Broadband Internet Radio

The Internet is becoming an increasingly popular platform for radio listening, which is due to it offering a number of advantages compared to the other digital platforms such as DAB, and some of the forms of radio it carries are only available via the Internet:

• Higher audio quality than on DAB
• On-demand (listen again) programmes
• Thousands of Internet radio stations available covering a very wide range of genres
• Podcasts
• Personalised radio stations, e.g. last.fm

Also, since the emergence of Wi-Fi Internet radios and Wi-Fi media adaptors (which plug into your hi-fi system), people are no longer limited to listening to Internet radio when they're using their computer. Almost all Wi-Fi radio devices available allow people to listen to Internet radio stations, on-demand programmes and podcasts, and there are plans to add personalised radio stations to them as well.

Higher audio quality than on DAB

Internet radio streams usually use modern audio codecs, such as MP3, WMA and AAC/AAC+, whereas DAB uses the outdated MP2 audio codec and, because of this, literally thousands of Internet radio stations provide far higher quality than is provided on DAB. As a rule of thumb, Internet radio stations that use a bit rate of 128 kbps or higher are likely to sound good.

On-demand (listen again) programmes

Internet radio streams are described as either being 'live', which means that they're equivalent to a normal continuous live radio broadcast, or 'on-demand', which is the radio equivalent of video-on-demand, where the listener chooses what programme to listen to out of a library of programmes available.

On-demand streams can only be delivered on systems that allow interactivity, such as the Internet, because data must be able to travel in both directions, e.g. to tell the server what programme the user wants to listen to. This means that systems such as DAB, where data only travels in one direction from the broadcaster to the listener, will never be able to provide on-demand streams to listeners.

As the phenomenal success of the BBC iPlayer TV streams has already indicated, on-demand TV viewing and radio listening is expected to grow sharply over the next decade.

The best-known example of an on-demand radio service is the BBC's Listen Again service, which has recently been fully integrated into the BBC iPlayer alongside the on-demand TV streams. The BBC has also significantly improved the quality of the on-demand streams, as they're now using the following bit rates with the MP3 codec:

The BBC has said it is going to switch its live and on-demand streams to using the AAC/AAC+ audio codec later this year.

Global Radio, which is the UK's largest commercial radio group after it took over GCap Media and Chrysalis, provides on-demand streams for a number of its bigger stations, such as Classic FM, XFM, Capital Radio, Heart and Galaxy. Unlike with the BBC iPlayer, where the on-demand programmes for the different stations are located in one place, commercial radio's on-demand streams are available via the radio stations' websites (bizarrely, commercial stations' on-demand programmes are usually accessed by clicking on a 'Listen Live' link, which launches the station's online radio player).

Thousands of Internet radio stations to choose from

As well as all of the UK stations on FM and DAB having Internet streams, and many of these are now using broadband bit rate levels (at the time of writing (July 2008), the BBC is going to increase the bit rates of its live streams later this month), there are thousands of Internet radio streams available on Internet radio portal websites and on Internet radio services. I'll briefly describe some of the better Internet radio portals and services below:

shoutcast.com is a very good Internet radio portal for discovering new Internet radio stations, because it lists over 20,000 streams, it lets you list stations by genre, and by default it lists stations in order of popularity, so the better stations are usually listed first.

You can also choose to list stations in order of what bit rate they're using, so the stations with the highest quality should be listed first. The last time I looked, there were over 4,500 streams using a bit rate level of 128 kbps or higher, and streams typically use MP3 (although AAC+ is becoming increasingly popular), so there will be thousands of stations on Shoutcast that are providing higher quality than on DAB.

Shoutcast also provides information about what track the stations are currently playing (you need to refresh the page to keep it up to date, though), which is useful when you're deciding which station to try out next.

