[jedberg]

Ha too funny! I haven't heard the name Icecast in a long time. I know the guys who created Icecast. They did it because they wanted to run a radio station but according to them Shoutcast sucked, so they rewrote it from scratch as open source.

The reason it is called Icecast is because it was replicating the Shoutcast protocol, so that people with Winamp could play Icecast streams (Nullsoft made both Winamp and Shoutcast). The Shoutcast protocol used what were called ICY responses (which stood for I Can Yell) so they called their Icecast since it made ICY responses too.

This post unlocked that little corner of my memory. Fun!

ps. One of the Icecast guys worked on Ogg Vorbis because he thought that "mp3 sucked" and the other one is now a professor of Computer Science at USC.

[oggadog]

This was super interesting to find out, I always assumed that Icecast and Shoutcast were 'allies' or built by the same org. I've had a few things topple over during streaming but it seems that Icecast is the only one that's run without any issues, guess they proved their point!

[utopian3]

Thanks for sharing this bit of history trivia! Had no idea about he origin of Icecast or Ogg