WWDC2004 Session 725

Transcript

Kind: captions Language: en I'm he said George cap elbow and we're from but networks and now we're based out in Boston and we make internet radio automation software and actually before we get started I wanna do a little informal poll how many people here just give me a quick show of hands are actually broadcasting on on the net right now don't forget so I'm great how many people are how many people came here because they want to go and start doing that okay how many people missed their flight in there and stand by it there was this car - no I'm just kidding but so I'm going to do something a little different I know this is the worldwide developer conference but I think whenever new technology rolls around weird things happen and internet radio has been no different than that and I thought we should take a look at things and sort of more of a total view let's look it looks like a radio itself and how that evolved over time and then also rather than just talk about the tech and we will talk about some tech I want to go into the business side of it because some of you may or may not have heard there are royalties associated now if you're streaming music and it was a very you know in the press so inflammatory issue a few years ago and things have kind of settled out and I think a lot of people you know one story or another and I want to kind of try to straighten that out a little bit so that you feel more comfortable about getting back into broadcasting because things are settled out to do that so yeah we're going to look at we will look at all the things you need to do to go ahead and put up an internet radio station and that includes like I mentioned the royalties and the regulatory environment so we'll go back and look at some history we're going to go back about a hundred years and talk about radio in a very short time we'll go a trip through time and about maybe three or four minutes not too long we'll talk about internet radio and how that fits in with other types of radio well you know we'll look at the regulation as I've said you know basically you know how are you going to pay for doing this if you have to pay royalties how do you go about and getting some money and to cover your costs or maybe even make a small profit and then we'll talk this is the plug part we'll talk about what what we do which is automation systems for internet radio don't seem quite tells my clicker doing here I don't want to I don't flooding with this laser they show them how to use this once but you know okay so it's interesting the internet radio is very similar you can look at it very similar to the way you do regular radio if you're driving in your car and you switch it on you come in and you're in the middle of a broadcast and maybe here's some music you hear some commercials of DJ talks and there's a transmitter somewhere up on a hill that you know the broad can that signal and you received in your car or your home or or you know your FM device connected to your your iPod right and you know basically internet radio is very similar where you have a computer sending the streams out to computers and they're now going to be in the future other devices that are not just computers that you'll be able to listen to it in a portable way and we think that that's that's when internet radio is really going to explode and then it's going to become less internet and more just another way of broadcasting just just the way radio is so well I would hope one of the reasons you're here is you want to find out about doing radio with OS 10 and QuickTime and as you know I'm sure if we've tended other sessions that OS 10 and QuickTime are all standards-based and it's the same for for internet radio and we we prefer using MPEG 4 which is the same codec if it's used actually for the iTunes music store because it sounds great it plays in a number of devices and it will play on more in the future and finally as we go along the technology framework we're going to we're going to look at the radio automation and that is a way to simplify the operation your station now if you're if you're a look at think of a traditional radio station where you're spinning discs you have to have somebody sitting there doing that so a lot of radio has moved to automation and we've decided to build a product that allows you to do that for the internet and very simply with just a few computers driven one computer so let's move on home so let's talk a little bit about radio so now we'll start going back in time and you know you can look at there's a definition of this it says it's a way to broadcast information by electronic means well internet radio will fit into that definition and it's really an old technology it's been around for a hundred years and it's all based on through the air or radio frequency spectrum and basically originally there were there was actual data sent Morse code you know dots and dashes have you watched Titanic right they were sending their messages with Morse code and radio and that was really just about maybe 10 years after radio existed that they had ability to do that on ships and then from the 1920s it really blossomed because they had the ability to do voice and you know things get pretty interesting so if you look at this this slide changed from what I gave it to people exciting you see about 1901 Italian gentleman named Marconi went off and did a first transatlantic signal and then you see in the 20s he started commercial broadcasting and then radio at home you know of Amos and Andy and all those old shows the Green Hornet you know people would during the Depression didn't go out much and radios were inexpensive so that really became it was what pretty much television is now but obviously television hadn't existed yet if you go back you go further ahead in time about the 1960s there were other forms of media competing with the television so you know radio changed as well and you get the better quality of FM and then in the 1970s you have the first satellite networks now I'm not talking about like XM or a serious where you listen you listen for masala and I'm talking about using satellites to distribute programs around the world to affiliate stations so imagine if you're listening to a nationally broadcast baseball game that's most likely coming over satellite into a radio station that all originated back in the 70s and then in the 1980s there was actually low speed data that was sent along with radio signals and over these proprietary devices you get stock quotes in weather and you know that's kind of pre Sage's things you can do with internet radio and things you can do with what paging networks etc that's all a lot it started and then in the 1990s talk a little bit about the business side they changed the laws about how many stations a single owner could have so you suddenly have these huge