I own and operate Broadcastify.com, which is arguably the largest icecast implementation in the world.
We've been using 100TB.com for our audio streaming infrastructure, which is a softlayer reseller. I've been unable to find anyone else that provides better pricing for bandwidth than they do.
All of our Web infrastructure, provisioning, archiving, etc is spread between AWS and Google Cloud though.
Audio broadcasting on the Internet is indeed an interesting field to be in!
Take a loot at Hetzner is Traffic is an issue, they offer 20TB for $5. https://www.hetzner.com/cloud
128 Kbps would amount to 30-40 GB monthly
So, digitalocean gives you ~30 users capacity? I think hetzner offers 1Gbit internet without quota which would serve thousands of users.
Nice article, played with Icecast in the past, good to learn about LibreTime which uses it.
With LibreTime it's also possible to stream in Opus and AAC+v2 so you can get decent quality on 48kbit.
> A single user listening to a 128kbps stream, non-stop for a month, would use about 300GB of transfer. Just one user!
Is that how broadcasting works on the internet?
Is there not a more efficient non-proprietary protocol for broadcasting on the internet?
1TB is not enough for Internet Radio, it's not even enough for most podcasts.
Ha too funny! I haven't heard the name Icecast in a long time. I know the guys who created Icecast. They did it because they wanted to run a radio station but according to them Shoutcast sucked, so they rewrote it from scratch as open source.
The reason it is called Icecast is because it was replicating the Shoutcast protocol, so that people with Winamp could play Icecast streams (Nullsoft made both Winamp and Shoutcast). The Shoutcast protocol used what were called ICY responses (which stood for I Can Yell) so they called their Icecast since it made ICY responses too.
This post unlocked that little corner of my memory. Fun!
ps. One of the Icecast guys worked on Ogg Vorbis because he thought that "mp3 sucked" and the other one is now a professor of Computer Science at USC.