Kurt Shintaku's Blog

…remember that KROQ 106.7FM is the #1 "Rock" format radio station in the United States according to Arbitron ratings.  And it’s in the top 5 of all listened to radio stations in Los Angeles.

 

 

Realize that the link above is to the raw audio stream feed – it’s a .WSX redirector to live audio stream with no interpretation of any scripting within the media stream.  (Windows Media streaming makes it possible to encode SAFE script commands within the stream to allow things to happen within a web page during the stream.) 

 

The feed is 100kbps which is of course complete overkill for audio, but I suppose exactly what I’d expect from CBS Radio’s Engineering manager, who has a powerful ear for quality.  Realize folks, that most companies stream both audio & video over the same 100kbps bandwidth.  The obvious benefit is that the stream is EXTREMELY high in quality… high enough to frankly actually record off of to capture a good quality song into a .WMV file for personal use.  (For those wondering, a 96kbps Windows Media stream has the quality & fidelity of a 160kbps MP3 file due to the technology’s far superior encoding codec)

 

One interesting thing is that they have the ability to change the content in the stream from what is being  played on the airwaves on 106.7FM.  My assumption is that Internet advertising requires an additional fee from advertisers and if that fee isn’t paid, they simply play repeats of their morning radio show, "Kevin & Bean", during commerical breaks instead.  This of course is nothing difficult being that Windows Media provides the ability to switch content sources on the fly during a media stream however, it’s eerie when you listen to the FM radio and the Internet stream at the same time how the content suddenly changes.

 

 

 

It would appear that the HTML web page above at http://kroq.com/streaming/player-final.html simply takes the raw feed I had found one extra step and creates an HTML wrapper around our Windows Media Player, hides the standard interface, and provides live information about the song being played through the embedded scripting in the stream feed, which is quite cool.  This makes it valuable to actually use the HTML page that they wrote.  (Otherwise, why bother?  It would normally be better to simply stream directly to the player and minimize the app to your Windows Task Bar.)

 

 

I went through the JScript code that that KROQ’s provider wrote and it’s a bit messy.  It would appear to me that whoever wrote it, took the source code from one of our partner’s sample custom player applications on http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmedia and rewrote it for KROQ’s specific usage but never bothered cleaning up the script. 

For example:
– The comments make reference to Internet Explorer 4.72  (Huh?  What’s version 4.72… we never created a 4.72.  Now, there was of course a Netscape 4.72… and it would seem someone just changed the comments to reflect support for IE instead of Netscape)

– It says that it leverages the Real Player ActiveX Control in the comments.  (It doesn’t – it’s exclusively Windows Media Player based)

– It says it was written by Marco Bianco, CTO OverDrive Media which I’m pretty sure is just the original author of the script and not the actual provider considering they’re using LimeLight Networks as the distribution point for the feed.  (LimeLightNetworks.com – aka LLNWD.NET)

– There appears to be functions that are written into the script but never actually called. 

 

 

For what it’s worth, it’s still a very nice, high quality implementation of our technology and LimeLight (http://www.limelightnetworks.com/) is a really great partner of ours.  So good that we hired them to do the streaming for all of our XBox360 content.