement.

The ‘TTSL’ or Total Time Spent Listening is a new feature that we are now providing free of charge to ALL SHOUTcast customers, to use for general information and for music licensing reporting purposes. This is calculated based on your listening figures, which are checked every 5 minutes.

For example, if you have a stream with a 25 listener max and for most of a 24 hour period, around 25  people are connected, you would expect around 600 hours listening time each day.  This is a very simple calculation (24 hours * 25 listeners = 600). Obviously, no stream is at the same level throughout each day, which is why we have created a complicated system to accurately monitor your listener figures every 5 minutes and calculate the TTSL at the end of each day. This figure is then logged and the data is made available via Wavepanel.

An example set of data of a 25 listener stream, which is close to being full 24 hours a day as follows:

09/07/2008: 578.5 hours
10/07/2008: 579.83 hours
11/07/2008: 579.42 hours
12/07/2008: 588.67 hours
13/07/2008: 589.25 hours
14/07/2008: 591.58 hours
15/07/2008: 589.58 hours
16/07/2008: 582.33 hours
17/07/2008: 586.08 hours
18/07/2008: 581.75 hours
19/07/2008: 584.92 hours
20/07/2008: 580.5 hours

As mentioned, most streams are not full 24/7 so its likely your data will vary from day to day, depending on listener figures. Data has been collected across all clients since 9th July. You can access it via the ‘Advanced’ section of your SHOUTcast server(s) from within Wavepanel.

This is just one of our ongoing development projects which we are working on over the summer. Making your legal reporting obligations simple and effective. To our knowledge, no one else doing streaming media can offer anything as easy and convenient.

More soon!

Well, the summer is finally here!

Its all go go go here at Wavestreaming. not only are we launching our Instant Radio Success Internet Marketing project - but we are also developing some exciting new products and features for our existing and new streaming customers, which will be made available later in the summer! Keep your eyes peeled for more information.

To kick this off, we’ll be making an announcement to all SHOUTcast and Windows Media customers today about a new BETA feature we’ve just created for your servers, so check your Wavepanel messages or email inbox to find out what its all about.

We’re also working on a fresh new look for our website, which will also be transferred to Wavepanel. We’ve had the green waves on our site for 4 years now! Our team of web designers have been busy, we’ve decided its about time the waves go and so we’ll soon be relaunching with a fresh new look.

Thats all for now, again soon.

Independent SHOUTcast review website Radiotoolbox.com has given Wavestreaming the thumbs up. Out of around 20 other streaming companies, Wavestreaming is the only SHOUTcast stream host that has managed to sustain a uptime of 100% since the start of the 2008 year.

Other uptime records range from an appauling 25.787% through to a very close 99.960%. However, no other companies listed on the radiotoolbox site have managed to sustain flawless 100% uptime record.

Wavestreaming are very proud to have made it over 6 months into the year with an uptime record as good as this. It just shows our ongoing efforts and commitments to provide a high quality streaming service, utilizing a premium network which many other providers do not.

If you’d like your SHOUTcast server to have a high Wavestreaming level of uptime, please sign up via our website; www.wavestreaming.com/

We promised a while back to bring you something for marketing your radio station.

It has arrived! Head on over to Instant Radio Success at; http://www.instantradiosuccess.com/

A good quality soundcard is absolutely vital if you are real serious about having a high quality sounding stream. Especially if you are inputting music from an external source (eg. microphone, cd players, ipod/mp3 players, mini disc) via a mixing desk. Chances are, the standard soundcard that comes with your computer won’t be the best quality and you may get interference in your broadcasts or recordings.

We use the M-Audio Delta 44 at our office for our ‘radio pc’ where we do occasionally broadcast from live, plus do quite a bit of production work with. We have got 2 mono and 1 stereo outputs coming from this going into the mixing desk and then being fed back in stereo to the soundcard.

Looks like this:

The great thing about the M-Audio Delta 44 soundcard we use is that it produces excellent results. We’d highly recommend it to anyone!

There are of course other professional soundcards you can pick up and which can be installed into nearly all desktop PC’s.

Check out the following links for some great soundcards:
http://www.m-audio.com/products/en_us/Delta44-main.html
http://www.m-audio.com/index.php?do=products.family&ID=recording

We’ve had a number of requests in the past for Stream Geo Locking. This basically looks at the listener IP address and if they are in a country which is ‘disallowed’ from your stream - will not let them connect. It will then re-direct them either to a page on your own website explaining the geo-locking policy (allowed countries etc) or it will display a generic message explaining this.

This was introduced to our services a few months ago and is available to all SHOUTcast clients at no extra charge. Just look in the ‘Advanced’ section of your SHOUTcast server in Wavepanel and you’ll see an interface whereby you can set it up.