Heart Xmas

Heart Xmas sits in the tail of the United Kingdom's 466 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.

Heart Xmas is the only station in the United Kingdom whose first tag is international, out of 466 with pages here. Tags come from the broadcasters themselves, so this says the station describes itself in a way no other entry in the United Kingdom does, which is a narrower and more honest claim than saying it is the country's only international station.

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 audio comes from media-ssl.musicradio.com, and 26 other stations in the United Kingdom are served from the same address. That is a streaming platform carrying many broadcasters rather than a station running its own server, which is worth knowing for a practical reason: when a platform has a bad night, a whole block of the United Kingdom's listing stops answering at once and nothing is wrong with any of the stations in it.