groups coming out like Clear Channel infinity broadcasting where they're hundreds and thousands of stations that are owned by one company and that changed the flavor of radio radio maybe before those days was very individual to the city and now there's a little bit more of a homogenous Asian so it's kind of it's it's you know it's some people like it some people you know don't understand that it isn't different in every city but some people don't like it and then of course talk about the nut later 90s we start talking about convergence and when I remember when I would go to the National Association of Broadcasters show in the mid 90s they're all saying now radio is going to get run over by convergence convergence is really about about video and funny how radio seems to have done pretty well at surviving this and found its way to other mediums and it translated very nicely to it so you want a broadcast so it's very expensive to do traditional broadcasts why because it's based on nature provides radio spectrum and there's a limited amount of that and there's regulations for you know health stations can be organized in a certain city so that otherwise they interfere with each other and that's all done by the US government the Federal Communications Commission and they actually came up with the rules for all this back and really the 20s and they did trees with other countries so if you ever go to Canada you see a lot of radio stations along the border they have to send their signal way up into Canada so they don't interfere with US stations and vice versa so there's a lot of things that go on that you don't know about you know with radio but that's all controlled by a regulate regulated Tory body and you have to apply for a license to be able to broadcast it's not there's not a cost to it but you have to prove that you're doing things in the public good and there's a lot of competition for them and what the station get the license it's very hard for them to lose it unless they've broken a law or whatever and that's some you know that's that's limited by spectrum so if you want to go buy or build a station into let's say a market like San Francisco you're talking maybe 50 hundred million dollars which is you know it's not small change and if you go to a smaller market let's say name a town out in you know the middle of California you're talking maybe millions for small a.m. or FM station so now recently in the last five years you have satellite radio we've talked about different kind of satellite just for distribution this is actually I'm talking about Sirius and XM and you know how you can listen to the that in your car well unfortunately if you want to start with those you need a satellite now there may be some channels available but there's a limited number of channels it was a few hundred at most and basically that's pretty much taken at the moment so that's hard to do so there's pirate radio and I don't know you know you've heard about people putting ships out at sea off the coast of California in New York and they broadcast you know of out of international waters and you can hear the station and well you know it's sort of dangerous thing well it's all sort of elite it's illegal as well we actually a few years ago at the broadcaster show in Las Vegas there was a group of pirate broadcasters they met they met in a church so they were they were granted asylum so they couldn't be arrested by the FCC so that's a you know not too much fun it's there might be exciting life for some people but you know if you want to start something and have a business and something you can enjoy doing you don't want to be on the run from the police right so that's or the FCC for that matter so to address that the FCC decided to put out a regulation said well you can do low-power FM stations in cities because no that won't interfere with other big stations well of course the large broadcasters have blocked all that because they said no it can interfere with its implies it's also competition so that's what you would expect them to do so that's you know there's only a few hundred of them that have been on the air and then there's about most people to say you're thirty thousand inquiries about doing this so obviously there's a demand for radio so finally we come to internet radio so instead of using electromagnetic waves we're using the Internet so it's another electronic means as we as we talked about earlier to transmit and well it's a lower startup cost to do this so really you could just get some computers and some bandwidth if you're at a college you might already have bandwidth you can rent machines you know through ISPs there are services that will give you a stream where you have some number of people listening and you know it's very easy to go out and reach a worldwide audience you can pretty much yum you know heard things all over the world without having negative with radio you'd have to wait for the ionosphere to bounce a signal to you right or you know or get something on a satellite well with this you can pretty much just do this from any computer and it doesn't cost you the person running the station anymore to reach that person on the other side of the world and Australia will say then it would be to just be local so it's um it's a pretty wide reach so the other thing now while radio frequency we talked about is a limited spectrum well there really isn't the limit to the spectrum is really just if there's enough IP addresses how many IP addresses are there there could be that many stations so that's it's really a lot more things that could be done and we talked about it's the same cost to reach people and one of the cool things about internet radio is you can enhance it you can have text annotation along that you can have images you can have as part of a webpage and you can do things that people can see have feedback so it's you know it's a pretty powerful medium and a lot of people that we work with or they're trying to reach a very narrowly focused audience just one type of you know of music and you get a lot more in-depth and interesting things that way then you do just you know kind of the commercial radio station that's to appeal to everybody in town so they do they choose a very broad spectrum so and you can also one things you get from internet radio that you can't get from how when you do var for um of getting a ratings book would ask you to fill this out and say what stations you listen to right okay so so that's that they do is they do statistical sampling so they get you know hundred people in an area and then they base that a population that may still lives how many people and listening station acts with internet radio you can track very precisely exactly how many people are listening to your station and you know if you want to know where they're coming from so right now there are about 12,000 