Asking for Guidance

[Mysteri]

I am currently seeking some guidance in establishing a financially savvy way of starting a Internet Radio station that accomplishes the following:

1) Live broadcast of multiple individuals who are essentially all over the world, possibly up to 5 or more at a time
2) Recording of said broadcasts
3) Implementation of pre-taped sponsorship commercials
4) Link to live show for streaming on website
5) Up to 40-50 listeners (although I know that is depending on streaming service..
6) Allows explicit and mature content
7) Support broadcasting of music as well as voice simultaneously

At this time I am aware of BlogTalk Radio, but due to limited financing wonder if there is any other service that might provide similar types of services.

Thank you

 

[Support]

Hi Mysteri,

Thank you for your interest in our services. In answer to all of your questions:

1) While live broadcasts are possible with any of your DJ's from any location to the server. You would not be able to have 5 different individuals streaming to the server all at the same time.

2) Most live streaming encoding software has the ability to record the audio in the format of your choice as it is also being streamed live. This can be handy for podcasting or for playback on an automated system (such as our Auto DJ feature) of previous shows for when you are not streaming live.

3) Implementing advertising is entirely up to you. You are welcome to do this if you like. This can sometimes work well for stations in covering some of their hosting costs etc.

4) In the control panel we provide HTML code snippets to display tune in links, now playing and more for use on your own website. You may wish to also check out the Muses Radio Player which you could add to your own website. We also host an optional start page for free on our own websites directory's. The built in flash player automatically connects any visitor to your radio.

5) We can accommodate upto 500 listeners on each server account with us. You can choose the amount of listeners that you would like on your account upon the account sign up process, but we have a listener cap set at 500 which is usually way more than enough for the average internet radio station.

6) Again, this is entirely up to you on how you approach using explicit and mature content. You can use this if you like. As you can see, we already have other stations on our listings that fall under that category: Adult Internet Radio Stations

7) Yes, this is possible as long as you have a microphone / your soundcard has a mic input / your streaming software supports this.

Please just let us know if you have any more questions or if there is anything that we can assist you with at all, thank you.

 

[General Lighting]

Hi Mysteri,

Thank you for your interest in our services. In answer to all of your questions:
1) While live broadcasts are possible with any of your DJ's from any location to the server. You would not be able to have 5 different individuals streaming to the server all at the same time.

if you want a multi participant talk programme and are OK with "telephone quality" for some of the participants (which will also stop you running into bandwidth problems) you could do that with a Skype group call or even a custom Asterisk server (though that starts getting complicated)

To broadcast music and voice at the same time you either need a mixer (a basic analogue audio mixer is as little as about $50 these days) or some playout software including free ones like Zararadio 1.6.2 or Mixx can be set to do this.

Even if you are on a limited budget, there are many places which will sell old Windows XP computers cheaply and these can run a lot of real time audio software, enough to allow you to dedicate entire PC's to playout or streaming.

In my country its illegal to put obsolete/old computers in the trash (they must go to special recycling unit) plus there are data security issues, and I work as head IT engineer, so I get to take home the obsolete ones, two of which have gone into my studio...

 

[Support]

if you want a multi participant talk programme and are OK with "telephone quality" for some of the participants (which will also stop you running into bandwidth problems) you could do that with a Skype group call or even a custom Asterisk server (though that starts getting complicated)

Ah yes, that's a good point. We just presumed he meant several DJ's streaming to the server all at the same time across several channels for example. He perhaps did mean for a talk show now come to think of it! :doh: