"View Current Listeners"

[rocketradio]

Can anyone explain why this metric does not accurately reflect the true current listeners?

A- We know people are listening in in various places around the world, but they dont show up on the map

B - The listener figures for x time today, always show up as higher when viewed as "Listeners for yesterday" the following day.

Amy ideas?

 

[Support]

Hi RocketRadio

We have refreshed the IP to Country database which is how the listener location is worked out on the maps. How does it perform now ? Unfortunately this method is never going to be 100% as it relies on ISP's correctly reporting locations of IP's back to the IP WHOIS databases.

Regarding the second (B) question. Could you give us some examples (perhaps with screen shots if possible) so that we can take a further look.

Can anyone explain why this metric does not accurately reflect the true current listeners?

A- We know people are listening in in various places around the world, but they dont show up on the map

B - The listener figures for x time today, always show up as higher when viewed as "Listeners for yesterday" the following day.

Amy ideas?

 

[rocketradio]

Hi RocketRadio

We have refreshed the IP to Country database which is how the listener location is worked out on the maps. How does it perform now ? Unfortunately this method is never going to be 100% as it relies on ISP's correctly reporting locations of IP's back to the IP WHOIS databases.

Regarding the second (B) question. Could you give us some examples (perhaps with screen shots if possible) so that we can take a further look.

and said "

will do Support, I hope the question made sense.

As a bit of light marketing we mention places on twitter where we have listeners across the world. So if we've got a marker on the map of current listeners, we give them a shout out.

Several times other people have come onto Twitter and said "and me too in such and such a place".

Plus we know that we have several listeners at most key times in the Merseyside area, yet it only ever shows 1 or maybe 2 at most.

Also cant help but notice that neither Google Chrome nor Internet Explorer ever show up as a user agent in our stats.

But i will take some screenshots and get them over to you.

 

[General Lighting]

Plus we know that we have several listeners at most key times in the Merseyside area, yet it only ever shows 1 or maybe 2 at most.

are many of these listeners on VirginMedia ISP and living close together, perhaps in one bit of town or the same streets?

this ISPs often uses a device called a "transparent proxy" which a even larger router, sharing the internet connection across users in different houses. that is often what is inside the bigger boxes which you can sometimes hear fans inside and are connected to 230V electricity (there is normally a warning sign).

So all these houses connected to this box get the same external IP address, whereas 5 houses connected to a British Telecom broadband line get 5 different IP addresses

If you look at the Virginmedia hostname and have good local knowledge you might even recognise an abbreviated form of the region it is in.

I am not sure how the view current listeners deals with duplicate listeners from the same IP and haven't tested it (might do tomorrow after some rest if I get time) but this could make it under report the listeners (and similarly with any other ISP using the same cable technology, or people in the same house/office..

 

[Support]

As a bit of light marketing we mention places on twitter where we have listeners across the world. So if we've got a marker on the map of current listeners, we give them a shout out.

Several times other people have come onto Twitter and said "and me too in such and such a place".

Plus we know that we have several listeners at most key times in the Merseyside area, yet it only ever shows 1 or maybe 2 at most.

Also cant help but notice that neither Google Chrome nor Internet Explorer ever show up as a user agent in our stats.

But i will take some screenshots and get them over to you.

Nice idea to engage the listeners that way

I'm not 100% sure on this as the centovacast code isn't open for us to inspect but it might be the case that several users from a certain area may be pinned to the same city location on the map.

Its unlikely Google Chrome or Internet Explorer will appear in the user agent stats as the user agent will be the flash (or winamp/itunes etc..) player. The flash player when used inside Chrome or IE will come up as "Mozilla 5.0 / Unknown player".

Hopefully the Centovacast 3 version (when it eventually comes out of Beta!) will have improvements on this.

8)

 

[General Lighting]

an update to this - its Party Vibe's birthday week (with many special live broadcasts), so I've been listening to these and keeping an eye on centovacast.

I was checking the sound is good on both large and small speakers, to do this I had both a PC playing the stream to my main system on a powerful amplifier and also the Archaos internet radio.both these are on my home network and there is a NATed connection to the Internet like how most routers are set up.

With both running at the same time, I thought I might as well have a look at how this shows on centovacast.

I can see my (external) IP twice on the list of listeners on Centovacast, but it does not count the second appearance of my IP as another listener!

I also tried a similar centovacast panel for Ipswich Community Radio and the same thing happened there.

However the list of hosts/players connecting is correct. it looks like there is some "feature" in Centovacast which does not count multiple appearances of the same IP as separate listeners, even though this could legitimately happen for a variety of reasons especially in multiple occupancy buildings....