LBC UK

Held against the 466 stations in the United Kingdom 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 open count here is 264, a figure only a few hundred stations in the whole directory reach. It is a fair signal that the stream is reliable as well as popular, because a dead stream stops accumulating opens quickly once clients start failing on it.

News talk is the station's own leading tag and no other entry in the United Kingdom uses it that way. Worth reading as self-description: the directory takes tags as broadcasters type them and does not reconcile them.

Worldwide it ranks 1 among 30 news talk entries, which is worth roughly as much as the count behind it and no more.

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.