SHOUTcast is a very popular AOL-owned listening portal that has been around for over 12 years. It is free for anyone to publish to, and this week it is ranked 4,895 on Alexa.com, with over 6,000 sites linking in.
There are many Internet broadcasters that have built up a following in SHOUTcast and do not want to lose that; however, in many cases, they would like to use a branded player with streaming features.
A station can use custom branded players, and still publish to SHOUTcast and not lose their ranking and following.
It’s very simple to do; most playlist and internet broadcast software programs allow multi-casting (SAM, PlayList, Icecast, SimpleCast and others have similar easy-to-use interfaces and allow you to encode in simultaneous multiple bit-rates in multiple formats).
In this example using SAM, one stream is in WVA9 at 22kb/s publishing to one point, and the other stream is being encoded in MP3PRO at 24kb/s . . .both at the same time, and both pointing to separate publishing points.
SHOUTcast allows the ability to add text and link to a website or player right from the directory window as shown below. The customer can still benefit from traffic going to their website or using their branded player, and at the same time, their listeners can find them in the SHOUTcast directory.
When a listener clicks on the “TUNE IN!” button as shown below, they are prompted the first time to select either the SHOUTcast Mini-Player or to use their own default player that their desktop is set for.
