Hello: I manage a not for profit, community radio station and we need a company to stream our audio to the internet, as soon as possible.

Our current streaming provider is not immediately answering our emails.

Unfortunately, SAM does not have telephone technical support at this time, and it's taking forever for a person named Phil to acknowledge his emails sent to him, as well.

So, a big red flag for us ?

I was wondering if some of you could answer my questions.

1) Does SAM offer a basic streaming package with a reasonable monthly rate, in which they also provide a built in encoder to stream our audio, 24/7 at 128 k ?

2) Are their streaming products and services compatible with Windows XP ?

3) Can they provide me with chat support, which I see is also not functioning at this time ?

4) If their streaming services break down during a future holiday and on a weekend, will my radio station have to wait until Monday to get proper customer service ?

This is ridiculous, a "Monday to Friday" streaming service, since much of our programming takes place during the weekends.

I've notice that many of these streaming businesses are Monday to Friday operations ? How the hell can I run a 24/7 operation when you are taking the weekend off ?

If my sponsors find out that we are off of the airwaves, they might cancel our sponsorship agreements? I suppose that you, the Monday to Friday business, do not understand the demands of 24/7 radio, do you ?

just saying,



R.J. Smith
President/GM
WDCR Society

Spacial offers streaming services under the labels CheapestStream and Spacialnet.
You can get either of these with a subscription for SAM Broadcaster called SAM Broadcaster Lite/SAM Broadcaster Plus.
The other option is to use their cloud based radio automation system that comes with streamhosting included called SAM Broadcaster Cloud.

If neither of that suits you, check out unrelated third party stream hosts that are closer to you (Spacial is operated from Mauritius and South Africa, so their business hours will most likely not line up with yours unless you're on the african continent as well)

I can not recommend Spacial for their technical support. The products are great, the support not so much.
That said, their streaming service has a technical service with someone there 24/7 in case the servers go down. It's unlikely since they're hosted on Microsoft Azure Cloud systems, but there could still be administrative errors. That kind of 24/7 support does not include a customer service represantitive available for you to talk/chat/phone to, but only a technician in a datacenter or at his/her home computer who could go in and reboot a server or restore settings in case of a fatal error.

_________________
Benedikt Bauer - SVS (Spacial Volunteer Support)

Shop for readymade PAL scripts by countrywesterndj - Or get a custom script made by me (or others)

My Project:
Send "Now Playing" from SAM to Twitter and/or Facebook | Sourcecode

Still, Spacialnet isn't a bad choice; their customer service may not react quickly, but it's rather easy to use and works well, so I never had to contact the support service, and even if I do, I hope it won't be a common happening.