The delay on the Live365 network will vary between 30 to 60 seconds, with most broadcasters experiencing about 45 seconds. This delay is a result of how our infrastructure is set up and cannot be adjusted. 

As a content delivery network, our engineers have designed our infrastructure to optimally process thousands of streams each minute in order to get them turned around for the tends of thousands of listeners.

The most important thing to keep in mind is that your listeners have no idea that there is a delay of any kind. Yourself and your hosts/DJs should not be listening to the station as listeners during a live broadcast. This is what monitors, headphones, and "mix down" or "mix out" jacks on mixers or sound cards are for.

The signal (which should be on a wired connection, never WiFi), travels to your Internet provider and the Internet backbone. Then, the data packets are routed to one of our data centers. We ingest the data you are sending to us and route it to the ingest point of your Live365 dashboard.

The stream you send to us is then minimally processed by our streaming server software. This includes light volume normalization and analysis for transcoding the stream to lower bit rates for listeners with reduced bandwidth connections.

While here, this is where the logs for licensing and royalty reporting are generated by our systems. This is also the layer where ad insertion takes place.

Total time: 15 to 20 seconds.

Your live stream then exits the station/dashboard side of things and is populated among our master streaming servers. Next, through a load-balancing mechanism, your stream is then distributed through our edge servers and this work to get the stream closer to the listeners. The stream must then travel through the Internet backbone until the local Internet provider routes it through the network going to the listener's player.

Total time: 5 to 20 seconds.

Our system is quite similar to that of TV networks, Netflix, and other CDN's, all of which have a delay.