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Hi there! I'm the owner and operator of Broadcastify, which is the platform that powers all the apps that provide police scanners and public safety communicati

Hi there! I'm the owner and operator of Broadcastify, which is the platform that powers all the apps that provide police scanners and public safety communications online. I'm an active HN reader and would be glad to answer any questions folks have. It's an interesting business to be in these days...

kennxfl 6y ago
Is there a way of legitimately detecting Stingrays? I understand this is the kind of situation where they are actively deployed despite all the social awareness.
- millzlane 6y ago
  I remember a few apps that you could watch the towers in your area and be alerted or warned when new ones popped up. But one app needed to be trained to remember the towers in your area. Something like this maybe? https://f-droid.org/en/packages/info.zamojski.soft.towercollector/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/info.zamojski.soft.towercoll...
- oasisbob 6y ago
  University of Washington researchers are working on this, their technique has used roaming car sharing vehicles and anomaly analysis: https://seaglass.cs.washington.edu/ https://seaglass.cs.washington.edu/
- krageon 6y ago
  You can look up where the towers are and perform triangulation on the ones that you are connected to given multiple antennae. It'll cost you some hardware and you'll probably be writing some software also. Another option can be just seeding a few phones around the area and have them report moving (or transient) towers.
- swebs 6y ago
  I guess if you were to build a map of static cell towers, it would be easy to see if a new one suddenly pops up.
  - jackhack 6y ago
    additional temporary "towers" are sometimes added when very high but transient network loads are anticipated (such as a music festival, or county fair, etc.). not all new towers are sniffers.
    - g_p 6y ago
      If anyone is interested in trying to work around this, I have a few ideas for how to try distinguish a real and fake cell. Temporary event "pop-up" networks should announce valid neighbouring cells. Your baseband (radio) might expose neighbour cell data - iPhone field test menu shows the announced neighbour data. Hypothesis is that a rogue tower will not have valid neighbour cells announced. They could try listen in for valid ones and advertise those. A lot of the ways to detect will depend on the generation of network being spoofed - 4G networks will also advertise signalling for legacy 2G and 3G circuit switched networks. Rogue sites might not.
- LinuxBender 6y ago
  Sweet talk a cellular network engineer into giving you the engineering firmware for your phone and a list of all the cell ID's.
  - gruez 6y ago
    stingrays can't spoof cell ids?
    - LinuxBender 6y ago
      They can and do, but they and the other cell sites can't up and move around. All cell sites have multiple transceivers that are directional. Each site has a unique cell ID and each transceiver has a unique ID. Your phone has GPS. If you drive around, you can find out who doesn't belong. Be careful about publicly disclosing this information.
      - ISL 6y ago
        The disclosure of facts is protected by the First Amendment.
        lawnchair_larry 6y ago
        There are sometimes non-legal reasons to be careful.
        elihu 6y ago
        That isn't universally true.
        vertex-four 6y ago
        I dunno if you noticed, but the law doesn't always exactly mean much in terms of what actually happens.
        gruez 6y ago
        Does that work for DRM encryption keys? I think sony went after a few people who leaked either the blu-ray encryption keys, or the signing keys for one of their consoles.
bochoh 6y ago
I was investigating starting a small personalized Scanner app with an AI twist but found that you're no longer granting licensees for mobile app developers - basically stopping all innovation in this area. "The broadcastify audio feed catalog API is only available to approved licensees. We are currently not issuing addtional licenses to mobile device developers at this time. " Can you explain the rational here?
- blantonl 6y ago
  Yes, it's pretty simple. There has been a proliferation of apps that all do the same thing - front end our feeds, and so we're protecting the investment that our core partners have made to write apps. We are extremely plugged in to AI efforts that are occuring around the use of our feeds, and so we have a pulse on what is going to work and not going to work in those area. You are more than welcome to use the feeds to develop AI models and present that back to us so that we could grant an exception, but the simple reality is that 99.9% of developers that want access to our feeds are simply trying to get yet another scanner app in the marketplace. It just dulites the environment, cheapens the brand, and presents a race to the bottom scenario in the app stores. I'll readily admit that we don't "know it all" and there could be some serious innovation out there, but the app store market has left a serious bad taste in our mouth of nefarious actors who will go to the ends of the earth to make a buck vs innovate.
  - bochoh 6y ago
    Really appreciate the feedback here. That makes good sense on the low quality money grabs.
  - VectorLock 6y ago
    Just wanted to say I appreciate how candid and direct your answer is, even though it might be displeasing to some people to hear.
