WDR3 HD

WDR3 HD sits in the tail of Germany's 1,409 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.

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

WDR3 HD streams at 102 kbps, under Germany's median of 128 kbps. A lower rate is not automatically worse: speech carries perfectly well below the music threshold, and a station built for phones on a weak connection has a good reason to encode this way.

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.

Its audio comes from wdr-radio.ard-mcdn.de. Five other stations in Germany stream from the same host, which is a smaller sharing than the big platforms and often means the same people run them all.