Sky Radio Lovesongs

Sky Radio Lovesongs sits in the tail of the Netherlands' 302 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.

The open count against Sky Radio Lovesongs is two, which is enough to know the stream has been played through the directory and not enough to compare it with anything. Small counts are the normal case out here, and a ranking built from them separates stations by luck as much as by interest.

Sky Radio Lovesongs streams at 64 kbps against the Netherlands' median of 192, which is less than half the local norm. On a dial where 77% of stations reach 128 kbps, a rate this low stands out, and it usually means either a speech station that never needed more or an encoder that has not been touched in years.

The format here is AAC+, against a listing for the Netherlands overwhelmingly made of MP3. Both play in a browser; the difference shows up in how much quality survives at a given bitrate, where AAC has the advantage at lower rates.

Its audio comes from 25233.live.streamtheworld.com. One other station in the Netherlands streams from the same host, which is a smaller sharing than the big platforms and often means the same people run them all.