Live365: Giving Radio an Attitude Adjustment

What began as a co-location scheme — with two facilities in Silicon Valley and one on the East Coast — has recently been consolidated into one large facility in San Jose, Calif., bringing major cost and logistical benefits, according to Rothman.

"It’s a lot cheaper to run out of one facility," he says. "There are bandwidth cost impacts, maintenance cost impacts; it’s much easier for us to service a single facility."

While this plan seems to run contrary to the streaming industry’s buzz about edge delivery, Rothman believes the plan is in the best interest of his company and audience.For example, employing an edge delivery system for Live365 streams would require the replication of 4 terabytes of data at multiple edge locations, a scale that would prove economically impossible for most businesses.

To win over Live365, edge delivery service providers would have to make a quantifiable quality of service improvement, Rothman says.

"I have the same conversation with all of them [edge delivery providers], which is, prove it, what’s the ROI? Am I going to get two times as much revenue? And if the answer is no, then I’d be stupid to do it," he says. "I may be stupid to do it if I only get two times the revenue. I should get a multiple."

All of the Nanocasters at the San Jose location are connected to the Level3 backbone, providing multiple gigabit Ethernet lines into the cage.

"Everything on the Level3 network is only one hop away from everything else anyway, and it’s the fastest hop," Rothman says.

Live365’s brewing international strategy will also benefit from Level3’s reach. According to details outlined in Level3’s network components, its international network will span 21 European and Asian markets. The European markets will be connected by a three-ring, 4,750-mile, inter-city network. The Asian markets will be connected by a broadband undersea cable, through Hong Kong and Tokyo, linking to the United States and Europe.

Here, There and Everywhere

The casual Web surfer may consider Live365 to be an Internet radio portal and enabler, but Rothman’s team views the company as an infrastructure company and aggregator."We’re interested in being everywhere that audio content is consumed today," says Rothman. "All we need is an Internet connection. We’re building on TCP/IP. If someone’s providing a broadband Internet connection, we’re there."

If Live365’s partnerships and strategies for home broadband, wireless, and satellite access are any indication of what’s to come, the radio revolution has only begun.