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How viable would free shoucast hosting be?

trev

New Member
It's just a though but i see a alot of people on forums always asking for free shoutcast hosts, but too my knowledge there only ever realy given out as a one off i am yet to come accross a free shoutcast hosting service.

So could a free shoutcast hosting service ever work? I mean i know they use alot of bandwith but so you're gonna need something like an unmetered 100mb/s which is quite costly, but do shoutcast servers use alot of space up? I'm just trying to see who you would get any revenue for such a service if some people don't have a website for there radio station.

I know the service would get used alot but is there anyway of makeing enough money to keep the cost of a server running every month? I'm not looking at makeing a profit purely keeping the server paid for would be nice :).
 
Perhaps if the host could place audio-ads on user sites?

Sounds like a good idea, but hard to follow-through with.
 
Interesting idea,an audio add that has to be played only problem how could you garentie its bein played withouth hijacking the signal every hour or something to force the add.
 
Well, you could fade out the users stream and pause it, then play your ad, then fade it back in and continue playing it. :) Or, you could get users to manually insert the ads, or stream in 15-minute intervals then insert the ads, etc. There's plenty of ways to do it, they're just rather complicated.

Plus, it's going to be very hard to find advertisers for it (at first, at least).
 
There is certainly a high demand for this and we all know what happens when high demand and low supply come togethor.
 
Indeed however after looking into this you would need a fair ammount of cash to keep a dedi or vps running for a few month and alot of time to keep track of all you're add's. I have the time but not the money.
 
If someone ever does do it, it'll probably be something along the lines of YouTube. It'd most likely force you to remain on the page using something like flash to stream the content, using some proprietary format to avoid users copying the files. :) This would generate much more ad-space than regular shoutcast streaming.

This actually sounds like a good idea to me, but i'd do it the way I said (YouTube-like). I'm sure there's plenty of money to be made, but I really don't feel like taking the risk or investing the money to see if i'm right. :)
 
If one were to offer free shoutcast, the max bitrate would be very low, even 16kbps... 128 is considered better.. But its very expensive bandwith.
 
Hi,
There is lot of difference in Premimum and free hosting services. One is Online live support. We should take paid services.:)
silvermoon
 
Looks like transfer would be deciding factore:

Enough bandwidth to run the server. If you want to broadcast to 100
listeners at 24kbps, you'll need about 24kbps*100 = 2,400kbps = 2.4Mbps
of bandwidth. That's about 2 T1 lines worth of bandwidth. Trying to
push 100 128kbps listeners down your 768kbps cable modem isn't going
to work :)

Memory not to bad though:
14kB of memory for every listener you want to broadcast to (i.e. 1,000
listeners means you need 14 Megabytes of RAM), plus whatever your
operating system needs for overhead, plus 1.5MB for the server's
base requirements. Don't set the listener count higher than you need,
it just screws things up.

Just as a side note:
I might be willing to go in partners (ie money man) on something of this nature.
 
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There is a way

there is a way for the company to make sure ur playing there ads by checking the last song played thing so they can make sure the ad is getting played or some hack or bug in the program
 
Free Shoutcast

The only free shoutcast hosting out there is listen2myradio.com. You get to stream around 96 kbps. to 128. Your listeners can only listen on there listeners link that has ads around it. Its very cool just it will not be on shoutcast.com page as streaming.:classic2:
 
Perhaps a better thing to do is put adds on the shoutcast webpage that the users go to to find the current song&find out the im contacts for the station.
Another idea is trying to put your add at the begining of every stream? For example, i tune in, i here your add, and then i get to here the radio.
I do kno that a station can do this, i just dunno how.
64kb is ok for streaming, although i like 96k better; 24 k is like dialup quolity.
Hth,

BEN-MR
 
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