stations traditional radio stations in the US and it took them about 80 years to get to that point excuse me and internet radio well less than ten years the first stations came on the air about 1994 or about 10 years off from that and there's about thirty thousand worldwide and the number is growing little hard to find the total number but seems to be a pretty good approximation if you add together all the different services and people broadcasting so that's that's pretty phenomenal growth so you know for now let's go back a little bit and think about traditional radio it took it a very long time for that technology to get to get it but you know embedded and mature and internet radio the curve has just been us huge spike so this is this is fun of explosive growth well not only the number stations are growing but the number of listeners are growing by about twenty five percent per year so how many of you've ever tried to listen to FM inside an office cubicle and all you get is you get the noise from from the you know the fluorescent lights or you do katie to get a signal so a lot of people listen at work that's one of the biggest audiences for NAT radio and you get other things you know people promoting their product or services looking looking for a particular service a lot of stations or things that are promoting something right and you know last night I was I mean anybody from Boston here and I was listening Red Sox game last night sorry over the internet radio which is terrific to do a outcome wasn't too good but we'll get them later I'm sure so that's that's pretty cool so now let's go into some of the business side of this let's talk about some cost well so we have set-up cost you got to get yourself some computers and actually have some a typical kind of setup here well this is really only kind of prop this really isn't all connected up so we actually could broadcast but we probably won't go but it looks nice so I have a nice studio mic here have a friend that makes these done in Pasadena their actual ribbon mics so you talked through this you sound like Edward Armour oh you know who that is it sounds great and I've got a little mixing board and I can connect that into a Mac I actually have a nice Pro audio card here that's there are a number of manufacturers for this but this will do actual if you know what balanced audio is and if anybody's an audio person here you can do really good sounding stuff you go to home and and all that it'll actually take digital inputs so there's a lot of power but you know OS 10 actually is enabled this is very easy to go and add devices in so that would be pretty much all you would need to be broadcasting from anywhere and you know we can we can look at will look a little bit a little bit later on we'll go do a demo at the end of our presentation here so Ryan costs well if you're a traditional radio station you need power to power your transmitter and you could have some you know large power bill electricity bill every month to do that well with internet radio the cost is or there some cost of bandwidth and that's basically for each person that's listening to your stream you have to send those bits however you know however many you need to have that person be able to hear the audio to each person there's a couple of ways to do this that we'll talk about a little bit later but but mainly you know you have to pay for that bandwidth and that's that's one of your running costs and the more people listen it scales up there are depending on what kind of deals you can get for bandwidth there are some economies of scale to some extent like you may be able to get you know a bucket to start out with that gives you pretty much your normal listenership and then if you go over that you pay more so you can predict what the costs are well so the other part is royalties and this is because the contentious part that it's evolved over the last few years and there are two types of royalties so they're actually the new royalties that are applied internet radio which do not apply to broadcast are performed to royalties and that's all done through the RIAA and there's a group called sound exchange we're going to be talking a lot about this to see you know and there's also composition royalties which traditional radio pays and that's pretty much every you know percentage of your revenue and it's it's a fairly low number and that goes to the composer and to the lyricist for the song and that's been done you know for years and so they're also their reporting requirements for both traditional radio for internet radio and the internet radio ones are a little more detailed and but computers help you solve some of that so let's talk about our setup costs so your computer now we talked about the client-server model the transmitter on the high hill right so kind of the equivalent of Mount Sutro out here in San Francisco is an ISP that's connected to the Internet backbone so you can locate your server there and then do your remote broadcast from wherever you need to be yeah that would be your studio so that server takes connections from your listeners we talked about send some bandwidth to them and you can also track that when they'll only come in you'll know who they are and you have some kind of encoding client or a control client we'll talk a little bit later on about the different models that are typically used for doing an internet broadcast and that can send a stream to a server that control client or it can just control what's going on in the server so bandwidth so there's basically the way bandwidth works out is the more bandwidth you use the better quality your sound is and that's probably pretty obvious but you know you can with new codecs you can actually keep lowering that amount down so you can actually get more listeners from the same amount of Internet bandwidth and you know the AAC correct we're going to listen to some examples of that later on is a pretty terrific and there's better stuff coming along it's really kind of a moving moving thing the technology is getting better and the sound is getting better and you know the ability of people listed at their homes a lot of people have broadband now that's gotten better as well so I talked a little bit earlier about saying there are a couple different kinds of a unicast a unicast connection to a server is you're sending the same bits to each person directly multicast is a pretty cool concept Butcher unfortunately doesn't get really get used in practice and that is you let the internet routers to decide you know who needs the stream so only one copy go into your network so if there's a thousand people inside your network listening to this this network segments listening to your station there's only one copy of that going in so that minimizes cost the problem is most of the Internet is not really set up for that it's not what