DW English HD

At position 992 of 1,409, this is one of the stations in Germany that almost nobody arrives at by browsing. That is the case for having a page at all. A station reachable only by knowing its name is a station most directories lose.

Among 1,409 stations in Germany here, this is the only one that puts 3sat first. The 3sat rail below therefore leaves the country entirely, which is the more interesting direction to travel from a page like this.

The stream is encoded at 1061 kbps, more than twice the 128 kbps median for Germany. Bitrate is the one quality figure the public directory carries, and on this entry it is unambiguous.

DW English HD streams in AAC while most of Germany's dial is MP3. Codec choice is mostly invisible to a listener, and it is one of the clearest fingerprints of which hosting provider a station uses, since providers default their customers into a format and few customers ever change it.

This one is HLS, a segmented format rather than a single continuous stream. It is worth knowing because the failure is specific and fixable rather than a dead station: the address works, the browser just cannot open that shape of address unaided.

The stream is served from dwamdstream102.akamaized.net, an address one other entry in Germany uses as well. A small shared host is usually a group of stations under one owner or one technical provider rather than a platform.