Kevin Ryan shows how internet radio developed, explains audio streaming and radio portals, shows you the different ways in which it is possible to listen to online radio content and evaluates the future of DAB radio.
Kevin Ryan kevin@radio-digital.co.uk
I will stick my neck out and guess that virtually every contemporary broadcast radio station now makes its audio output available online, either as a continuous stream of audio or as a selection of podcasts. Both formats need the audio converted to a data format suitable for downloading over a web connection. ‘Streaming’ means that you can listen to the audio as it downloads. Usually, the audio stream cannot be rewound or paused like with a podcast. Together they are the backbone of online radio.
Internet radio usually has good to excellent audio quality. This can be much better than DAB and very similar to the quality provided by an FM station. Of course, there are always the extremes where the audio quality can be up to CD quality or down to low-speed mono DAB sound.
The common streaming audio formats incl de mp3, Windows Media Audio (.wav), RealAudio, plus various versions of AAC. I recently discovered that the BBC stations include other higher-bitrate formats, such as Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) and Apple’s HTTP Live Streaming (HLS).
As a test, I added BBC Radio Orkney to My Favourites (Fig.1) on the Frontier Silicon portal and checked it using the John Lewis Octave radio. It played back the DASH stream at 317 kbits/s, very close to the maximum 320 kbits/s for the stream. I could not tell if the audio was CD-quality.
Where it All Began
Sources tend to agree that Carl Malamud created the er first internet station in 1993, named Internet Talk Radio. As the name suggests the channel did not play music but aired interviews with public figures in the technology sector. Others began putting music performances online. In 1994, a company called WXYC (broadcasting in North Carolina) became the first traditional radio station to start streaming internet radio. The WXYC Group used the output from an FM radio station, connected to a digital system provided by Cornell University. They later moved to commercial systems.
https://wxyc.org/simulcast In 1996, Virgin Radio in London became the rst station in rope to start broad casting an entire program live on the internet. There are a number of short histories of Virgin Radio on the web. A company called RealAudio made internet radio happen because it used compression. This made it possible to listen to an audio track or stream while it was downloading. You don’t hear much about RealAudio these days, but they are st
