@Dunwyth said:

@bertoletdown - to answer your question..of course trouble-free streams happen all the time. Every festival, Yahoo webcasts, etc. etc. Those are all free. I was talking specifically about PAID, secure webcasts. That is a different species.

I am a longtime lurker, yes. But I know a bit about the tech involved, and it really is more involved then most people think, so wanted to give my two cents. Appreciate the dialogue happening here.

If you could educate me and others as to why a paywall makes streaming content more problematic, I'd definitely be interested in learning more about that.

Intuitively, it would seem that:

a. Charging for access limits your users and your traffic;

b. Once authenticated (i.e. logged into LP and having purchased the show which then resides in My Stash), you're just another user.

I guess I'm missing something. Premium Spotify members don't suffer more dropouts than users on the free service; in fact, I've never seen Spotify crash or sputter, going back to my early days as a member. I set my playback quality as high as it'll go, as well.

YouTube has a paywall for stuff like this, no? I suspect their paid streams are pretty reliable. Thank you in advance for whatever insight you can provide on the tech side of the equation.