Syria TV - راديو تلفزيون سوريا

Held against the 20 stations in Syria on this site, this one is in the leading three. The order is the directory's count of stream opens rather than anybody's judgement, which is worth saying because a leading position on a list like this reflects habit as much as anything else.

The directory counts 42 opens against this stream. That is well above Syria's median and it is the reason the station sits where it does on the country list, since the ordering is the count and nothing else.

Syria TV - راديو تلفزيون سوريا streams at 56 kbps against Syria's median of 128, which is less than half the local norm. On a dial where 67% 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.

Where Syria's stations mostly use MP3, this one uses AAC+. Worth a line only because it is a difference, and because the country page's format breakdown is one of the quicker ways to see which providers a national dial runs on.

The stream is served from stream2.syria.fm, which no other entry in Syria uses in this snapshot. Nothing else in the listing shares its fate: if this address stops answering it is this broadcaster's own outage, and if it plays, it plays.