happens is multicast gets thrown out by routers so that's you know that's multi gasps is very close to what what it's like to do traditional radio where you're just sending one signal out and everybody listens to the same thing okay so now we'll get into the interesting part the royalties so I talked about composition royalties and those are there's a group of BMI ASCAP and SESAC there's also something called the Harry Fox agency and basically you're paying as I said you're paying for the composition and you're paying us versus and I could split up by this organization and it's based on a percentage of revenue and Mike you have a girl down here if not evidence that's on the end of the presentation that you can go there and there's a calculator and you can punch in the numbers of you know based on how much revenue you have and they give you a number and it's a fairly reasonable thing all internet broadcasters have paid that back to the you know that when they started pretty much so the interesting royalties are the performance royalties so when the DMCA came out back in the late 90s there's a provision law that said you cannot stop someone from broadcasting on the internet there's a compulsory license you can guarantee your over you're not breaking the law by broadcasting the internet however you have to pay a royalty and in this this ended up turning into a performance royalty right which they've modified now to say you know you can you can be charged either for how many people are listening to a particular sign this is for restricting music okay and you know how many people are listening a particular time to the one that song played or you can just count the amount of listening hours and they have a number they say well you know you played twelve or fourteen songs in that hour and we'll give you a value based on that okay and that's collected by a group of a new organization called sound exchange and I haven't role for that but you can check that out and as all the real details of that as well so once again traditional broadcasters are paying the composition royalties and you know that's based on a few percent and there's a minimum about two hundred sixty four dollars and there's the oral okay there we go that's the oil that s Capcom you can find all that so as I've mentioned the performance royalties are very contentious I mean it was really I may have seen stories about this is going to kill internet radio it's going to show that a lot of people pulled their streams off the air and there was a lot of you know fear and panic and and it really made a lot of news and that was because this was a new thing and especially for the traditional broadcasters who were putting stream on the Internet they're not used to paying performance royalties they say you know we provide a promotional value so it was it was deemed that radio had it was a perceived promotional value back in the 20s and so we'll be that's helping the record you know industry to promote their music so because I think of because of the reasoning for it was because of the fragmented nature of a lot of internet stations it's a small audience it's not that you know the more general thing that commercial radio does so they were able to have negotiated out so they had to pay performance royalties well so the political turmoil lasted for about two years and Congress get involved and there was a settlement Act for a lot of people that were broadcasting at that time were able to get in and get something that allowed them to stay in business so and as I said this all goes back to the DMCA and that was it it was intended to address the the right holders rights holder concerns and digital media and you know you can imagine if you you're in a business you own something and suddenly people were able to get it you know for free you'd be nervous about it and if you're someone who's already doing this you know well then you'd want to keep doing it right why you know why should I pay for something I'm paid for before why do I want were costs so the players in all this are the Raa which sure you've heard of that's a group that's made up of they represent all the major recording labels the US Copyright Office there are the arbitrator's and there's a digital media association which is the best-known of of the webcast your side but there's various other things and some technology companies are involved as well so the law said that you know these groups could sit down and negotiate something come up with their own settlement decide this is what we're going to pay well of course they couldn't do that as I said you know the webcaster said we don't wanna pay anything cause we're not paying it now and the Recording Industry said well we'd like you to pay a lot so they couldn't agree so at that point the Copyright Office by law gets involved in arbitrates it so they have something called the copyright arbitration royalty panel and these these meet they set the rates for about two years so we're actually coming near the end of a two-year period the rates will be possibly different next year so the first set of rates were very high and they retroactively 1998 and that's what caused all the uproar so and there are course different different rate levels for college non-commercial or commercial and we're going to look at those a bit so first we'll talk about college internet radio and this is this is the current rates now so it's actually a fairly reasonable thing it's actually only if you go above a certain amount of performances or tuning ours do you actually owe more there's actually just a flat rate of a few hundred dollars and you pay $50 to the Data fund which I'm not 100% sure what that is but I believe that's do with how you collect you know the information about the streams are basically to keep track of all of it so in that a little bit different in 2004 if you have if your college is based on college size if you have more than 10,000 students your rates a little bit higher but this is pretty reasonable and you know college could easily make sure the internet station could don't we could stay on the air now they do limit the number of stations you have if you go up if you try to do a bunch of stations once again we said the spectrum is unlimited well they kind of put a limit on you then you have to start paying that the you know the per rates for hours so if I'm non-commercial you actually pay a flat rate of 400 dollars and if you're if you do news it's less when you say when I'm doing news and talk why should I pay a royalty for that well you might be using some bumper music you know and things like that at the start of your show so they kind of just blank it in that you're doing that and there's a flat rate for all of us as well and once again if you go over a certain amount of streaming well you know then you kind of get yourself into a quandary and you have