Streaming services in real life - how do they work for you?
Follow @mediaukdiscuss
James Cridland posted on Friday 1st March at 11:53Brent Noorda wrote this excellent blog post a while ago, pointing out the reliability of services like Rdio and Spotify on a typical user-experience – that of walking from wifi coverage into normal 3G coverage and back again. He posted it as a comment on my Rdio article, and I reckoned it was worthwhile linking to it from here.
Streaming music services of the type he discusses here are, of course, one thing: streaming radio quite another, since for streaming radio you need a decent quality of service all the time, not just “most” of the time. I found, a few years ago, that it was almost impossible to walk down a North London street and listen to LBC 97.3 on its own app. (It’s also similarly impossible to listen to FM or DAB on a portable device incidentally). I was wondering what other peoples’ experiences were. Does streaming work for you on the move?
Depends on the service, I’ve found. Using an ancient clapped-out iPhone last spring down by the Welsh Assembly I could get Danny Baker on BBC London just fine over a 40-minute trip from out of town without a single hiccup.
Sadly TuneIn now can’t be trusted to keep going without drop-outs in my own (small) house in Ireland with wifi and a 40Mbps cable line behind it on the current top-of-line Android device on the paid version of the app. Can’t speak to UKRadioPlayer because for reasons passing understanding they won’t let me download the app even though it works just fine on a PC…
Generally though, chucking high-bitrate streams at devices in motion is daft. You’re in a car or wearing headphones outdoors, at least half of any 96k stream is a waste because of external noise, and more bits only leads to more buffering. If I could cap the phone to 32 or maybe 48k I imagine it’d be more reliable. Yes, 32kbps, even for music.
The research I’ve done shows that switching frm 48kbps to 24kbps AAC+ has a dramatic effect on the length of time that people tune in.
Heh – good point. Positively.
Quality of Experience is important: not just quality of audio. If the audio buffers, then that’s zero quality, after all.
Innit.
This is an area where you’ve got to look at mobile devices and think “56kbps modem”. In which regard it’s basically the same as everything else smartphone-related.
Spotify is generally OK on the move, although I find some tracks will just play pure silence and I’ll have to edge it onto the next one.
Use a social media account you already have to log in. More info
If you're not on social media, register for a Media UK account.
By logging in, you are consenting to a cookie that personally identifies you to us. Here's more about our cookies.
Of interest, I discover that XCode has “Network Link Conditioner” built-in, which allows iOS apps, at least, to be tested with a crappy network connection. Brent himself has also worked on CrappyNet which kind of does what it says on the tin.