Heart FM (Birmingham)

At position 431 of 466, this is one of the stations in the United Kingdom 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.

Heart FM (Birmingham) has a zero in the directory's open count. It is the least interesting number on this page and the one most likely to be misread, so it is worth being plain: it measures traffic through radio-browser, not audience.

At 48 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.

The stream address on this entry points at media-ssl.musicradio.com, which is where 26 other stations in the United Kingdom 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.

The station's site is at heart.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.