Internet Radio & TV online

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Internet radio and TV online, more ...

So zouk originating from the West Indies can be found in the five continents in various forms: zouk love, Brazilian zouk (zouk lambada), afro zouk, Angolan zouk (zouk kizomba) and cape verdean zouk (cabo-zouk) etc. Latin music (salsa, bachata, cumbia, merengue, etc.), by mix with reggae, ragga, dancehall and hip-hop, has given birth to new forms of music like reggaeton, raggaton, bachaton. ...

An Internet radio (also known as net radio, webradio, web radio, online radio, or radio online), as opposed to an FM radio, has no geographical boundaries.It can be hosted anywhere on the globe and be broadcast, live or recorded, by a streaming server located, too, anywhere on the planet (usually in major cities of Europe and USA ...). It can be used to broadcast programs of a local FM station in order to extend its reach, or conversely, operate only on the Net while assuming the role of local media (web radio of Haitians in Miami). It can be a thematic media, means of expression of a broad community not related to a specific locality (afro-Caribbean or African American web radio). It can be attached to a music genre (Zouk Radio, Radio Bachata), a religion etc. These different cases are found in this page.

What looks like the current landscape (in 2009) of internet radio? There are not available studies of Médiamétrie on this question yet. A point made ​​recently by using the SHOUTcast Radio Directory (directory which contains the majority of web radio stations), gave the following results (for 30,417 active stations and 753,609 listeners connected):

In this one-time survey, realized during prime time, it appears that a small number of stations (3%) exceeds 100 simultaneous listeners and thus provide the broadcast bulk (almost 74% of online listeners).The large majority of the web radio stations (approximately 82%) are found with less than 10 simultaneous listeners and a substantial number of them (36%) without any listener. The result is the same in what concerns so-called tropical music broadcast, particularly Latin music and reggae, which are widely spread in the world.
Icecast Directory (approximately 3000 stations) gives comparable results. ...

Shoutcast publishes, in addition to real-time data, the "TTSL" (Total Time Spent Listening). This document provides, per station and on 30 days, the number of cumulative hours of listening (TTSL), the total number of connections and the number of connections of more than 5 minutes. It takes into account nearly 12,000 web radio stations which TTSL is at least 1000 hours. Among these, there are some ones from Overseas Departement and Territories. The first of these is around the 500th rank with approximately 115,000 hours of TTSL for 50,000 connections over 5 minutes. These results may seem low compared to those of the first rank, ".977 The Hitz Channel", which are an order of magnitude 40 times greater. being 500th on 30000, it is far from ridiculous ...

In general, the audience results of web radio stations are of the order of a few percent of those of FM radio stations, but the situation is changing. The development of mobile Internet that enables the reception of web radios using stand-alone devices (cell phones, wireless receivers, or blue-tooth, receivers for cars) is making things happen. The development of optical networks and fixed IP addresses (IPv6) are factors factors likely to boost the emergence of small Internet radio stations. Currently there are very few FM stations that do not adjoin a web radio and a website to extend their reach worldwide through streaming and podcasting. The FM band is also saturated and many projects are moving towards pure internet radio that require that require relatively light equipment costs and broadcasting costs function of the possibilities of simultaneous connections you want.

Among the obstacles to the development of internet radio one can include the exponential increase in bandwidth of streaming servers with the number of connected: to serve 1 thousand 128 kbps connections, a server with a bandwidth of 128 Mbits is appropriate. To serve 65,000 simultaneous 64 servers of this type are necessary. This is a basic difference with terrestrial broadcasting: AM or FM transmitter can be received simultaneously by several million listeners in an area of dense population. A web rado station, as for it, requires a two-way communication between the listener and the streaming server, a bit like a phone communication. As a result, many web radio stations are limited to 100 simultaneous connections.

The adoption of restrictive laws on copyright may penalize small web radio stations. The parade is perhaps the group , as does Radionomy. This company allows the creation and free management of a web radio station in exchange of some ads broadcast. It makes available to creators a music database well provided and bears all costs, including copyrigh.

What has been said about internet radio is valid, in large measure for internet TV. (The terms WebTV, Web TV, Net TV, TV online, TV online, are considered as equivalent in this page). Perhaps web TV will grow more than web radio, but "live streaming" broadcast will have to count with VOD (video on demand) and podcasting.

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Plugins to install - (continued ) ...

