Should Our Radio Station Be Affraid Of Bots/Rippers ?

Hi, I want to ask the question about " Should Our Radio Station Be Afraid Of Bots/Rippers ? ".

We get them on our steam and would like to know -
1) What does a bot do with our audio stream !.
2) Is it played out audibly their end ? if the answer is yes, then all the better for us getting the station to more ears, we would think!.
3) Apart from data should we really be worried about one or two, without fussing about with banning I.P.s ?.
Any thoughts!

TGrooves said:

Hi, I want to ask the question about " Should Our Radio Station Be Afraid Of Bots/Rippers ? ".

We get them on our steam and would like to know -
1) What does a bot do with our audio stream !.
2) Is it played out audibly their end ? if the answer is yes, then all the better for us getting the station to more ears, we would think!.
3) Apart from data should we really be worried about one or two, without fussing about with banning I.P.s ?.
Any thoughts!

Click to expand...

Here's some thoughts on the matter:

1) Hard to say although is its worth pointing out It's possible that these "rippers" are not rippers at all. They could well be misconfigured web crawlers that find your stream and just connect and keep "listening". The web is full of bots scraping things for whatever reason.
2) Possible although unlikely. See point 1.
3) Its going to be tough to eliminate all bots / rippers while keeping your station public and not impacting genuine listeners.

Rippers read the metadata and thus navigate to the beginning and end of track. I've been struggling with them for a long time, and after I found a way to randomly change the metadata, they disappeared. If you are using Sambroadcaster, I will give you a solution, if you are using Centova, I guess it can work there too, but I don't know how.