Radioplayer Automated URL Reporter (RAPPORT)

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Dear Country Manager

Radioplayer is running some automated tests on every territory to report on any streams that appear to be unavailable to listeners. We are doing this to ensure that as many stations on the Radioplayer platforms are publishing valid streams to listeners and so improve the listener experience.

To begin with each Wednesday, we will send you a report generated by the RAPPORT (Radioplayer Automated URL Reporter) platform that will list the URLs that it has found that have been inaccessible in your territory when the check was made.

Audio streams can occasionally go offline for a number of valid reasons, for example, temporary power cut, change of equipment, change of premises, change of stream provider, and so on.

We want to identify those streams that are down for longer periods of time that could be offline due to, for instance, station closure, permanent change of stream URL and provider, long-term technical issue, etc.

An example report for Austria is shown below - which has only been selected here due to the small number of issues reported:

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The server response code is on the left, the stream URL is in the middle followed by the RPUID, and the station name is in the final column.

You will be most interested in 404 server responses. A 404 error is an HTTP status code that means that the resource that you were trying to reach couldn't be found on the server. To be clear, the error indicates that while the server itself is reachable, the specific resource giving the error is not.

On receipt of the report, please investigate why the RAPPORT platform has indicated that the stream is not available. It could be that the stream is geo-blocked and not reachable from Dublin, from where RAPPORT is running. We are working on a solution to run RAPPORT over a VPN to minimise the number of false errors due to geo-blocking.

Where audio streams have been geo-blocked then please report them to Bill Best (bill.best@radioplayer.org) and the stream URL(s) can be added to an exclusion list to remove them from checking.

Where a stream is genuinely no longer accessible then please take the necessary steps to remove it from the station configuration.

The end goal is to ensure that as many stations as possible on Radioplayer have valid streams that are accessible to the listeners.

Thank you in advance for your cooperation.