Red Fm

Red Fm is at position 4 of the 565 stations in India with pages here, inside the top quarter of the national listing. That is high enough to be reached by browsing rather than by searching, which is how most of these pages are actually found.

The open count here is 245, a figure only a few hundred stations in the whole directory reach. It is a fair signal that the stream is reliable as well as popular, because a dead stream stops accumulating opens quickly once clients start failing on it.

At 320 kbps, Red Fm streams at more than double India's median of 128 kbps. That is a deliberate choice by whoever runs it: bandwidth is the recurring cost of an internet station, and a rate this far above the local norm is money spent on sounding better than the dial around it.

Red Fm streams in AAC while most of India'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.

The stream is served from funasia.streamguys1.com, an address one other entry in India uses as well. A small shared host is usually a group of stations under one owner or one technical provider rather than a platform.