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Today

Over the last, 5 years we at Barnabas Road have seen many changes in the Internet Radio industry. Back in 2004, we were not sure we could even call it an industry because so few broadcast radio stations were streaming on the Internet. We were fortunate and we were able to ride the wave to the resurrection of Internet Radio.

Barnabas Road grew from a hosting service with only a few stations in 2004 to a large network of broadcast radio stations located in the US, Canada and Western Europe. Our collective number of listeners grew to well over a million unique listeners each month and our audience continues to grow as we add new radio stations and radio groups. Barnabas Road has always focused its efforts on meeting the needs of Christian broadcasters, but we have many commercial stations broadcasting other formats as well.

The Future

That brings us to the point of this writing. Internet radio has and will continue to grow at double digit rates for years to come. In the beginning, the vast majority of listeners were people tuning in via their office personal computers. Today, people are tuning in via their personal computers, cell phones, and sophisticated Internet Radio devices.

Barnabas Road’s target market, (Christian Radio Stations), are usually not looking for fancy advertising delivery platforms as most non-comm Christian stations do not sell advertising. Instead, we believe our customers come to us because our prices are low and we offer multiple encoding platforms at no extra charge and we offer multiple streams at no extra charge when using our Dual Band Option. We even offer a matching MP3 stream for every Windows Media stream so that Internet Radio devices and cell phones can tune into a station’s broadcast.

Earlier this year we visited a company called RadioTime, located in Dallas, Texas. This company has built an Internet Radio tuner (software) that has become the industry standard for being able to easily locate and tune into any Internet Radio broadcast anywhere in the world. You can find any station or any program easily when the RadioTime tuner software is at the heart of the PC, Laptop, Cell Phone or Internet Radio device.

Several of the newer Internet Radio devices have adopted RadioTime as their built-in IP tuner. WunderRadio (RadioTime tuner as the engine) was built for the iPhone and it is a truly wonderful application for the iPhone.

We believe new automobiles will be equipped with built-in Internet Radios and RadioTime will be the included application helping drivers quickly find the station or program they want.

Fancy media players, graphic ads and almost every other aspect of Internet Radio will be overshadowed by two more important concerns for radio stations. Those two concerns are ubiquitous connectivity and the lowest possible content delivery cost.

Make Sure Your Broadcast Can Be Found On The Device Chosen By Your Listener

Barnabas Road offers fancy media players and multiple advertising platforms. Sadly, today most of these extra features really only apply to listeners using a PC. Personally, I hardly ever listen to Internet Radio using my office PC anymore. I use my iPhone and take it with me whereever I go. The sound quality is fantastic using my ear buds. Even the bass rumbles in my head like it never could on most office PCs. I have an auxiliary audio input feature in my car that my iPhone plugs into. With this setup, I can receive Internet Radio stations that I couldn’t possibly receive otherwise on my car radio.

Barnabas Road offers three standard Dual-Band packages: 20k/32k, 20k/48k, and 20k/64k… two Windows Media or Flash streams. Then, we offer the station Dual-Band MP3 streams in the same bandwidths as the WMA package and the MP3 streams are included at no additional charge.

Although the cost of bandwidth continues to decrease very slowly, demand will keep the retail rates rather level. Few stream hosting providers will decrease their rates to existing customers even if their bandwidth costs go down, but they may offer lower bandwidth rates in order to attract new customers. Don't be trapped in this scheme. Their expensive overhead considered and their venture capitalists demanding a profit will eventually cause possibly traumatic rate increases. Common sense must be applied to that offer that looks too good to be true.

When a station or radio group’s audience grows to a very large number, most hosting services will only offer streaming service on a usage basis. Barnabas Road has extremely low flat-rate hosting fees for small and medium sized radio stations and we also have what we call our Network Affiliate Plan for large bandwidth broadcasting consumers.

Our published rate for users streaming at least 3 terabytes per month is $0.22 per gigabyte. This rate is significantly lower than all of our major competitors. These competitors may require 50, 60, or even more terabytes of use before they offer a similar rate.

Barnabas Road... Low Operating Overhead

BRM is privately owned and we have no corporate debt or capital funding partners to satisfy. BRM also has extremely low operating overhead. In short, all of these factors allow Barnabas Road to offer effective service, multiple streams, and extremely low rates.

There is one other issue which is extremely important to radio stations and radio groups and this is reliability. Barnabas Road’s radio stations enjoy a 99.9% uptime guarantee. This has not been a strain to offer as Barnabas Road’s radio station streams emanate from one of the finest media broadcast centers in the world. This multi-million dollar facility is the highest quality data center available anywhere.

So, ubiquitous connectivity, extremely low rates, and guaranteed reliability are and will be the most important requirements of the stream hosting service of the future. Barnabas Road provides all of these requirements and more today.

Make us prove all of this to you. Start streaming with BRM today and give your listeners the means to connect to your broadcast no matter the Internet capable device they may be using. Give your listeners bandwidth options so that if they use a dial-up service or they are in a week cell phone location, they can still tune in to your broadcast. Keep your streaming costs within budget and sleep well at night knowing your streams are hosted by one of the most reliable companies in the industry.