All Costs Considered

April 30, 2008 1:16 PM

Streaming radio production cost: what is the cost to a local radio station for internet streaming of one program to one listener? Not just the cost of paying the royalty cost of a national program (like Prairie Home Companion}, but the local costs incurred by the station, e.g. servers, software, staff time devoted to webcasting. Bonus question: is it more or less expensive than the cost of downloading a single podcast to a single listener?
posted by bbranden1 to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

"Podcast" is really just a fancy name for audio file download (maybe through some sort of XML feed). Setting up a streaming server and managing it is going to be more expensive than recording a show to mp3 and putting it on a web server. Of course, the costs of setting up a system that streams all output from the radio station to internet listeners could be less expensive than having to manually record and upload mp3 files of different shows.
posted by demiurge at 1:37 PM on April 30, 2008

I assume this station is in the U.S., so ...

It's possible to farm a lot of the streaming infrastructure out so you aren't eating bandwidth costs, worrying about servers, etc. You can usually do some back-of-the-envelope math for 20/50/100 listeners from some well-known streaming hosts (email's in profile if you want some examples) and then the only thing you're worrying about is a single box at the station to send one stream to this host. Low bandwidth, low maintenance.

Streaming's also nice if it's a simulcast, because once you set it all up there's usually little to do after that other than pay the monthly hosting bill. Whereas with podcasting there's effort to cut shows into podcasts and manage the metadata, distribution, etc. (Basically what demiurge said, with the caveat that if you farm out the stream hosting it gets way, way cheaper.)

What will get you is the licensing and all the BS you have to do to either a) stream or b) podcast legally. Depending on what you're doing (playing music? rebroadcasting other shows? just doing talk radio? A mix of all three? Are you nonprofit? Community/Religious? etc.) you're going to have to appease a whole bombload of licensing folks, usually via some extra payment on top of what you're already paying them now: ASCAP, SESAC, BMI. And then there's a new fee to go to SoundExchange to cover your streaming, and then you have to report quarterly playlists their way for royalty purposes. So there's employee time there to be considered.

For podcasting, I'd have to check, but the crux of the difference is that podcasting is more difficult because reporting listenership for royalty reasons gets way, way harder, and then you're worrying about what can and can't be podcast according to whose license on what thing lets you turn them into podcasts.

Again, emails in profile if you want some help.
posted by bhance at 1:59 PM on April 30, 2008

As with all questions concerning cost, the answer is "It depends."

Depends, for one thing, on the quality of the streams. 24Kbps/11Khz AM quality streams are pretty cheap in terms of bandwidth, 64kbps/22Khz streams more expensive, 96Kbps/44Khz streams more expensive yet.

Another thing that is a big determinant of cost is the content of the stream itself. Because of Congressional action, a radio station with a real, over the air signal gets a break on streaming a musical program it is airing, if it streams that exact program feed to the Internet, because that Internet feed enjoys the mechanical reproduction license rate that music for radio enjoys, whereas a separate Internet feed that is not aired goes to SoundExchange rates, which also vary with whether the station is commercial, or non-commercial in its over the air programming.

And then you've got a bajillion sources for streaming services. Few stations these days operate their own streaming servers, and purchase Internet links and bandwidth themselves. Most go with Live365, StreamingMediaHosting, Shoutcast, etc. These services aggregate bandwidth buys, and provide listener statistics verification and program logging services for SoundExchange, etc.

So, there's all that, in the "It depends..." bucket. But boil it all down for low quality streams of non-profit public radio music programming, like WWOZ out of New Orleans, and you get a cost in the range of a few cents per listener hour.
posted by paulsc at 2:07 PM on April 30, 2008

Response by poster: Interesting answers. To be more specific, I was interested in what a local PBS station's average cost/listener is to reach their listeners via internet streaming of either locally generated material or syndicated broadcasts. This single internet feed to single listener model of signal distribution, on it's face, would seem to be a much less cost effective way for local PBS stations to reach their local demographic. Better, I'd think, to simply blast out the over-the-air broadcast signal to anyone in the region. Same goes for the free downloads of popular PBS programs, which altogether bypass the local affiliates, causing PBS to lose both revenue and loyalty from the affiliates.

I became more interested in all this after sitting through decades of pledge drives and only once hearing a specific dollar figure given for the actual cost of any aspect of the public radio operation. I'm probably being unkind and unfair, but when I give to the needy, I'd like to know in a general way how needy they currently are.
posted by bbranden1 at 2:40 PM on April 30, 2008

Best answer: I run a website that distributes podcasts of community/independent radio shows. The licensing issues are taken care of by our stations; I'm just concerned with the mechanics of distribution. We're popular, but not huge.

Here are some actual numbers for you, though their relevance may be open to interpretation -- we run things on the cheap, with mostly volunteer labor.

We lease two dedicated servers, for about $2000/year (combined), which comes out of the pockets of those who run the site. We've got a $500/year contractor budget, for things that are beyond the reach of our volunteers.

Each of these servers is on a second-rate 100 megabit/second connection (Savvis in one case, Cogent in the other). Instead of the typical 95th percentile billing based on speed, we are given an allotment of 2 Terabytes of transfer (volume), per month, per server. Because of the peaky nature of our traffic, this sort of billing suits us better, and was a requirement when finding a provider.

Most of our content runs just under 60 Megabytes per hour (which many will recognize as being 128kb/sec). Assuming 60 Megs per hour, our 2.0 TB allotment allows us to transfer 33,000 hours of content, per server, before we hit our cap and have to start paying more. (Actually, it's 33,333... but let's leave it at two significant digits)

So.

(33k hours/server * 2 servers) / month = 66k hours/month
66k hours/month * 12 months/year = 792k hours/year
$2500/year * year/792k hours = $.0032/hour
$.0032/hour  = 310 hours/dollar  (OK,  312.5...) 

So... we can deliver a complete one hour show, as a podcast, 52 times a year, to roughly six users, for one dollar. Or, a-la-carte, we can send one episode of a one hour show, to 310 listeners, for one dollar. "Your $10 yearly donation takes care of you, and more than 50 of your freeloading friends!".

This assumes that we run at or near our 4TB limit most months. In practice, we usually run between 50 and 75% of that, so our true costs per listener can be as much as twice that (on a slow month). But... we can claim "tens of thousands of regular users" for $2500/year.
posted by toxic at 3:55 PM on April 30, 2008

Response by poster: So considering the likely price of quality over-the-air transmission equipment, the annual maintenance costs of it, and the electricity to run it, internet streaming is starting to sound like a bargain.

(And I wonder why my low throughput DSL line costs so much!)
posted by bbranden1 at 4:37 PM on April 30, 2008