How does discontinuation of WinAmp affect ShoutCast?

[streamfinder]

Hi,
Just heard that WinAmp is being "shut down" December 20th.

http://www.winamp.com/media-player/en

How does this affect ShoutCast? Can we get an official comment on it please?

[Atari-420]

This is exactly what I wanted to know!
Vitally important to find out how this will impact Shoutcast asap!

[Blastbot]

The fate of Shoutcast.com and Shoutcast servers

What will become of the Shoutcast.com site? Is it going to stay alive, or die off? What will be the fate of the development of Shoutcast servers?

[Bryon Stout]

Oh wow. :/

[Waves]

Well it does say "Winamp.com and associated web services will no longer be available past December 20, 2013"

I think we should be bracing ourselves...

[Bryon Stout]

well looks like the winamp store is no longer available.

Guess we cant buy any more licensing keys????

http://shop.winamp.com

[DJ Matt]

I saw this coming when they turned off all our AOL hosted streams a week ago.

My guess is that SHOUTcast is dead soon as well.

[swing42]

Bloody hell...

So what's the alternative? Is Icecast going to get a lot more popular all of a sudden?

[Jay]

I think it would be shocking if they shutdown the YP, simply because it represents so much traffic. Now, if there is no further development and no further improvement in the YP or SHOUTcast, it doesn't really matter, eventually it will go by the wayside. However, given that there have been releases very recently it would surprise me if SHOUTcast's YP is going anywhere anytime soon. (DrO?)

As far as the free bandwidth going away, that really doesn't surprise me. That was just a nice bonus for a select few.

[jeffy777]

If they do shut down the YP, would v2 still even work without the Authhash?

[Jay]

If they do shut down the YP, would v2 still even work without the Authhash?

I wouldn't worry too much about that as that could be potentially patched.

[Sabine Klare]

I wanted to ask the same question, also, because many of my friends broadcast via SHOUTcast Radio (and not on Mixlr or Ustream). If at least SHOUTcast Radio would survive, then they wouldn't need to stop their radio-broadcasts...

[S-uper_T-oast]

I've never been too big into the streaming side of shoutcast, but I have been listening in for 10+ years. There really is no other service like it, so hopefully even if it does get discontinued, something new will come up to fill the void.

I have a few ideas myself, and I'm personally paying close attention to technology like BitTorrent Live: http://live.bittorrent.com/
This service seems to be more designed for audio/visual streaming, but it shows the potential for a decentralized streaming system that is still controlled by a central broadcaster. By simplifying the system for only an audio transmission we could in theory make a swarm based streaming system for stations. The obvious problem would be clients that don't want to upload to the swarm, but based on the relatively small amount of bandwidth an individual client would need, it shouldn't be too problematic to allow clients to simply leech the stream.

That brings me to my first technical problem with shoutcast, do the servers actually stream to each individual client or do they use some multicasting intermediary? I should probably try and read up more on the actual functional side of shoutcast before I start theorizing solutions to a problem that doesn't exist yet, but any free technology to fill this potential void would have at least one person listening.

Either way, thank you all for keeping your stations and the shoutcast system itself running for so long.

[Jay]

SHOUTcast unicast. Peercasting has been around for over a decade and it hasn't gained much traction due to lack of player support. I doubt BitTorrent Live is any different but I will certainly check it out.

Edit: just checked it out, requires a download. That is a no go in the future IMO.

[S-uper_T-oast]

By requires a download you mean you can't open a playlist in any media player and access the bittorent live stream?

My thought about bittorent live isn't that it is direct replacement for shoutcast, but that people are actively creating new ways to do a similar task. It may not even be necessary to reinvent the entire shoutcast system to that extent. The fundamental part of shoutcast seems to be a stand alone server that streams to each client. Even if winamp and associated services go down, it should be possible for the stations to keep serving their streams, they would just lose the centralized database. I don't know how the shoutcast licensing works, which I think would be the main problem for that possibility (which I assume you were talking about earlier with AuthHash)

Sorry for rambling my thoughts here, I'm in the process of reading up more about the shoutcast service so I should be able to think about it better in the future.