to pay a little bit more but you got to get fairly large to do that so now we'll talk about the commercial entries commercial entities and this is the compulsory license again and basically one performance is one listener listening to a song so if there are a thousand people listening to a song playing on on your music station that's a thousand performances and so the rate is or except about 0.07 cents which adds up over time and they say that while four percent of your performance is beer know royalty that's to kind of deal with people that only stand for a short amount of time and miss connections and things like that so that they give you a little leeway for that the earlier rates actually had something called an ephemeral fee where they charge you for storing music on your computer some percentage of your royalty and that's been that's not in this they simplified it for this next round you can see it's kind of moving toward something a little more reasonable so there's a minimum fee for this so if you don't really don't stream much you still owe them five hundred dollars and if you have multiple stations the minimum and they only have you know it's a few listeners than the maximum you can do is twenty five hundred dollars so okay so I have it some examples here of the W of the rates and this is for the aggregate tuning hours and you see that if your internet only station you pay the most if your if you're doing if you're doing news talk you pay the least and if your simulcasting your radio station you pay a little less than that's for traditional broadcasters get a little price break and all that and die some examples here of what things would be and I came up with it opposed to this because my eyes are going bad can't read my own the slide here uh what would this should show us what that'll be okay right to pay for this you'd want to run commercials okay so if you imagine someone that's running so many the you know listener listeners per hour and you know they had a bill of you know of eight hundred dollars a month they'd have to do about 3.50 cents an hour and commercial time assuming yeah you're running like eight hours of commercials a day not the whole day just kind of in the middle of the day you could easily get some kind of revenue in just just you know that's not a lot of money to have to go out and raise or give an underwriter to cover those rates and they do go up as your audience goes up but that's more valuable to your you know to your advertisers as well so we can talk a little bit about the small webcast or Settlement Act now this was designed for people that were already webcasting avoid a very onerous bill so they really put a flat rate for the years that you know they didn't know this dissolved what was what things were going to happen 1998-99 and basically you're eligible for this if you fit in a range of things and if you if you're in that and that's actually I think it's expires this year turning this year and this basically a lot a lot of people who are already broadcasting to stay on the air and was you know a compromise and you know compromise not a perfect thing but a lot of people stay on the air so it was it was probably a you know it's a good thing that it all uh all happened so part of the compulsory licenses you must report so there's there's reporting which revised which we required to decide you know what you have to pay and that's based on what you play and how many people are listening here how many tuning hours you have and there's also something called the broadcast compliment and that's the mix of music and play this is they provide rules that say you know how many songs can play by an artist in a two hour period etc and repeat them you know within a day and you're supposed to follow these rules they give you a little leeway but you're supposed to roughly follow these rules so it's a you know a little bit of a restriction but done it's something that you know traditional broadcasters have always done and then there's finally annotation so you have to display the name and artist of the title artist of the people that have made the music it's music is part of the law so let's look at the reporting requirements so every three months you have to do two weeks of log and basically you have the name of your service and what type of they have transmission categories whether you're a news station or music or you know a non-commercial etc then you talk about each each song and say how many performances of that song so you have to give them a two-week period you can just select that from whatever you want and that's how they kind of they do a statistical thing and they say okay yeah okay he's pretty much playing what he's what he says he's going to do and they sure your your rates on that so here's a detail on the sound performance son recording performance compliment and this is a thing fall over fall over I said from a traditional radio and it's designed to keep listeners from recording music so the idea is it kind of randomizes everything if you don't know what's coming up so you can't say what's going to play next and you can say what's played but you can say oh it's going to play next and you can't play the same things at the same time every hour so people will know if I tune in now I can get that u2 song that's popular so this is basically like I said there's some leeway to this you can do about 10% out of it so if there's some special thing you play a lot of songs by one artist in the music realm you know for you know a special love someone it's let's say if an artist pass through the way you can even do that and not you know not violate it so here's here's an example of not see if we get that there we go so there's an example of an annotation this is actually from a station that we stream is a Beggars Banquet record recording company internet radio station called AV deck this is a track that they had a few years back and you can see it's got copyright and it's good artist and title and you know it's a bonus for internet radio which which is pretty nice you can embed a link in that so it's commercial you can have a point to the website of the company that's buying the commercial time from you if you're promoting music you can have it go in point to you know that the recording label or maybe a music store you know or a number of things so the Royalton summary the only all royalties if you play music that you don't own license to the compulsory license that we talked about is not for just absolutely for everybody if you can work out a deal with someone or some particular record company or if let's say you're a bad and you own your own music you don't own any royalties you can go in broadcast with what you want so there are a lot of things but this allows people to kind of play music that they like of different genres in do it in a legal way so you may have to