2006-05-11

Radio streaming over internet

It's incredible how many web radios make it hard to listen their program for users who don't have windows and don't want to mess with installing mplayer plugins into firefox or opera under linux. Take for example the Norwegian Radio 1 (something I "hacked" today). I had to manually wget several obscure pages (whose links I obtained by searching through the ugly HTML+javascript of the web interface) just in order to be able to execute the following command and listen to the radio: mplayer http://213.158.233.199:3004.

Why can't they simply publish the URL on the website? My guess is that there are two reasons for that:

  1. The direct URL wouldn't mean much to most of the users.

  2. Revenue from commercials displayed on the web site.



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2 comments:

Unknown said...

Look at he streamtuner
GTK application, can search several internet
radio directories, scriptable, sorts stations by genres, has find utility, integrates with other programms... I use it and it works fine for me :)

Anonymous said...

I totally agree. It took me all an after-noon long to get the url to listen to Air 1. It's like they find funny to make such ugly pages, with protections everywhere... They would get much more users with a direct url.