538 Radio

The directory lists five streams in the Netherlands under this name, told apart by a number alone. This page is number five hundred and thirty-eight. Nothing here is taken from the other four.

Out of 302 entries in the Netherlands, this one ranks 5. The upper quarter of a national list is an interesting place to be: well known enough to have accumulated opens, not so well known that it is the station everybody already had.

538 Radio has 64 recorded opens in the public directory, which is a real number by the standards of this data set. Most entries never reach double figures, so a count at this level means the stream has been found and played repeatedly by people using directory clients rather than the broadcaster's own site.

538 Radio streams at 128 kbps, under the Netherlands' median of 192 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 address on this entry points at playerservices.streamtheworld.com, which is where 32 other stations in the Netherlands 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.