How much will it cost to stream a radio station?

Streaming Wizard offers a selection of 24/7 radio streaming packages in different formats at competitive prices, subject to our acceptable usage policy.

Up to 20 concurrent users £50 per month
Up to 50 concurrent users £100 per month
Up to 100 concurrent users £200 per month
Up to 500 concurrent users £800 per month
Please contact us for higher requirements

There are several different questions that should be considered to determine the best set up for your needs:

• Are you broadcasting live, running a playlist or a mixture of both?
• Which format should I use?
• How many users will you have at peak times?
• What is the total amount of traffic used going to be?
• What quality do you need to stream at?

Please feel free to contact one of our advisors to help you answer these questions. Some guidelines are given below:

Windows Media - You encode at source, we pull the stream from you, and re-distribute.
Real Media - You encode at source and push the stream to our servers, we redistribute.
mp3 - Darwin Server - You set up a playlist and upload mp3's which are placed in a continuous rotation.

Quality of the stream

• The higher the quality of transmission you use, the more data needs to be transferred, and the higher the cost.
• 10kbps will just about suffice for a poor quality stream of spoken word. This is similar to a standard telephone call in quality and not sufficient for listening to music.
• 20-40kbps is about right for most circumstances. This will work with most peoples connections without intermissions for buffering, and the sound quality will be satisfactory for most users.
• 96/128 kbps is used for the highest quality audio. This is a lot more expensive, and is only really necessary if users are listening to a wide range of frequencies such as orchestral concerts with both very high and low pitched notes. Generally desktop computers do not have the audio capabilities to match this.

The number of listeners and the length of time that they connect
Obviously the more listeners you have the more data will be transferred, and consequently the more you will be charged. The above prices are given for average usage at 34kbps (suitable for modem users and above).

The format which users connect with (Real / Windows / QuickTime)
The three different formats which we can stream radio content in have different costs due to their licensing models. The above prices are given for our most popular solution which is Windows Media.

Real is Streaming Wizard's preferred platform for streaming on, however the licensing costs can be prohibitive for small radio stations. It is also necessary for users to have the real player installed. Most people are familiar with this now, but as Windows comes with Media Player pre-installed this is favorable where new internet users are expected to be using the service.

Windows Media is suitable for most circumstances, and can be run without the need for additional software licensing beyond Windows 2000 Server, however windows streams will only run on Windows Platforms.

QuickTime is the cheapest as the streaming product "Darwin" that Apple have created is open source and free to distribute. It is also suited to a Linux platform, so software licensing is minimal. The Darwin server uses the RTSP standard for streaming, so players suck as Real Player or Winamp can be used by listeners. The setup fee and initial configuration is more expensive than for Real or Windows.