Greetings, I am loving the loudcaster web based broadcasting. The feedback I'm getting from my listeners has been positive so far.
I'm curious if there are plans to track listener stats per channel? I'd very much like to know how many "listener hours" I'm getting each day/week/month.
What would be even better would be to have a display of ip's so you can either go to youtrace.de or http://ip-address-lookup-v4.com/ and see where your listeners are. I know that Shoutcast allows this. Plus knowing rather your listeners are on the Shoutcast server or the web flash player. I can already pull up the ip's from the Shoutcast servers separately, but there is no way of knowing where your Flash player listeners are (nor how many).
As far as displaying how many listeners you have on your web site it can sometimes hurt you if you don't have a big number. People love to see big numbers and 4-10 don't cut it for most people visiting your site.
I agree legacy... I know from experience. Live365 has a bunch of great stations that never get any listeners, because they are rated low on TLH on the main page, so people just do not think they are that great. I would rather see a rotation of ALL stations on the "main" first page so everyone gets a chance to be noticed. As far as stats go, unless they are private I have no use for them personally. A good example... I can have 5 stars on 365 and my competition will make up a new login and rate you bad which brings you back down. The 365 folks are aware that this goes on, but will not change it. This of course keeps the biggest stations on top and never gives the little guys a chance. Oh well... just my two cents worth .. LOL
While I take on board what you both are saying, I personally would like some feedback of how many are listening at any particular time. if not for public use, then certainly for my own peace of mind.
Oh I agree for Private DJ admin use we all should know how many listeners are on the Mp3 64K side, The AAC+ 24K side and the Flash Media side. In fact that is the utmost importance. For one thing I have set up a dot TK (web shortcut) to my station. http://thelegacyrocks.tk and I'd like to know how many web listeners I actually have. I know Brandon has discussed with me some ideas of station exposure as well and he's trying to find ways to expose our stations fairly. Live 365 was a semi-subscription network for listeners. Meaning that your FREE listeners were limited and VIP's actually got first priority to listen to your station. Loudcaster is 100% free to the listener (some mobile devices have a harder time listening for free) but not the fault of Loudcaster itself.
As far as people logging on as fake users and lowering your stations ratings here I don't see it happening because either your a fan or not a fan. Plus I do believe its easy to implement an IP adress checker in the Loudcaster BBS software to only allow one user ID per ip. I suppose Loudcaster could get creative and make an application in order to be on the forums or rate stations that would remain in your systems registry in order to stop this. Napster did this years ago to stop multi user logins from the same computer. You have your babies who will try and make their station higher by cutting down others, but they'll be revealed and or banned in the future.