At my current station, our "live" streaming is not live at all, it's on about a 25-second delay. My question: is this common on all stations that stream, and, if so, why does it occur? (We've actually had complaints about phone contesting because of this...advantage to the over-the-air callers!)

Seems to me, the buffering in the player software can contribute to this, as can encoding delays, and finally IP propagation delays. (though the latter is small)

Actually, player buffering is probably the most likely major contributor. I can't imagine the codec taking more than a small fraction of time, under reasonable loads. That leaves the player.

Given the irregular packet delivery we sometimes see, I know many of the streaming players I've used will buffer content for 20 seconds or so, before playing it. That's your delay right there, leaving the other five to just be elements in the chain right?

Makes sense. So it really is on the receiver end where the delay is taking place...

I sure think so. Might be worth checking out a few players, to see what their buffering metrics are. Also maybe there are tweaks that can cut that down in trade for robustness.

It is irritating... we have the radio on downstairs and my daughter listens to the same station in her room over her computer. The delay is very irritating. Not to mention the diffeent commericals that get put out over streaming. Not sure why but that really bothers me.

Not so much different commercials, but a lot of stations have been substituting promos for commercials due to copyright and AFTRA issues. However, my latest info is that this has been resolved for the time being and not an issue. Of course, that could all change quickly! Stay tuned, or "stay connected"!

AFTRA fell behind on the whole internet broadcasting issue and tried to pro-rate some of it's lost revenue without really studying it. I think those in charge didn't feel internet broadcasting was a viable medium at the time and got caught with it's pants down.

Stations are now selling internet only ads that just play on the streams when the RADIO station goes to break.

Two revenue streams. NTR dude.

Most stations go through a third party stream hosting company rather than have the capacity to handle potentially thousands of streams themselves. this could account for the time delay.

In this approach the station encodes its own audio and streams it to the host company which then re encodes and hosts the audio stream at the paid for bit rate.

Most stations do not want to use all of their "pipe" for streaming sessions.

We actually block streaming media at work. It is to bandwidth intensive, especially if you have 100 people doing it. People just use the CD players at work.

Hadn't thought about the streaming company delay...

It's likely that both are contributing then.

If you get 100 people streaming then you have no bandwidth left for business critical web functions. With server connections at remote sites dependant on the bandwidth for the VPN connection to it....it can be very costly in reduced performance and employee productivity! Especially video streaming which is far more extensive than just simple audio. On the horrific day of 9-11 our internet pretty much was operating at a snales pace....we did not block streaming back then! I doubt you'll ever see internet stream at the same pace as over the air. There are just to many devices for it to pass through or hops as we call them, filters, slow connections, etc etc.