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I know a lot of popular streams actually. Some getting up to 400 listeners at times.
Having a dedicated stream hosted somewhere (rather than at home) is also better as it wont reduce your internet speed while you have many listeners, it's also up 24/7 so you can have people playing music at any time of day/night, even if your computer is off.
Most streams I know of get around 20-30 people when someone is on. I'm not sure why you were only able to get 5 out of 600 people to tune in.
A lot of the time, SHOUTcast servers consist of two parts:
- The SHOUTcast server itself (referred to as a the "SHOUTcast Radio DNAS", I forget what that stands for)
- The SHOUTcast Radio DSP (this is a Winamp plugin, although there's other implementations. It is what "feeds" the stream)
The person running the channel has the DSP running on their computer. The DSP sends their stream to the SHOUTcast server, which then sends it out to all listeners. This means that the person running the stream only needs the bandwidth for the stream (128 Kb/s or whatever they're using), and it doesn't increase if the listener count increases. If you get a sudden spike in listeners, your internet speed won't suffer, and listeners will not get gaps in the playback. The server is practically guaranteed to have enough bandwidth for all the listeners, so it's a non-issue.
I was referring to Davo claiming that the broadcaster would have enough bandwidth to support the listeners on his/her own connection, which is generally not the case.
That is why people buy/sell SHOUTcast servers.
why would anyone use shoutcast server hosting?
If you're broadcasting music, then you would probably have the bandwidth to support the limited number of listeners.
I advertised a shoutcast server i hoested (for free) to over 600 students on a public forum (me being a moderator). The highest members listening at any one time was 5.