Canadians and Streaming Radio

Statistics Canada : 22% of canadian home internet users between 45 and 64 years old listen to the radio over the Internet.
Internet activities performed at home in the last 12 months by Internet users, by age group, 2007
http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/11-008-x/2009002/t/10910/tbl001-eng.htm

YouTube Video tag

I know, this is old stuff. But it is still interesting.
http://youtube.com/html5
You need a browser that supports HTML5 Video tag and can decode and playback H.264 encoded video.

RTMP specifications published

http://adobe.com/devnet/rtmp/

http://blogs.adobe.com/ktowes/2009/06/rtmp_specification_now_availab.html

VLC 0.9.9

VLC just got better:
http://videolan.org/vlc

Interesting excerpt from VLC FAQ:
Is libdvdcss legal?
http://www.videolan.org/doc/faq/en/#id374183

My favorite /. comment about the VLC vs MPlayer debate:
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1187129&cid=27447043

Last.fm to start charging end users for service

Looks like ads don’t pay the bills.

EUR 3/month
http://last.fm/about/subscriptionradio

ShoutCAST TTSL

impressive!

TTSL (Total Time Spent Listening in hours per month)
http://yp.shoutcast.com/ttsl.html

so called iTunes podcast format

There is no such thing as “iTunes podcast format”. Apple developped a module to the RSS standard.

RSS Modules : extend the basic XML schema established for more robust syndication of content.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS#Modules

Apple iTunes Module
http://apple.com/itunes/whatson/podcasts/specs.html#rss

See my previous post on Media RSS.

in car streaming

This is getting very interesting.

Blaupunkt Presents World’s First in-car Web radio
http://blaupunkt.com/press/download.aspx/2610/BP_iRadio_en.pdf

miRoamer Partners with Blaupunkt to Introduce the World’s First Internet Car Radio
http://corporate.miroamer.com/press-release.html#p1

Cadillac rolls out in-car Internet access
http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13746_7-10199833-48.html

FFmpeg 0.5

FFmpeg 0.5 is released!
http://ffmpeg.org
caught this one on /.

How much does it cost to stream radio on your iPhone?

A friend of mine that I cannot see often enough asked me today what where my hobbies. As a geek I must have geek hobbies. One of them is to play with Google.
My friend also asked me how much it would cost to listen to streaming radio for one hour on my iPhone.

The canadian iPhone carrier does not offer unlimited data plans.
So lets calculate using the 1 GB monthly data transfer offered by Rogers' iPhone 3G Voice & Data Packages. So if I add the $6.95 System Access Fee and the 50¢ 911 Emergency Access Fee to that base $60 plan I get $67.45 per month before taxes.

Where does Google fit in all this you might ask? In addition to do web search (duh), you can use it as a cool calculator and unit converter.

For the sake of our example, lets use a stream encoded at 32 Kilo bits per second (Kbps). One hour of streaming that station on my iPhone will cost me almost one dollar.

Another way to put this: You can stream that live radio station non stop for a bit over 3 days using the basic 1 GB data plan.

Now if Rogers could only follow AT&T's example with an "unlimited" data plan.
Of course when my iPhone is connected through WiFi (which is 80% of the time) my data transfer costs go down to $0.