AOL Radio is an Internet radio service that carries over 200 stations covering a wide range of genres. The content on the 200+ stations on AOL Radio tends to be pretty good on the streams I've listened to, and the streams are using 128 kbps (it defaults to 'Broadband', which are using 128 kbps)

and you can also skip tracks that you don't like. AOL Radio is a good choice if you'd prefer not to  There are also over 150 local US stations available that are owned by CBS Radio, which is one of the biggest US radio broadcasters.

iTunes also includes a pretty basic but easy-to-use Internet radio portal. As well as the station name, the bit rate level and a brief description of the stations is given. iTunes doesn't list as many stations as Shoutcast, but for regular iTunes users it would probably be the most convenient way to listen to Internet radio.

Reciva is a UK-based company that makes modules for most of the Wi-Fi Internet radios that are on sale today, and it also provides an Internet radio portal that lists over 10,000 stations and over 20,000 on-demand streams. One good feature of the Reciva portal is that it allows you to search by location as well as by genre. However, one downside of Reciva's portal is that it doesn't list the bit rate levels the stations are using, so it's not very good for discovering new stations as it doesn't provide any indication whether the audio quality is likely to be good or poor.

Podcasts

Podcasts are audio files, usually in the MP3 format, which are downloaded to a computer. Podcasts originally got their name as they became popular at the same time as the iPod became so successful, and they were billed as a new form of radio.

Similar to the case with Internet radio stations, there are thousands of different podcasts available, with podcast providers ranging from well-known brands, such as the BBC and the national newspapers, down to individuals who use podcasts as a form of audio blogging.

iTunes is by far the most popular place to download podcasts from, as it provides an attractive and well laid out user interface.

Personalised radio stations

Personalised radio stations are a relatively recent phenomenon, and they have grown quickly in popularity over the last couple of years or so.

Personalised radio statons log what music a user listens to on their computer and what tracks they fast-forward on the personalised radio station, and based on this information a computer algorithm tries to predict what other music tracks the user might like and plays these on what is effectively the user's own individual radio station.

last.fm is the best example of a personalised radio station -- another popular one is Pandora, although that's no longer available to listeners in the UK due to music rights issues.

UK broadband Internet radio streams

The following table provides links to the bigger UK radio stations' live streams that are providing broadband bit rate levels:

128 kbps streams

These streams are available to anyone with a broadband connection.

Multicast radio streams

Multicast is a very efficient way to distribute live Internet radio (and TV) streams, because instead of a broadcaster having to send an individual stream to each listener, which is what happens using the current streaming distribution technology, called unicast, multicast only requires that one stream of a channel is carried on any Internet link. So, for example, the broadcaster only has to deliver one stream for each of its channels instead of possibly tens of thousands of streams. This vastly reduces the bandwidth a broadcaster requires, so this allows them to provide higher bit rate levels for the streams so that the audio quality can be higher.

The combination of multicast being so efficient (and therefore cheap to distribute) for the broadcasters and the use of modern audio codecs ofor Internet streams means that multicast radio streams are pretty much guaranteed to become the highest quality source of radio in the next few years, and in future it's possible that multicast radio could carry HD Internet radio.

Multicast isn't supported by any of the big UK ISPs at the present time, though, but Virgin Media is planning on supporting multicast later this year (2008) when it launches its 50 Mbps cable broadband package, and most of the other big ISPs look like they will support it within the next 2 - 3 years due to ISPs providing IPTV services to its customers, and multicast is a key technology that enables live TV on IPTV systems. For more details on multicast and information about which of the big ISPs are likely to support multicast in future, see this multicast page.

NOTE: You need to be on an ISP that supports multicast in order to be able to receive these streams -- see below for the list of ISPs that currently support multicast.

ISPs that support multicast

If your ISP is not on the list but you want them to support multicast, please contact them and ask them to support it.

• JANET
• InterVivo
• clara.net
• NetServices Plc
• Zen Internet
• KeConnect Internet
• C & W (but not Bulldog)
• Mistral Internet
• Hotchilli Internet
• fast.co.uk
• Entanet International Ltd
• Bogons
• IDNet

Virgin Media, which is the UK's second biggest ISP, which accounts for about 25% of all broadband users, is planning to support multicast by late 2008 when it launches its 50 Mbps broadband package.

TV channels on multicast trial

The following TV channels have been on the BBC's multicast trial, but the TV channel streams haven't launched yet whereas the multicast radio streams have launched.