Live365: Giving Radio an Attitude Adjustment
The MP3 files streamed from the Nanocaster server can be played on any MP3-capable player, but try telling that to a streaming newbie. Live365 had originally sent users to download commonly used streaming players, but people were disappearing. Rothman’s team was forced to build its own MP3 player (Player365) to retain new visitors looking to experience the service.
"People basically didn’t know how to work them [the media players], and the downloads took too long. They didn’t want to bother," says Rothman. "The reality is that those players don’t meet the needs of consumers. So we built our own player at 160KB [in file size]."
Live365 reports over 500,000 Player365 downloads since its launch in January of this year. With those kinds of numbers, Rothman almost regrets waiting as long as he did to offer it.
"It’s hard enough to get people to pay attention to you in this space," he says. "Once you have someone’s attention, you’ve got to get them to the content right away."
Beyond the "dial-up friendly" player file size and ease of installation, Player365 also features automatic reconnect, the ability to negotiate proxy servers, support for multiple protocols, and a 32-band graphic equalizer.
"It only works with our service; we’re not trying to build a media player to go out and battle these other guys. That’s not our intention," explains Rothman.
The player also measures and sets to the user’s Internet access speed — a seemingly trivial improvement, but key to a positive user-experience.
Storage
According to Rothman, there isn’t a storage vendor in the industry who hasn’t tried to sell him a product. But Live365 has settled on three networked attached storage (NAS) devices from Network Appliance.
"We looked at SANs [storage area networks]. They’re just not mature enough, cost-effective enough, not capable of sustaining the throughput numbers that we need yet," says Rothman. "What we’re using is vanilla NAS, simple RAID [redundant array of independent disks]."