Broadcasting a program to large audiences can be a very cost intensive task since traditional streaming solutions require large server farms to reach all interested listeners. With the StreamForge solution these requirements are drastically reduced. Each user downloads only a fraction of the total radio stream from the server and gets the rest from other members of the audience. Consequently, more parallel listeners can be handled per server and thus less infrastructure is required to serve the whole audience.

Like all distributed systems the StreamForge solution also requires a certain amount of communication overhead to manage connections between members of the audience and to guarantee the security and authenticity of the streamed data. However, due to its highly optimized design our solution minimizes this overhead to a negligible amount. Compared to a traditional file download from a web server only a low one-digit percentage of additional overhead is imposed. The advantages of the StreamForge distribution system outweigh the incurred overhead with as few as two parallel listeners. For larger audience this positive effect scales with the number of listeners.

Besides infrastructure and maintenance costs, license and royalty fees are also significant cost factors. Broadcasting radio over the web in a proprietary audio format can lead to additional charges ranging from licenses for specific operating systems to per-stream royalty fees. With StreamForge no such hidden costs exist. By default all our streams are encoded in the license-free Ogg Vorbis format. Ogg Vorbis is a well-established audio format which produces high-fidelity streams.