Streaming radio for Mac? Not from Clear Channel stations

By MacEdition Staff (feedback) December 22, 2001

Earlier in the year, many hundreds of radio stations ceased streaming their live broadcasts due to pressure from AFTRA to ensure that contractual obligations to their members were met.

Clear Channel Communications was one of the largest radio station owners to be dealt the cease-and-desist. Before the shutoff, Clear Channel was using Windows Media to stream its content to PCs and Macs alike. Other than the sheer ugliness of the Mac client and the low stream rates, it was a passable solution.

In order to comply with the AFTRA lawsuit and be able to stream again, Clear Channel partnered with a company called Hiwire. Clear Channel is now an investor in Hiwire. A press release outlined that Clear Channel would be utilizing Hiwire’s proprietary technology to allow streaming of radio station feeds, but with the ability to punch out ads from the radio feed and punch in ads from a stock of Internet-only ads. The press release indicated that streaming would resume in July 2001, but Clear Channel didn’t begin streaming again until December 11, 2001.

Too bad for anyone not using Windows, though – Hiwire doesn’t work on the Mac or any other platform, and it appears that at least Clear Channel doesn’t believe that the proprietary software ever will.

However, the Hiwire software is fraught with security holes. It appears that the implementation is a wrapper to a COM version of Windows Media Player. The wrapper seems to do nothing more than tune to a station’s stream and switch ads in when it receives cues from a server. The hole? The URL to the station’s stream is visible by viewing source from a file used to initialize the wrapper plug-in. This is great news for Mac users, because it allows them to go directly to the stations’ streams outside of the incompatible plug-in. AFTRA won’t be too happy to hear this – the direct stream still contains all of the radio commercials.

Based on the appearance of the “technology” built by Hiwire, one might think it was trying to rush a poorly-conceived product to market so its sugar daddy could claim first re-entry into the radio streaming market since the AFTRA lawsuit. To that end, they have failed, as many stations have beaten Clear Channel to the punch. In most cases, stations (for example, WTOP, Washington, DC) simply block non-cleared ads without trying to insert Internet-only content. This leaves the control of what audio hits the Internet at the station, no special software at the client or server required.

For the Clear Channel “solution,” the place for switching out ads in the stream is client-side, and doing it that way is akin to developing a widget that connects to viewers’ remote controls and switches the channel when the home office wants them to watch a different ad. All of that work should be done on the server, prior to the client even connecting to the stream.

But with Hiwire and Clear Channel, their system is so shoddy that all it takes to stream any of the stations which are back online is to replace the call letters in a URL. The similarity of the addresses (and the Web site content) is no real surprise since Clear Channel has been consolidating all of its Web content to a server farm in Texas dating back to its buyout of Jacor (PDF).

For instance, to connect to 93.3 WFLZ in Tampa, Florida, point Windows Media Player to this link. Want talk radio? How about 970 WFLA? How about rock?

It would be nice if the monopoly of the radio industry didn’t align itself with the tactics and technology made famous by our favorite software monopolist, just as it would be nice if the Hiwire software didn’t take the easy way out to solve the problems with AFTRA.

That Mac users can still get to these streams may be the only bright spot in this sordid tale – at least until this article is read by the folks at Hiwire and Clear Channel.

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