prove that you do this they may come after you and ask you you know wait a minute you're broadcasting shows you could do that so you may have to show a contract or a log that shows what you've played etc but you can do that so well here's where computers start to come in now we talked about all this report reporting and in the royalty rates and there's a lot of math there and if you had if you had to sit down and do that by hand looking at your logs you just be day after day after day it would take up all your time or you might have to hire someone to do that and that would be a terrible job to have really you know so computers make that a lot easier and that's one of the things that we do is we track background radio my product we track who's listened and your log and then we we put it all in a relational database and we allow you to go in and just say you know hey what did I play we give you a cue some example queries of what that looks like and you can actually just calculate that stuff with a few clicks of a mouse so that saves you haven't have a person and to do that so and of course you can write special software now that you've got this data and there might be some interesting things you could do you could show the people that are buying commercial time from you well look here's here's who's listening at this time so you really you know you really got a good you know a good response based on this because a thousand people are listening you know that at that point or if you're if you're promoting music you can look at those demographics say what was more popular what did people like to listen to when do they turn off their stream you know in the middle of a song maybe that tells me something so and you can look at what times things are more popular so you can decide you know what's the best what's the prime time to charge you may be charged more for commercials so you can pretty much do your own ratings okay so that was all the the legal parts and you know the parts that you did that you required to do to be able to do the station legally so let's talk a little bit a little bit about the technology of what's behind all this so we talked about encoding briefly and really got a trade off if you send more data to the to your listeners you get better quality but a class you more we talked about the client-server model and we're working we're talking about QuickTime here right because you're at WWDC so we use something called the real-time protocol which is an internet standard for streaming and each QuickTime file contains in it something called a hint track which tells the server how to go about building the real-time protocol packets that need to be sent to a listener and we standardized an mpeg-4 AAC just because you know it's it's it's pretty cool and it sounds great and also we're going to look at some broadcasting models we're doing this solo say what is been coding while your source material could be anything it could be a CD it could be an mp3 that's high quality and you basically perform math on this with some software that says if I take out how much data can I take out and it sounds still sounds good so you can you can do that and minimize the amount of data you have to send to somebody yet keep the quality and as I said it's a very subjective thing and it's really a trade off of how much you want to you want to use for a band with anyone using how much you want to pay how good the quality is and you know it's it's a very personal thing so obviously higher day rates higher quality in higher cost lower data rate you know basically it's a good sound okay but it's reduced quality for example like the baseball game I was listening to last night was sent at about 10 kilobits a second it's just voice so it really sounded like kind of a bad telephone connection but I can understand all of it but if you're doing Tchaikovsky well you might want something as stereo and a much better quality so you might want to be able to have different encodings for different types so there's some other trade option can do stereo is great but you can get as good a quality at less data rate by just choosing mono so we'll talk a little bit about I am and pay for AAC and this is done by Dolby labs and this is included in QuickTime and it's currently kind of the state of the art for streaming and this is really it's based on standards so is if you or I wanted a few and I wanted to go out and build our own codec we'd go get a copy of the standard and sit down and write some code and come up with something it put out the same format as mpeg-4 and it sounds better and we could have an mpeg-4 codec and that's exactly what's happening so there are codecs that are on the way that I'm sure that what time will adopt as time goes by that you know it sound even better at lower data rates but once you're in the standard you know it's guaranteed to be backward compatible and forward which is one of the great things about about standards and also standards mean that you know as new devices come up but support the standard they're going to be able to play your your audio natively you want have to do anything special to make that all that happen and there are actually no royalties as well on that there were some talk about mpeg-4 and this is for video if you go above a certain number of you know of users you pay some royalty on each video stream but there's none of that for for audio so I have some music samples we'll see if we can hear this okay that's 128 field but a second stereo mpeg-4 and that's kind of what comes out of the iTunes Music Store and it sounds pretty good okay so we'll go to music sample number 2 and was going to start perfect well the demo gods are not what we with me so far but I do have a 48 oh okay I'll start tip number three goes here this is not happening well this town doesn't sound as good as the others we'll have to uh excuse er than that okay well if our music is staying on as well okay um could you I can bring down the audio on that thank you so let's talk a little bit more in depth about the client-server model so as I said listeners on the Internet are your clients is very similar to traditional radio where you've got the transmitter in the high hell and people listening in their car in their home you know to a radio station well if you're listening on your computer it's a very similar thing so the difference in their radio of course is as we mentioned that there could be two-way communication so I can get some information back from you you know you can send me an email we can do a chat etc and there so there's a lot of things that are you know that's a lot that's a very interesting thing you know that traditional radio can't do so in most cases as we said we talked about multicast in unicast is Stream sent to every listener so that's different from traditional radio but it's there so let's talk