Hello BAM,
I agree with your post ... a lot to look at ...
I have one question about your information:
> With Nullsoft's player, Winamp, AOL now owns an "open standard"
> platform that's competitive with RNWK's MP3 thrust (through the
> acquisition of Xing) and comes with a huge following.
> (Incidentally, among geeks, Winamp is no longer thought to be the
> best player, but well over 15mm downloads have been logged.)
I'm curious what numbers you've seen and which players seem to have a larger following?
> For Net broadcasting, however, Nullsoft's SHOUTcast system
> (streaming MP3) is sort of a toy in that it doesn't scale well.
Also, where is this information from? I have been running a SHOUTcast server for a long time now for research purposes. Our tests have shown a mediocre NT box (75Mhz Pentium) handling 100+ streams. Bandwidth is more of a problem, but it appears equal to Real. I have a T1 and ofcourse am limited to the bandwidth available to me no matter which solution I pick!
> You can Webcast to something like 29 users per SHOUTcast server
> with a broadband connection, pretty wimpy. Still, while not of
> commercial quality, it's cute for consumers, AOL's main market
> segment.
Again ... I haven't seen any such limitation. Our "sink" program for testing has actually taken this up over 300+ connections on Ethernet. And as for bandwidth a 24Kbps stream is 24Kbps ... SHOUTcast *or* Real ...
I was curious where you heard this? I was catching up on posts this weekend and saw an old one where someone was saying the same type of thing, but didn't comment because of the age of the post (I was behind about 300 posts ... ;-(
Scott C. Lemon |
