Live 365 Or Shoutcast?

[Jay]

Originally posted by idobi
Live365's most important feature over shoutcast is that you do not have to pay royalties for the music you play.

Also, you can use any mp3 player (without having to download a plug-in) to listen to a Live365 station.

TjC

last I checked you had to have an account to listen to any station on live365, thereby adding more steps to get to a broadcast then is neccessary. I got rid of my founders account because of this.

The plain and simple advantages and disadvantages are

Live365:
Advantage: US Royalty coverage, this does not include other country royalties, coverage does not extend to YOUR website, only their's. Cheap to get some sort of presence at their website.

Disadvantages: Listeners are not able to easily get to your stream
Live365 has no other services that attract music lovers.
Lack of control over what can and cannot be broadcast on your Live365 account, Bitrate limitations set to 56kbps and lower. SO much for a CD quality experience.

SHOUTcast:
Advantage: Complete control over your station, you can do anything, broadcast anything you want, as long as you get proper licensing for acts that you have not gotten permission to play, your license would cover YOUR website no anyone elses. Broadcast at any bitrate your Bandwidth or hosting company allows. Great exposure to an already established music loving community Winamp.com/SHOUTcast.com

Disadvantage: you have to pay for everything envolving your broadcast. Therefore the expense can be greater but I think the value is too.

[skyhawk721]

Originally Posted by Jay

last I checked you had to have an account to listen to any station on live365, thereby adding more steps to get to a broadcast then is neccessary. I got rid of my founders account because of this.

The plain and simple advantages and disadvantages are

Live365:
Advantage: US Royalty coverage, this does not include other country royalties, coverage does not extend to YOUR website, only their's. Cheap to get some sort of presence at their website.

Disadvantages: Listeners are not able to easily get to your stream
Live365 has no other services that attract music lovers.
Lack of control over what can and cannot be broadcast on your Live365 account, Bitrate limitations set to 56kbps and lower. SO much for a CD quality experience.

SHOUTcast:
Advantage: Complete control over your station, you can do anything, broadcast anything you want, as long as you get proper licensing for acts that you have not gotten permission to play, your license would cover YOUR website no anyone elses. Broadcast at any bitrate your Bandwidth or hosting company allows. Great exposure to an already established music loving community Winamp.com/SHOUTcast.com

Disadvantage: you have to pay for everything involving your broadcast. Therefore the expense can be greater but I think the value is too.

This quote is inaccurate on Live365 in quite a few aspects:

1. Live365 royalties are covered through your site if the player on your site is infact a live365 player! For instance for my listen live button on my site it opens a pop-up window that contains the live365 widget that you get from selecting your presets! This widget registers the viewers to your live365 every time it opens and is completely covered by the royalty fees!

2. Depending on the amount you decide to pay you can like my station stream at a 128kbps which is the highest you can go to date! And this is crystal clear quality!

3. You have all the control in the world for live broadcast should you splurge for the equipment to run the feed through a mixer!

4. Listeners can very easily get your stream if you do like I said with the presets widget and place it in a pop-up on your site or you can feed it through your facebook and myspace and again this is all covered by royalties from live365 cause your not using any other source of player but theirs!

I put all my faith in Live365 specially since it will end up costing less!

My station is 2 Brothers Radio - www.2brosradio.com and since our open January 2009 we have accumulated over 80,000 streams

Not to mention a few things not mentioned over ShoutCast:

1. You get complete stats for your station on listens that are printable and it holds the memory for your current month back to the previous month, you also get in-depth geographical stats showing whats countries you are listened to in and you can see what states in the U.S. you are listened to in back dating 30 days! Making Live365 the best marketable choice out there for Internet Radio because you have more to give to your advertisers!

2. You also have in the statistics your stations ranking and every day it changes based on your listeners and listening hours for instances in the Rock and Metal category there are over 700 stations and ours has climbed from the last position when we opened to soundly in the 40-70 rank and we've been there for close to a year now! This also extends to the overall rank over all stations on Live365 we started out in last which is well over 6,000 stations and we now bounce around from 1,600 - 2050 ranked which is in both aspects extremely nice for a station that's only been open for 20 months!

3. Also listeners don't have to pay to listen to live365 that's an option they have if they don't want to hear any Live365 ads during your broadcast! If they don't mind the ads it's free!

This about sums it up as to why I prefer Live365 over Shoutcast, I've been open 20 months I have a Pro package that cost just under $300.00 a month and to me that's cheaper then if I went with Shoutcast and all the licensing hoops I'd have to jump through! P.S. this includes the extra I pay for having over 1 Gig of their server space which if my Live stream goes down I can dump over to so I never have more then like 2 mins of dead air cause if this event ever arose which it hasn't I can do this switch straight from my cell phone and having a back up server providing by a company that provides your signal is not something you get with Shoutcast!