a little bit about how the stream is sent the standards RTP RTSP and RCS P is is the the control protocol when you're quicktime player tries to talk to a server it does a handshake with it and it's told what it's going to look kind of stream it's going to receive what data rate and it does all this under the covers you don't have to do anything and if you're the listener and you just hear a stream so the real-time protocol is the way that the data that's in the stream is broken up into small pieces and sent to the player and it's designed so if you're ever driving in your car and you grow and you're listening to FM and you go under a bridge and FM drops off for a second or real-time protocol is designed to make that possible with computers if there's some disruption stream for some reason it won't just fall over it knows that it can throw some data away and so it can be lossy so it's designed to kind of exist in harsh environments you know and you can still hear pretty get a pretty good stream and of course all the packets have numbers and so they're all sent from the server they may arrive in any order at the player the player decides you know how to put them back together based on their sequence number and when to play them based on that there's a time stamp in each packet so there's also something called a real-time control protocol which basically it tells the player if you this is more important of your doing video but it tells the player basically you know this this video is frame isn't at the same time as this audio so that you can sync lip-sync and all that but they're actually also reports that back from the player to your server which talked about the quality of the service so your server can automatically adjust itself saying well this guy's having lost I'll send him some repeat packets and there's there's kind of a you know there's only a certain point of loss that you can go to before you know things fall over but if there's just a little bit understate ten or twenty percent you could actually compensate a bit and you know and get a silky food quality stream by spending a little extra data so the control protocol so when you're in your QuickTime Player and you hit play and pause buttons are open a stream you're sending RTSP commands to a server which say just that i'd like to listen to the stream set it up you know i want to play or pause if it's if it's a if it's a file you listen to the stream you can actually move around randomly you can't do that in a live stream because obviously you know it's live right so you're hearing what's what's in the now it'll also tear down the connection so the server knows if you've disconnected from from the server that it shouldn't be sending you those packets if you can use that bandwidth for somebody else and that's all done under the covers so you can you can take a player and you can encapsulate that you know inside you have a stub movie that actually just has information about what the stream is and you can put that inside a web page or you can mail that to somebody you know or you can have your web page launch an external player so they can they can be scrolling through different different pages as they're listening to the radio stream so there's a lot of a lot of details out I won't go into a lot of that just because that's that's some things that are going on in and and you know other sessions with it they sure they've covered that in a lot of detail so let me talk a little bit about broadcasting models so how is internet radio done so let's kind of look at this is more of a traditional broadcaster and you know they've got a studio so they've maybe got a radio automation system that just puts out audio all right so they've got a hard drive somewhere and or they've got some CDs or there's some places they still do tapes but they put that for a mixer and there's a microphone etc and at some point that comes out and it'll go maybe to us you know it obviously goes to a transmitter up on the hill the real you know RF base broadcast but it goes into a compressor and that compressor sends either over a public Internet or sometimes they just use an ISDN lines they guaranteed bandwidth and they send that off to an encoder or they send the encoded data you know from the station it's really a choice of the people putting it together and then that goes to a server so the good part about this is it's pretty simple well that part of it is you don't actually other than you might be able to can track the number of hours people listen to but you don't really know you have to go correlate your logs to that if you want to do performances you really don't have that correlation of who listened to what was played okay so another type achill thing is I'm an mp3 hosting service so you upload some files manual and you build a stick of fixed playlists and that fixed playlists runs and it could be very long you know and it could place to do some things randomly but it pretty much just repeats and you have to go and manually go change that to get that to be different and once again you could you could get some information on that on who's listening and all that but that has to be built into that software those typically those are very simple they just really just sending out a stream they're not doing all the all the logging so we can talk about internet radio automation which is what I what I do and in this case there's a control client that actually controls the server remotely from anywhere you are in the world so you know really your server just does what it's told and you can also the server is a lot of intelligence so it can do we talked about the broadcast compliment there's a set of rules you have to do or maybe you want certain broadcasts to go on at certain times the automation system can make your station sound very fresh and at the same time if you want to broadcast live you now cut in and just send that live stream to that to that ISP so avoiding having to have you know a stream that's if there's some disruption in that if you're not broadcasting live your station is going to stay on the air and of course that server is up on the high hill at the isp and you've got your listeners listening to that so and that server can now keep track of all the logs it keep track of who's connecting and you know who's listening and allows you to go off and build your and build your reports so basically with the one on an automation system you can encode the clips ahead of time and put them actually physically on the server so they don't have to be streaming from the client all the time they just sit on the server and run when you know when they need to and you can let that run autonomously so you could have people on the air that are just looking at what's playing now and they know what they can talk about or you can have them pre-recorded there's a number of concepts in