News Talk 740 KTRH

Position 549 of 1,481 puts this station in the middle of the United States' directory presence. The middle is worth browsing precisely because the ordering has stopped sorting by fame and has not yet stopped sorting at all.

News Talk 740 KTRH streams at 24 kbps against the United States' median of 128, which is less than half the local norm. On a dial where 49% of stations reach 128 kbps, a rate this low stands out, and it usually means either a speech station that never needed more or an encoder that has not been touched in years.

The stream is served as an HLS playlist, which is the format broadcasters use to switch bitrates on the fly and the one a plain browser audio element will not open. Nothing is wrong with the station; the player on this page simply cannot follow that kind of link without a library. The extension carries one and handles it.

The stream address on this entry points at stream.revma.ihrhls.com, which is where 176 other stations in the United States 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.

News Talk 740 KTRH and Halloween Radio are described by the directory in very nearly the same fields, which makes the differences between them worth stating rather than leaving to be inferred. This entry is named for a number, seven hundred and forty, and the other is not. They are filed in different parts of the country: this one under Texas, that one under Fun and Scary Halloween Hits. The broadcasters publish at different addresses of their own, ktrh.iheart.com and iheart.com.