  - dvsfish 6y ago
    Thorough and satisfying explanation.
_curious_ 6y ago
Interesting product/service! I've been familiar with it in the past but really used it a lot over this last week - thank you for offering a free n accessible tool. When, Why and how did you get into it? Does it generate meaningful/worthwhile revenue or is to more to cover overhead? (I only noticed the occasional 30 second commercial intro) Maybe you have a lot of premium subs? Why sometimes do certain cities/counties change their feed? For example one night the Minneapolis police were on a completely different county that was hours away. Majority of the time, these feeds are relatively low key right...with actual concerning/escalated incidents few and far between. Wondering: is there someway to us ML to identify specific things and provide push notifications to people in a given geography around that? For example it could listen for "shots fired" in a specific area and notify me via sms or whatnot when that occurs. And AI could be used to show more of an abstract map view if and when "violence" is rising based on action on the scanner, right?
- blantonl 6y ago
  My Grandmother had a police scanner that she used to listen to drama going on in her small town in Virginia. Old ladies with police scanners is still quite common. It sparked an interest and my parents got me one as a Christmas present. I spent many years in the IBM ecosystem as an technical SE, but developed an online database (RadioReference.com) in the late 90's that consolidated frequency information for all the municipalities around the world. When online streaming came to the Internet, I purchased a small business that was putting scanners online and launched it as Broadcastify. The business is wildly successful. Revenue is a split between paying subscribers, license and royalty revenue, and advertising. About 90% of the feeds are provided by volunteers who simply connect a radio to their computer and broadcast to us. The other 10% are actually provided by the agencies themselves. We probably turn over 20 feeds a day, so coverage comes and goes all the time. There is a lot of work going on in the ML / AI space around the content, but it is a hard problem to solve because the quality of the content diverges wildly. Vernacular differs. Coverage comes and goes. Organizations like Citizen, which have HUGE funding (60 MM lol!), are trying to solve this, but they still end up just employing armies of workers to sift through the data and audio and normalize it all. We're doing a lot of innovation in the space on our end, including using SDRs to vacuum up wide swaths of RF and then store call data, which is going to be the next "revolution" in our space. Interesting times...
larrywright 6y ago
Is there a way to report incorrect feeds? I was listening to our local scanner feed last night and growing increasingly alarmed at the amount of activity, until I realized that the scanner audio was actually for a larger city an hour away. I’ve listened before and it’s been correct, but last night it was definitely not.
- blantonl 6y ago
  You can always open a support ticket with us. Feeds are provided by volunteers so we battle quality issues all the time. It's a tough problem to solve.
z9e 6y ago
I don't have any questions but I'd just like to say how much I love what you're doing, thank you. When I was a kid I loved geeking out with my scanner I bought at radio shack, your site relights this flame for me and it's awesome to explore all of broadcasts going on in the world through your site.
- blantonl 6y ago
  Thank you for the kind comments. I started out in the hobby the exact same way, my parents got me a scanner for Christmas and I was hooked ever since.
save_ferris 6y ago
Do you have a sense of how many precincts are encrypting their scanner comms these days?
- blantonl 6y ago
  Every year new technology drives some agencies to remove their routine general dispatch operations from public access. Some agencies really like their communications to be publically available, and some don't. If I had to back-of-the-napkin it, I would say that 10-15% of all law enforcement general dispatch operations are encrypted full time. The vast majority in this country is still unencrypted.
- duskwuff 6y ago
  Not OP, but: many common voice encryption implementations have serious usability issues which lead to users inadvertently -- or often even intentionally -- disabling encryption https://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/p25sec08102011.pdf https://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/p25sec0810...
  - parliament32 6y ago
    That was actually a great read, thanks!
vidanay 6y ago
Is the poor audio quality a function of the participating scanners that feed your service, your infrastructure, or the current workload? My local feed is nearly unintelligible.
- blantonl 6y ago
  It is solely a function of the participating scanners. There is a report a problem link on each feed's page which allows you to let the provider know there is a problem. There are a lot of times providers simply don't know that there is a quality problem. Edit: there are also a lot of problem vectors. Poor reception, failing equipment, old equipment, and even the case of some providers that don't care and just rush a feed online just to get the premium subscription. Crowdsourcing content isn't always easy :)
PappaPatat 6y ago
Thank you so much for the possibility. I grew up with scanners and am truly reminiscing while listening on these intercepts. Here in Europe there is close to no police still using analog and listening to air traffic control or couriers just does not cut it for me. Bought the app, hope you'll be able to keep this up.
pmarreck 6y ago
Is there a way to listen to the broadcasts in a web browser without Flash Player?