radio that are built in automation systems at the same time your plate your program director could be choosing what's what's played you can have people doing commercials that track that and that's called traffic and traditional radio they could be doing that offline and programming the station ahead of time and it all works for you know seamlessly and at the same time that could be done from anywhere so those people don't really even have to be in the same physical building they could be at a live remote somewhere they could be you know in their home and their office you can you can pretty much do a station and have a lot of different people involved in it and you know not leaving a lot of bricks and mortar to go and do that I talked a lot about doing dynamic playlist basically if you use you know rotation rules you can come up with something it sounds very fresh and you're not doing anything to do that because you know it's going to be randomized you'll be following the you know the law of you know what you have to play to broadcast and you know you can have that set up with a month worth of music and you know it'll play without you having to go to see the station so a lot of stations do something called voice tracking where they actually record the live inserts you know if you if you say hey it's a great funny day and it's raining well you know that doesn't quite work out the next day but you know you can do that in the future and a lot of radio stations do that and it allows them to create something it sounds pre live but without having people sitting there you know the air talent can come in and do their show in 20 minutes half an hour instead of you know being there all along but you can also do live assist you can actually have somebody doing a show and they can be talking over their music or if they're doing a live broadcast you can have you know material running and recorded and you know that's appropriate and then they can cut in and do the live show if they're doing a sporting event or whatever or use the playlist staff commercials while you're doing your sporting event so and of course an automation system does all the logging as well so where's everything heading at this point well the royalty situation has really stabilized you know that one of the problems in the period of the early you know 2000's was that people didn't know what it was we know what the rules were going to be so that's the tough thing if you're trying to run something where you're going to have to pay you don't know how much that is well now it's very well known and now it's going to evolve every two years so all of you can get involved in this process and you know lobby of you know Congress and do things to try to get things to you know come down even further perhaps or or make it more easier to report so it's not going to be a fixed thing it's going to be it's gonna be revisited every two years and of course well there are lots of mobile devices on the way in a few years you'll build at your internet radio station we'll be able to stream to phones you know 3G and other and other things that are coming along there's other standards for high-speed data but thing is radio doesn't need that much speed you don't need the 1/2 megabits a second if you have a phone that can do that and you're just doing a 56k stream it's going to sound great and of course this year the theme of NAB 2004 was IP broadcasting so every so this convergence thing has really happened now and everything is moving into being IP and I think over time you may see traditional you know traditional terrestrial broadcasters become a little less important especially with these portable devices because you can imagine the next thing might be though it might be in your car and that's where a lot of traditional radio is listening to now and given the unlimited spectrum of the internet you know that's it gives you as a station operator a large audience to go choose from so it should be it should be a pretty cool future well so I have a final thought before we go up and do a little demo here well there have been millions of downloads I think they just said 250 million downloads of iTunes since it came out right that's about the number I'm sorry fork time excuse me a quick time thank you and well and also when you don't download iTunes you do get QuickTime for free it comes along so everybody that's downloaded iTunes for Windows has got a copy of QuickTime so that means you've got people that can listen to a stream done for most n server and you know there's there's a lot of market out there that's really been untapped and you can do it much easier and much better quality you know in our in our world ok well so I'm going to do a little demo there when you switch to them the demo actually whoa with that there we go okay so I have an automation system here it's running so we're actually looking at a server that's running in Florida and I've got a time of what's playing on the air now and I get a countdown time and get the time and date there various things I can do to change the microphone gain what might you know what my source is etc I can look at a database well so I actually want to do a little live insert and I want to I need a volunteer from the audience now we do some stage-diving here and looks something I can someone want to do that how about probably sir would you like to be a DJ okay you can multi sure welcome to up in your ear and your name is a rock nice to meet you okay okay so what we're going to do here look at this microphone setup here and I'm going to go open what is open up [Laughter] okay so I'm going to I'm going to start this little playlist this has got a little jingle and actually we bring up the audio just a little bit on this so you're actually we're going to go to so in 23 seconds this this playlist will start there's gonna be about a seven seconds intro then you're going to see it script come up and you just read what you see so just read what you see you can translate into Dutch on the fly if you'd like okay and so this would be kind of a live assist you were standing on the rock rock WV HD okay so hey San Francisco you're here this is WWDC mm m4 and you've just heard internet radio in-depth from George kabab Louis that your name was enough oh thanks before we go to back and ten great hits in a row it's your turn step up and ask them thank you so now there are a lot of things that we're going on in Ellis I will briefly bubba's to this automation system so the streaming is based on delay and there's about a five-second or so delay the bigs half an hour automation system actually synchronizes his live voice to what's playing on the air so to him he just has to look at the live cue and he doesn't have to think about any of that and that you know we were streaming to a server is out in Florida and that's now off playing the next thing