AMR Sound Goes Worldwide!

Frost, WV – After 30 years of providing its unique sound in the Allegheny highlands, Allegheny Mountain Radio is now able to reach a whole new audience via the World Wide Web. That’s because at long last, AMR is streaming its signal on the web – here’s AMR Chief Engineer Chuck Niday.

“It came down to a matter that there was a lot of demand for streaming and we really couldn’t ignore it anymore,” he says. “So the decision was made to go ahead and get the streaming going and we’ll take care of the legal things along the way. We already had all the equipment in place to do it as far as what we needed at the Frost studios, because we were streaming the programming to the WNMP transmitter and the equipment we’re using could easily stream to a streaming provider, who in this case is Stream Guys.”

Stream Guys, based in California, offers streaming services to a wide variety of web sources.

“I know there’s public stations that stream on them, there’s commercial stations, there’s internet only stations; they also do temporary streaming, they do all kinds of stuff,” says Niday.

He says even the sometimes less than optimal internet service in our area has not presented too much of a problem.

“So far it hasn’t, it’s been amazingly reliable,” says Niday. “We did have a glitch last week, where our stream wasn’t making it to the streaming server, I think it’s in Chicago, I’m not sure. For some reason it was blocked; while I was reporting it to Frontier, it started working again and it’s been solid every since. It’s worked well, much better than I expected.”

News of the streaming has been largely by word of mouth. Nonetheless, people are tuning in online.

“So far, in the almost three weeks that we’ve been streaming of 18 simultaneous listeners, and we usually have about 6 to 8 at any one time,” says Niday. “I have access to the stream server so I can go in and look at who’s on at any particular time; well I can look at the IP address of who’s listening. I can’t tell that it’s Joe Blow or Jane Doe, I just know it’s this particular IP address from some internet provider somewhere out in the ether.”

He says he’s found some unexpected listeners.

“As you would expect, a lot of people right around here in the area in the three counties listening, but we’ve had some outside; there’s one in Charleston, one in Madison Heights, Virginia, which is north of Lynchburg, some in northern Virginia,” he says. “I’ve seen three at any one time from the U.K. [United Kingdom], from England listening to the stream which I think is pretty amazing. I’m trying to get things set up so that I get a weekly summary of where all these people are listening.”

“Oh and there was a mobile listener too; I could tell from their address it was a mobile user, so that was pretty cool too. It’s been fun, it’s been interesting.”

Niday says right now, only a certain number of users can stream simultaneously, but if needed that number can be increased. AMR must also meet some quarterly reporting requirements, something that is still in the process of worked out.