• Setup time for each radio station

• One box, no technician required, just plug it in.

• Maintenance time and costs

• Free updates are automatically pushed from our server to your appliance.

• Hardware costs

• Everything you need is in a low-cost Streaming Appliance

• Licensing costs (ie. Operating system, codecs, etc.)

• StreamON! uses license-free technology such as Ogg Vorbis and Unix-based tools

• Service monitoring

• Our Streaming Appliances contain special software that will automatically bring services back up within seconds of an event failure or network disruption

• Potential hardware failure due to fans, hard drives, optical drives, etc.

• Our appliances are 100% solid-state with no moving parts to wear out.

• Security concerns

• No points of entry, no open ports and a secure operating system.

• Virus concerns

• Our Unix-based Streaming Appliances don’t get viruses.

• Risk of data loss due to power failure

• Our Streaming Appliances use read-only filesystems – there’s no writable data to corrupt.

• Potentially exposing automation computers to the internet in order to display metadata.

• No need to expose your automation system to the internet. Our Streaming Appliances come with two network interfaces – one for the internet and another isolated port for the automation network.

• System uptime in a Windows operating environment

• Our Streaming Appliances are solid. We have several that have been up for years without any unscheduled downtime.

2. Server Side

• Frequent security holes in Windows server solutions that require constant updating

• StreamON uses BSD operating systems, which have very good security track records.

• It’s extremely difficult to setup a high availability system in a Windows operating environment

• In the rare event that a server goes down our cluster is designed to automatically redistribute IP addresses so that a backup will kicks in within milliseconds – listeners won’t even notice!

• Setting up relaying and cluster coordination across several streaming servers.

• Server side configuration is already taken care of. We’ve put extensive R&D time into setting up top-notch, high available, streaming clusters.

3. Player Side

• Streams can cut out on wireless networks or under other poor connectivity conditions.

• We designed our player to work even with terrible network conditions. In a simulated network with 40% packet loss, our streams continued to play.

• Reaching listeners in work environments behind corporate firewalls

• Our service is setup to stream over port 80, which makes it extremely difficult for firewalls to distinguish the stream from other web browsing traffic. From the beginning, we’ve designed our service to reach the at-work listening audience. We have reports of people being able to tune in to our streams in government buildings where other streams can’t get through!

• Reaching listeners in work environments due to caching proxy servers

• We’ve modified the protocol so that our streaming system bypasses caching proxies.

• Streaming usually requires a constant internet connection that’s not always available. What happens if a listener’s internet cuts out for a second or two?

• Automatic reconnection without requiring listener input.

• Buffering challenges such as skips, pops and repeats.

• We’ve built intelligent buffering into our player that filters out nearly all skips, pops and repeats.

• Playing pre-audio or video rolls

• Pre-audio and video capabilities have been built into our player.

• Different automation systems output metadata in different formats and different protocols. There are some very challenging issues when it comes to timing metadata with a live audio stream because each listener has varying buffer levels.

• We can integrate with metadata input
  from iMediaTouch, Maestro, Scott S32,
  RCS, Simian, and Rivendell. Our player
  does complex calculations to determine
  when song information should be updated.

• Tracking who’s listening, when they’re listening, how long they’re listening, and where they’re listening from.

• We use a statistics package that does it all with style! The information is thoroughly presented with elegant graphs.

• Unexpected cost overages as the scope of the player continues to evolve and new bugs are unmasked.

• Custom development always takes a lot longer and costs a lot more than you think bit will. We know, because we’ve spent the last 7 years developing, refining, and expanding our streaming solution.