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  From: Alan Kennington <akenning@dog.topology.org>
  To  : newton@atdot.dotat.org
  Date: Mon, 8 Nov 1999 15:24:27 +1030

Re: setting up internet radio station in Philippines

Mark,

I've just had a look at the Icecast home page material.
It looks excellent, and it uses most importantly an open standard
and is GPL etc. etc.

There's one more question to ask though, which I can't find addressed
in their home page or FAQ etc. And that's
how does the MP3 broadcast bandwidth requirement compare with
the realplayer requirement.
As I understand it, RealPlayer is very efficient on bandwidth,
and that obviously very important in terms of cost of
supporting each client.

Do you have any info on the relativities of the BW requirements?

Incidentally, as you certainly woudl know also, there's been
heaps of bad publicity recently for the RealPlayer mob,
largely because of their privacy intrusions for the sake
of getting marketing data on clients.
Personally, I've tried a dozen times to get realplayer to
work on various linux boxes, and have not yet succeeded.
Only the windows versions of clients seem to work on 99% of servers.
Therefore, given that Linux is vastly more attractive in
a country such as the Philippines -- even more so than
in Australia where a couple of hundered dollars for
MS-software is small change -- it's excellent that an alternative
to RealPlayer is available.

The only question remaining is whether the cost of
server connectivity per client is going to be
much greater than for RealPlayer.

Cheerio,
Alan Kennington.

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