Licence area populations are 130k for Darwin and 214k for Townsville.
But to support your point, Mackay has 135k and also has 4 stations - although that may not be 100% sustainable since both the SCA and Grants operations in Mackay are understaffed.
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āunderstaffedā - what a hilarious adjective to describe them.
Hit has the same minuscule staff number it had when it was Hot and Meech and Teegs were the bfast talent (now on ABC but having training this week whilst new studios installed).
Remember the cyclone just last month? Hot and Sea (Hit and MMM) combined program teams at the first emerg siren, the PD required to do 8 hr shifts and the others close to it. Itās not how radio should be. Equally as dire at Grants? Most likely.
Very interesting comments here re Grant management and Radio Today:
I donāt bother reading the site regularly due to the short sightedness of what seems to be former owners of RT. Thankfully they seem to have gone.
An interesting game changer for internet streaming of SCA stations across Australia, up there with iHeartRadio offering data-free streaming for Optus mobile customers.
OVO Mobile has signed an āindustry game-changingā deal with Southern Cross Austereo to offer radio fans unlimited access to Australiaās largest FM radio networks The Hit Network and Triple M.
58 radio stations across the metro and regional Triple M and Hit Network are now accessible to OVO Mobile customers ā totally free of data charges ā via OVO Mobileās innovative OVOPlay app.
Boasting exclusive entertainment and sport offerings with live streams from OVOās myriad media partners ā now including SCA ā the OVOPlay web app is accessible free of charge and data free to all OVO Mobile subscribers.
More at: https://www.radioinfo.com.au/news/ovo-mobile-and-sca-sign-partnership-data-free-radio
My favourite telco.
Something different. Its not often you see MVNOs offer unmetered content, let alone content that isnāt unmetered by the network provider, in this case Optus
How much data does radio streaming involve?
The average radio stream would be about 48 kbps.
Which would equate to 21.6 MB per hour.
So not a lot.
48kbps the average? Canāt agree unless its talkback or AM station streaming online
Many variables depending on the service, encoding, etc, this may help How much data does music streaming use? (2018 edition) | nbn
Wait until LTE-B (B stands for broadcast) comes out next yearā¦ Mark my wordsā¦ the DAB+ killer
To sum it up in 1 sentenceā¦ every base station in the stations coverage area has multicast stream being broadcast thats time aligned.
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Eagerly awaiting (have been for a long time since first reading of it). Wonder what data costs will be upon release?
In a longer description, this is Evolved multimedia broadcast multicast service?
Yep Basicallyā¦ I can see in the next few years TVās will start coming out with sim card slots as well as the connected car.
My prediction is telcos will start providing a āentertainment simā which will give you access to local TV and radio broadcastsā¦ If you own a Jimās Antenna franchise I would be very very worried.
I have had talks with Telstra about LTE-B and they have indicated that only licensed broadcasters (no narrowcast) in that area will be offered the service, Broadcasters will send their streams over DVN or BDSL to the telcos.
Video will be streamed in H.265 in Mpeg DASH
It also will be utilised at major sporting and events.
It will require the content provider to have an app that can check for the multicast streamā¦ if its available the user can listen for freeā¦ if the multicast stream cant be seen because they arent in the coverage area it will revert to the unicast stream.
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Thanks. Great to be at the forefront of this, not surprised.
The app would have a fall back provision when moving outside the coverage area? Thinking of the many commuters in adjacent metro markets.
Yepā¦ The app would make an API call and request the multicast streamā¦ the switch will look at what Cell your in and will either deny or allow the streamā¦ if it denys the stream the content provider can just make it fail over to unicast.
Once the session is complete the the following feedback is sent back to the content provider.
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Installing antennas is only a small part of the total service they and other antenna installers provide. I imagine a lot of people would still need help setting up their LTE-B TVs and some may need to have 4G antenna installed on their roofs to get sufficient signal.
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Hopefully with this, we wonāt see the kind of lag that we see with current telco/internet streams.
For instance, I have noticed that an NRL Live stream via Telstra 4GX is about 25 seconds behind the live free to air TV broadcast of the same game.
Not sure what is at fault here, the technology or if it is a contractual thing to protect Channel Nine and FOXTEL.
Technology. The method used by the TV streams (and some radio stations) works by breaking the stream into short video clips with playback downloading them individually and playing them one after the other. The length of these clips can be set by the broadcaster, but is commonly somewhere between 8 and 12 seconds. That means that when you join a stream, you might be starting on footage that has already been available for viewing for up to 12 seconds. Add to this the time it takes for the file to download to your computer and the time it takes to upload to the streaming server (although the latter is minimal thanks to commercial fiber connections), plus any processing time and the current technology canāt do much better than the 20-30 seconds you quote.
Iām not familiar with what transport methods will be used by LTE-B, but some of these s lag will be unavoidable - just as it is with DAB+
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And analogue radio AM/FM will be ahead of even the TV broadcast.
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Along with the abolition of the commercial TV licence fees as proposed by the Turnbull Government in next weekās federal budget, the commercial radio licence fees will also be abolished.
More: https://www.radioinfo.com.au/news/radio-licence-fees-be-abolished-mitch-fifield