Panorama FM

Panorama FM sits in the tail of Bahrain's 5 entries. The tail is the part of a directory that goes missing first, and it is the part worth keeping: the head of every country's list is the same handful of national broadcasters, and everything that makes a dial local is behind them.

A word on the ordering, because it is doing less work here than it looks. Bahrain's most opened station in this snapshot has only four recorded opens, so the ranking across the whole country is separating stations by a handful of clicks. Read Bahrain's list as a shelf rather than as a chart.

The gap here is large: 348 kbps where Bahrain's stations typically run 1066. Rates at this level were designed for dial-up and for mobile data that was billed by the megabyte, and plenty of stations simply never changed the setting.

The stream is served as an HLS playlist, which is the format broadcasters use to switch bitrates on the fly and the one a plain browser audio element will not open. Nothing is wrong with the station; the player on this page simply cannot follow that kind of link without a library. The extension carries one and handles it.