[Icecast] Bandwidth Consuming

Geoff Shang
Wed, 07 Nov 2007 14:36:58 -0000

Hi,

This is normal behaviour for Unicast streams.  In this sense, Internet
radio is not really broadcasting as such, as a stream needs to be sent to
each individual listener.

There are several solutions to this problem.

1.  Software like Peercast (which I've not personally used) allows
listeners to send the stream to each other.  However, my understanding is
that each listener has to be able to send the stream to someone else, so
for it to work well, each listener needs to have 128kbps uplink available
if you want a 128kbps stream to work well.  My understanding is that this
approach often doesn't work well in practice.

2.  A variant on the peercast idea is Iceshare
(http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/IceShare) which is unicast streaming mixed
with bit torrent.  A great idea, but it appears no-one is currently working
on it.

3.  Multicast - the true solution.  IP Multicasting will solve all of our
problems, but it requires special handling and is (afaik) currently not
supported in Icecast.

So as far as I know, at present you need to be able to serve the full
bitrate of your stream for each listener who tunes in.

Geoff.