You can Download here the plugin "Windows Media Player Firefox" and test its operation here. It is valid for Mozilla, Opera, Safari. The radio broadcast is accompanied by a "visualization" (Functional for Opera with a small correction of the configuration - see Tips below).
The additional plugin AAC/aacPlus is needed for stations that broadcast streaming AAC/aacPlus (Radio Freedom for ex.).
Mozilla browsers (Firefox and Seamonkey) are those that currently offer the best results for all the features of this page. If you are fond of using Internet Explorer, at least use version 8 of this browser ...
The plugin Adobe Flash Player is required. Installation of Silverlight is required for to take full advantage of the latest developments of "France Televisions Info". (See below)

Note on Firefox 4:
The "Plugin-container" is enabled by default in Firefox 4, which can prevent the reception of audio and video with Windows Media Player. To avoid this failure, it is necessary to disable it by doing the as follows:
-Type about: config in the address bar
-Take note of the warning and accept
-Enter " dom.ipc.plugins.enabled" in the filter
Do-double-click on the "dom.ipc.plugins.enabled" to change its value to "false"
-Restart Firefox.

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TEST YOUR INTERNET CONNECTION

1°) Flow measurement >>>      
You can choose a test server on the map and measure the speed of your connection to the server for reception file (download) and send files (upload). This flow (also called activities Connection) is expressed in Mbit/s. We use the (improper) term bandwidth to denote the maximum flow rate of connection. For streaming video, a rate higher than 2 Mbit/s is desirable.

2°) Ping Test >>>      
The ping test measures the time it takes for a data packet to make a round trip between your computer and a server. This test requires the activation of Java. An alert box tells you that the Windows code Java is about to be executed and asks if you want to block it. You must of course answer NO to so that the test can be done.
You can choose the test server around the world. In addition to the ping, the test measures the packet loss (packet loss over 250 items - this loss should normally be zero), the jitter (sort of ping variance in several measures). The quality of the link is improves as these parameters are small.
The test shows another result called MOS (Mean Opinion Score is an estimate of the quality of Voice characterized by a value from 1 to 5, ideally 5).
The test ranks results by letters as follows:
A: excellent (Example - ping <50 ms, = 0% packet loss, MOS> 4.37)>
B: very good (Example - ping = 90 ms, = 0% packet loss, MOS between 4.28 and 4.37)>
C: Fair (Example - ping = 150 ms, packet loss = 1%, between 4 and 4.27 MOS)>
D: poor (Example - ping = 300 ms, packet loss = 3%, MOS between 2.50 and 3.99)>
F: very poor (Example - ping = 500 ms, packet loss = 20%, MOS <2.50 ).>

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TIPS

Video display:
Four display formats are possible with respect to WMPlayer (50%, 100%, 200%, full screen). To simplify things, only two formats have been adopted: a format that fills the display frame and one for 'full screen'. Just double-click the video to switch from one format to the other.
For other players, it is necessary to use their specific commands.

Function Keys:
A click on F5 causes the refresh of the page.
A click on F11 toggle the browser from "normal" to "full screen" and vice versa.
Of course, if the F5 and F11 are struggling to function, their actions can always run from the browser menu. [Full screen mode is particularly interesting for netbooks using the display 1024x600 pixels.(This mode of operation is possible with all recent browsers - Do not confused with the "full screen video" described in the previous paragraph).]

Opera Browser Configuration:
The plugin used by Opera to run the WMPlayer player in Web pages is, by default, npdsplay.dll. This plugin does not allow "visualization" (visual animations when playing audio) and AAC+ audio playing. It is possible to replace it with the np-plugin mswmp.dll (developed for Firefox) which works perfectly. The operation can be achieved simply from the "Tools" menu doing successively "Preferences", "Downloads", "application/x-mplayer2", "Edit" then "Use Plugin" Microsoft Windows Media Firefox Plugin. (Of course, this plugin must be downloaded first ...).

Visualization and CPU utilization
When listening to web radios, the "visualization", consumes lots of CPU resources, when displayed in foreground. So just hide it, to significantly reduce the percentage of CPU used (by setting the page in the background, acting on the scroll bars, for example ...). This trick is especially useful for netbooks, due to the low power of their CPU.

Sort in "Internet radio" or "TV online" tables :
Click on the column headers Station, Group, Language or Site to sort alphanumeric corresponding columns in ascending or descending. (Priority: digits, uppercase and lowercase).

Stations websites:
Click W or W* to open the website of a web radio or TV. The website visit can allow to know the title of broadcast songs, to listen to (or view) the station, to discovery other stations etc ... Thus, clicking on W* for RFO Martinique, provides access to all RFO stations (Guadeloupe, Guyana, Martinique, Mayotte, New Caledonia, Polynesia, Réunion, St Pierre and Miquelon, Wallis and Futuna ...).< br> The mention W* features a web radio station (or internet TV station) associated with another media (radio station, cable, TNT etc.) ... The mention W features a station broadcasting its programs uniquely on the web.

In short ...
It is necessary to wait for the synchronization of stations and their buffering. (Don't be discouraged too quickly, in particular with regard to the stations Livestream...). If necessary, you may want to restart display ... It is possible that a station is temporarily unavailable, click W for more information.
It may be necessary to adjust the volume after the launch of a station.
Naturally, the quality of the reception of radio and TV (mostly) depends on the quality of your Internet connection (cable or ADSL) and also the bandwidth of streaming servers.