I especially hate that at my weekend job. I work at a radio station. When I bring up something on the studio computer and it has sound it automatically goes out over the air!
A local station sends it's audio through the internet to the transmitter. I had called and asked why there were so many breaks in the broadcast (like a second or two every 10-15 minutes or less) and he explained that the Cell Phone Company gets overloaded and his bandwidth breaks up.
I asked him if sending through the internet was the way to go, and he said yes. Lots of stations are doing it this way. I assumed he was transmitting MP3 type of format, and asked if quality was a concern. He answered that it actually sounds better now. (i did NOT verify it was MP3, but send wav via internet and see how much bandwidth you'd need and do the math).
This is a an oldies station, and a pretty good one, except they play a lot of unknown oldies IMO. Anyway, so I'm listening after that, and I recognize what seems to be MP3 distortion especially during commercials. It's always bad, some songs are worse than others.
My question is: Is it common or desired to do radio this way? I don't mind MP3, as long as the quality it up there like 128K+
And, you can almost always turn off certain aspects of multimedia inside the browser settings. Look for it.
