You've been listening to streaming MP3 Net radio. The future's here.
Radio DAER, and a handful of other stations now broadcasting on the Net with Telos Systems' Audioactive technology, relies on a hardware/software solution based on Microsoft Windows NT. Playback is currently achieved via Microsoft Media Player because it supports MP3 (although somewhat crudely). Real Networks (RNWK) will shortly support MP3 as well (a third-party MP3 plug-in is already available for RealPlayer) and its player should be compatible with the Telos Audioactive MP3 bitstream.
Telos also offers at no cost on its Web site a more sophisticated MP3-only player derived from the mother of MP3, Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, München, Germany. Fraunhofer IIS is perhaps the world's leading research laboratory in the area of audio coding. MP3 comes out of work undertaken by Fraunhofer beginning in 1987, in conjunction with Deiter Seitzer, a professor at the University of Erlangen.
For more about the history and technology of MP3, here's a link to Fraunhofer:
iis.fhg.de
Telos Systems can be considered a competitor of MP3-encoding developer, Xing Technology Corp., which RNWK is acquiring for $75 million in stock:
xingtech.com
Telos, however, is much more broadly-based than Xing and offers a comprehensive product line of proprietary hardware and software to the broadcast industry. Its expertise originated with products enabling high quality real-time radio feeds over ordinary telephone lines.
One remaining question concerns the scalability of Telos' streaming MP3 system. Certain streaming MP3 implementations, such as Nullsoft's SHOUTcast, are troublesome as they are uneconomic for mass distribution. As a result, Net radio stations relying on the Nullsoft approach are limited to a handful of listeners (for example, using SHOUTcast and an ADSL connection @ 768kbps upstream * 0.9 / 24kbps = 29 maximum users). We'll investigate the extent to which Telos has overcome such limitations, but it obviously has.
So where does all of this lead?
Good question...
BAM
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