- blantonl 6y ago
  We’ve abandoned flash as our default player long ago in favor of html5 audio. I’m not sure why you’d be seeing flash as a default unless you previously set flash as your default player.
  - yellowapple 6y ago
    When navigating via the map to Nevada, then Washoe County, the big button for "Launch County Web Player" defaults to the Flash version with no apparent option to change it. The other options below it seem to correctly default to HTML5, though, so I'm able to listen to RPD's radio chatter.
primogen 6y ago
Thank you for you this! For the last couple of years, I play Broadcastify combined with one of those downbeat live channels in YouTube while I code. This after I tired of http://youarelistening.to/ http://youarelistening.to/
- turrican 6y ago
  You may already be aware of this, but SomaFM has an ad-free version of this idea streamed 24/7. I enjoy it. https://somafm.com/player/#/now-playing/sf1033 https://somafm.com/player/#/now-playing/sf1033
kebman 6y ago
Isn't police radio usually scrambled? It is where I am in Norway. It was legal to listen to it before it was scrambled though. Not sure if it's legal to de-scramble it, if it's at all possible. AFAIK you can still listen to the ambulance channel, though, but sometimes the details are ... grisly.
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  In the United States, no. Police, emergency, first responder radio transmissions are generally in the clear. I don't know the precise history of it, but I have always assumed it is a combination of legacy (emergency radio in the United States is very old, and predates cheap and convenient electronic encryption standards), compatibility (first responder funding and maintenance in the United States is generally a local and state issue, so practices vary widely; for anybody to successfully come up with an encryption standard would require an unusual top-down standardization that has only been seen in extraordinary circumstances, such as after September 11th), and utility (in a disaster scenario where disparate groups coming from disparate points of the country might need to quickly ad hoc communications with each other, the absolute last thing you want is lives on the line while people are configuring their encryption protocols for their radios... Nor do you want to deny local volunteers the ability to understand where first responders are and how to get to them by having that information communicated in scramble).
  - simcop2387 6y ago
    This is starting to change, but it does take time since it usually requires replacing hundreds of radios at one time and a bunch of additional training on how to use the new radios properly.
    - thephyber 6y ago
      Yeah, San Jose just scrambled theirs 6 weeks ago. One article from 2015 claims only 2 departments in California did this for the primary radio communications, so things are changing that way.
    - 6y ago
autojoechen 6y ago
Is there a text transcript feature for users who may want to search through the communications? I'm curious how well those speech-to-text tools work for the audio feeds.
- mstade 6y ago
  I suppose maybe you can try running it through Otter[1]. We’ve used it with varying degrees of success when interviewing customers, and it’s also what powers Zoom’s transcript feature which is what we use these days. It’s hit and miss, in my opinion. It’ll give you a good enough base to refine the transcript from, but I’ve yet to come across a transcript that doesn’t need editing. (Which is annoying, since Zoom doesn’t give you that option.) I’d say it’s more valuable having the tool than not, but don’t expect miracles. (I’m not affiliated with Otter or Zoom in any way.) [1]: https://otter.ai/login https://otter.ai/login
- lunixbochs 6y ago
  Hi, this is a difficult problem but I've been working hard on it for a couple of days with some help. I have a pipeline and website that automatically transcribes scanner feeds that is working pretty well, and the website allows users to correct and vote on transcriptions. My goal is to train my own models on the corrected transcriptions (I work in the speech recognition space) so I can transcribe many live feeds inexpensively. I will respond with a link here (hopefully very soon today) once I've fixed a couple of remaining UX bugs.
  - ciarannolan 6y ago
    I thought there were some open source speech-to-text models already [1]. Maybe there's something unique about how these low-quality radio transmissions sound that make these ineffective? [1] https://voice.mozilla.org/en https://voice.mozilla.org/en
    - lunixbochs 6y ago
      I work in the speech recognition space and train my own models already. The existing open-source models aren't very good at noisy radio speech. I will specialize one of my models to this task once I have some data from the site.
kaitai 6y ago
Hey, just wanted to say thank you. I'm in the Twin Cities (Mpls/St Paul MN) and I've absolutely been on Broadcastify for hours in the last week. On Friday/Saturday night things were getting pretty wild near my house, and being able to hear where dispatch was reporting incidents was really helpful in being able to calibrate my sense of personal danger, to be frank. Just sitting on the front porch listening to the scanner and watching for cars with no license plates the last few nights... and using what I hear on the scanner to try to convince the guys with their impromptu militia that they ought to at least sit down in f*(&ing lawn chairs to indicate they're local instead of pacing around after curfew looking like the very folks we don't want to see (they had the police dispatched on them 3+ times). Broadcastify, Unicorn Riot, and some select trusted sources on Twitter have helped me understand much better what is going on as these protests unfold.
