Non-commercial infrastructure

Small stations should not pay data-centre prices to stay on air.

EU Media Relay carries live audio for community, campus and cultural radio stations that broadcast to a few hundred listeners at a time. We take one stream from the studio and fan it out, so the station's own uplink never has to hold more than a single connection.

41 stations carried

6 relay nodes

99.94% availability, trailing 90 days

What the relay actually does

A community station usually runs its encoder on an office connection with a modest upload budget. Thirty simultaneous listeners are enough to saturate it, and the thirty-first hears silence. Commercial streaming providers solve this for a monthly fee that most volunteer stations cannot justify.

We sit in the middle. The station pushes one stream to the nearest relay node. Listeners connect to the relay, not to the station. The studio uplink carries a single constant connection regardless of whether ten people or four hundred are listening.

We are not a hosting company and we do not sell anything. Capacity is donated by three university networks and two independent providers, and it is handed out to stations that ask for it.

Who we carry

Campus radio — student stations, typically term-time only, with sharp peaks around scheduled shows.
Community and municipal radio — local news, minority-language programming, municipal announcements.
Cultural institutions — concert halls and festivals streaming live sets, usually a handful of dates per year.
Archive projects — continuous playout of digitised collections that would otherwise sit unheard.

We do not carry commercial broadcasters, advertising-funded services, or anything that requires a listener to pay. That is not a moral position, it is a capacity one: the donated bandwidth comes with that condition attached.

Getting on the relay

There is no sign-up form. Stations write to us, we look at the schedule and the expected audience, and if there is room we send back credentials and a node assignment. Turnaround is usually under a week, slower in September when campus stations come back.

The technical side is deliberately boring: standard Icecast source protocol, optional HLS packaging for the web player. If your encoder can talk to any Icecast server, it can talk to ours. See the connection guide for the details.

Capacity note, July 2026. The Frankfurt and Helsinki nodes are close to their comfortable limit during European evening hours. New stations in that region may be assigned to Vilnius or Tallinn until the autumn expansion.