France Culture

France Culture ranks 39 among 710 stations in France. High enough that the country hub carries it in its own tables, and far enough from the head that the neighbours below are a genuinely different set of stations from the famous ones.

The directory counts 31 opens against this stream. That is well above France's median and it is the reason the station sits where it does on the country list, since the ordering is the count and nothing else.

The directory carries no bitrate for France Culture. The field is filled from what the stream's own server reports when it is scanned, so an empty one usually means a server that answers without announcing itself rather than a bad stream. France's stations that do report come in at a median of 128 kbps, for whatever that is worth as a guess.

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.

The stream address on this entry points at stream.radiofrance.fr, which is where 35 other stations in France are served from as well. Platforms of that size carry the long tail of a country's dial, and they are the reason a listing can look broken when it is one host having a quiet hour.

Of everything the directory lists in France, the entry this page reads closest to is FIP (no pub), so it is worth setting out what separates the two. The other entry records no pub as its region, and the directory holds no region for this one. The other entry carries the eclectic, m3u8, public radio and radio france tags and this one does not.