We’re often asked whether we provide a streaming service for stations, alongside our player products. The short answer is no. However because we deal with such a broad range of streaming companies, we’ve found we can offer some advice as stations go about selecting a provider.
With that in mind, here are our top tips
- If costs allow, find a firm with servers in the UK. As well as making your music rights simpler, listeners will find the streams more reliable as the data doesn’t have to cross the Atlantic to get back to them.
- Remember you’ll need a low bitrate stream for our smartphone app, So 48k or under, AAC (best) or MP3
- Look at suppliers with transcoding facilities – that way you just stream one feed at a high bitrate eg. 128k-160k from your studios and then the streaming provider will provide that feed for the web-based Radioplayer console and transcode it down to 48k for mobile.
- Radioplayer does not have a list of recommended or preferred suppliers so you’ll need to do your own due diligence and research the market. A starting point would be to consider suppliers who’ve worked with Radioplayer before like SharpStream, Canstream, ImpishFish