talkSPORT

In the United Kingdom's listing talkSPORT lands at 5 of 466, which puts it on the first or second page of the country hub rather than in its tail.

The open count here is 113, 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.

At 63 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.

talkSPORT streams in AAC while most of the United Kingdom's dial is MP3. Codec choice is mostly invisible to a listener, and it is one of the clearest fingerprints of which hosting provider a station uses, since providers default their customers into a format and few customers ever change it.

The stream is served from radio.talksport.com, which no other entry in the United Kingdom 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.