Port 80 Streaming – Why and How?

A ‘port 80’ sounds a bit technical doesn’t it? Well, its a very simple principle, it is fair to say that many of your potential listeners will be at work, school, college or university during the day – thats pretty straight forward, yes?

The problem arises when these potential listeners want to listen to your radio station, but they cannot as the corporate firewall or network setup wherever they are working or studying from is preventing them from connecting to your SHOUTcast server on port XXXX – although there is no risk in listening to a streaming server, often un-used ports are blocked because they can ‘potentially’ open up a risk via other means to the network they are often blocked to prevent employees from playing games too whilst at work.

This is why we have introduced a port 80 streaming link. It allows the stream to bypass the normal XXXX port and go via port 80. Port 80 is a port which will ALWAYS be open on networks as its the same port as websites get sent through, the text you are reading on this blog – will have been sent via the internet to your PC on port 80, so in other words – if you can read this, you’ll be able to listen to a port 80 shoutcast stream.