iHeart Countdown

iHeart Countdown is deep in the United States' listing, at 959 of 1,481. Down here the ordering barely orders anything: the difference between one position and the next is often a single recorded open, so treat the neighbours below as a shelf rather than as a ranking.

Two stations in the United States lead with the tag contemporary country, and iHeart Countdown is one of them. That is a small enough group to hear end to end, and the tags are the broadcasters' own words rather than a classification imposed here.

At 24 kbps this is one of the lowest rate streams on the United States' dial, whose median is 128 kbps. It will hold a connection almost anywhere, which is the tradeoff being made.

iHeart Countdown publishes an HLS stream. That is a modern and perfectly good way to broadcast, and it is also why the button on this page may not start it: HLS needs a player that can read a playlist and fetch segments, which a browser audio tag does not do on its own.

The audio comes from stream.revma.ihrhls.com, and 176 other stations in the United States 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 States' listing stops answering at once and nothing is wrong with any of the stations in it.

Of everything the directory lists in United States, the entry this page reads closest to is 95.5 Buzz HD2, so it is worth setting out what separates the two. The other entry records Miami, Florida as its region, and the directory holds no region for this one. The broadcaster tagged this entry contemporary country and countdown, which the other entry is not tagged with. The other entry carries the 2000s, 90s, alternative and rock tags and this one does not. The broadcasters publish at different addresses of their own, iheartradiocountdown.iheart.com and buzzwpb.iheart.com.