Al Jazeera English (Live)

At position 11 of 15, this is one of the stations in Qatar 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 15 stations in Qatar here, this is the only one that puts breaking news first. The breaking news 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 6324 kbps, more than twice the 128 kbps median for Qatar. Bitrate is the one quality figure the public directory carries, and on this entry it is unambiguous.

The stream is AACH264, which is unusual anywhere: Qatar's listing is dominated by AAC+. Formats outside the common three are typically a deliberate choice by a broadcaster who cares about the encoding chain, and they are also the ones most likely to give a browser trouble.

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.