BBC Arabic

Position 94 of 466 in the United Kingdom. The ordering is a click count and nothing more, but at this depth it still separates stations meaningfully, which stops being true further down the same list.

A Arabic station transmitting from the United Kingdom is a rarity in this data: two of the country's entries carry that language, against a listing whose commonest is English. Combinations like this are the reason the site indexes language separately from country.

The shelf for the language holds 199 stations, led by Algeria. A station like this one broadcasting from the United Kingdom is what stops that shelf from being a second copy of one country's hub.

At 56 kbps this is one of the lowest rate streams on the United Kingdom's dial, whose median is 128 kbps. It will hold a connection almost anywhere, which is the tradeoff being made.

Its audio comes from stream.live.vc.bbcmedia.co.uk. Three other stations in the United Kingdom stream from the same host, which is a smaller sharing than the big platforms and often means the same people run them all.

The station's site is at stream.live.vc.bbcmedia.co.uk, which sits under the .uk country domain rather than the United Kingdom's. That mismatch is usually mundane, a host or a parent organisation registered elsewhere, and it is the kind of small inconsistency worth seeing rather than smoothing over.