Our MP3 project for House and Senate audio streaming began with inquiries from legislative staff for advice on how they could provide live audio of their sessions. In the process of gathering information for the legislature, we decided it was time for MDN to experiment in this field on our own.
We first checked out the commercial leader in audio streaming, RealAudio. But we found it to be financially prohibitive. The license fee depends on the number of simultaneous users you wish to have and the price tag runs into the thousands of dollars. We simply could not afford that price tag. Besides, the proprietary nature of RealAudio did not seem appropriate for an educational institution.
There are quite a few alternative methods for streaming multimedia on Internet that are free or more reasonably priced. We decided on MP3 for a variety of reasons:
With the large installed user base that already exists with MP3 music, there are robust and stable MP3 players available to our audience at no cost -- particularly WinAmp.
MP3 compression provides a level of audio quality at low band width that is unmatched by any other technology. The quality simply is staggering, even at the lowest audio-quality settings.
There is a solid program that is well documented for streaming live audio (WinAmp). Several other multimedia streaming technologies are limited to streaming audio files, not live audio.
MP3's server allows anyone else to take an audio stream from a server and redistributed it with their own server. This approach provides the opportunity for a much greater audience. The significance of this tree server structure is important when you realize that no one computer can handle much more than 1,000 simultaneous listeners at the same time. That's a restriction of Internet, regardless of the audio streaming technology being used. MP3, at least, provides a way around that restriction -- at no cost. A school, for example, could take an MP3 server, have it use our House or Senate audio signal as a source, and distribute that signal to as many as 1,000 other listeners.
We have an intuitive sense that MP3 will become the standard audio streaming technology on Internet. There is a broad-based international community developing around MP3 audio streaming with a growing number of "Internet radio stations." And it shared the two critical features that made the Web the standard text and graphics communication medium of Internet -- it's free and it's open source.
But for all of those advantages, it is important to remember that this still is an experiment. In fact, as best we know, we are the first non-entertainment application of MP3 live-audio streaming.
As we write this page, we do not know just how stable will be the MP3 server with an audience of hundreds. It has worked fine in our testing, but that has been with less than a dozen simultaneous listeners.
