* Dave Boland wrote, On 2/10/2011 8:38 AM:
Anyone KNOW why radio stations insist on using flash for audio instead
of normal audio formats like Windows, MP3, etc? I see no advantage
since it won't work on Apple products and HTML 5 has audio built in.
Just makes the listener's job more difficult. Makes no sense.


One motivating factor for some stations is music licensing and server
operations. Many contemporary automation systems can generate a web
stream while simultaneously feeding the air chain, and those streams
contain meta-data that can be collected *at the stream server* and can
be correlated with server data to account for each song, each play and
each listener. It can be expensive to set up and maintain your own
server, which carries its own expense.

Large streaming vendors are well equipped to provide data collection
services for their clients, as well as having the "big pipe" Internet
connections to facilitate potentially large numbers of listeners. All
the station has to do is provide a single stream out of their playout
system. (And, BTW, a blanket license for Internet music streaming is
astronomically expensive, so you either do the accounting or you don't
stream!)

After 11 years of doing our own mp3 Shoutcast streaming, we recently
farmed out our streaming to a third party. It's less expensive than
hiring qualified personnel to continue with the DIY method.

With the third party service comes the almost inevitable Flash player,
one value of which is that, in addition to a customized interface for
your organization, it can also relay song meta-data easier than if you
were using a combo of mp3/Windows player and pushing the song data to
a web page. In our case our streaming vendor also provides mp3 and
...asx streams, but of course without the meta-data.

Some stations or networks are so caught up in corporate imaging that
the bean-counters and mid-to-upper level management can't see beyond a
custom Flash interface to push ads and promotions to listeners (who
have almost certainly minimized their player!), and they can't
conceive of providing or allowing alternate streams that don't carry
ads and promos, even if their streaming vendor is capable; the lost
listeners are irrelevant, as they wouldn't see the ads anyway.

Welcome to Music Streaming Commerce-101.

JT
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