ISL 6y ago
Any surprises with the uptick in traffic? Do you see increased usage ahead of news-reports of protests? Also: Thank you! I've been listening to Broadcastify both at the beginning of the Covid-19 outbreak and yesterday, to track nascent looting <2 km from our home.
- blantonl 6y ago
  The past few months has resulted in us seeing record traffic and revenue... it turns out that people stranded at home due to stay at home orders are thirsty for entertainment and information. I can't say that I'm really surprised by anything anymore after all that has happened over the past 3 months :)
imjustsaying 6y ago
Your site helps me know what's happening when I'm in Chicago. Robert thanks you for your service and for checking those keys. o7
- ta0vb0ndsdf 6y ago
  Same, hope that robert stays safe out there (and remembers to check his keys)
  - Scoundreller 6y ago
    In Chicago, try this one. Much. Nicer because you can put different channels on each headphone and manage multiple feeds more easily: https://crimeisdown.com/audio https://crimeisdown.com/audio
- Scoundreller 6y ago
  I’m Chicago, this one is much clearer and interesting scanner: https://crimeisdown.com/audio https://crimeisdown.com/audio
rowawey 6y ago
Oh nice!! I was listening to your platform for NYC Citywide-1 for a couple of hours last night after someone in YT chat of Louis Rossmann's security cam feed (retail store that fixes Macs in Manhattan) dropped some Broadcastify stream links. https://www.broadcastify.com/listen/feed/32890 https://www.broadcastify.com/listen/feed/32890 CW-1 https://www.broadcastify.com/listen/feed/31439 https://www.broadcastify.com/listen/feed/31439 Manhattan
- pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
  https://broadcastify.cdnstream1.com/32890 https://broadcastify.cdnstream1.com/32890 https://broadcastify.cdnstream1.com/31439 https://broadcastify.cdnstream1.com/31439
ChuckMcM 6y ago
Thank you for your service! FWIW, this was one of the things I wanted to do and learning about SDRs made that possible.
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denkmoon 6y ago
I used your service to listen to emergency service radios during the recent Australian Bushfires. The fires got really close to my family's home, your service allowed me to keep up with what was going on in real time. It really helped. Thanks.
lerie1982 6y ago
I just wanted to weigh in here and say thank you for this service, I have been using it for quite some time now to monitor and follow emergency services in my area to report news. A truly awesome and bad ass service.
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mariojv 6y ago
Thanks so much for providing this service! Here in San Antonio, there were over 1000 tuned in a few nights ago. Some local news channel management asked reporters on the ground to leave the scene quite early in the night, so this service was really invaluable in helping me understand what was going on in real time. The difference between live local news and reality on the ground was drastic at times. How did you get into this business?
tzs 6y ago
In a few states it is illegal to use a police scanner while operating a motor vehicle unless you have a license from the FCC or permission from local law enforcement. Do any of those states consider those laws to apply to using one of those apps? PS: for those who live in one of those states (Indiana, Florida, Kentucky, Minnesota, and New York) a ham radio license counts, and the entry level ham license (Technician) is not very hard to get.
aviditas 6y ago
Have you considered putting the app on f-droid?

kennxfl 6y ago

Is there a way of legitimately detecting Stingrays? I understand this is the kind of situation where they are actively deployed despite all the social awareness.

millzlane 6y ago
I remember a few apps that you could watch the towers in your area and be alerted or warned when new ones popped up. But one app needed to be trained to remember the towers in your area. Something like this maybe? https://f-droid.org/en/packages/info.zamojski.soft.towercollector/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/info.zamojski.soft.towercoll...
oasisbob 6y ago
University of Washington researchers are working on this, their technique has used roaming car sharing vehicles and anomaly analysis: https://seaglass.cs.washington.edu/ https://seaglass.cs.washington.edu/
krageon 6y ago
You can look up where the towers are and perform triangulation on the ones that you are connected to given multiple antennae. It'll cost you some hardware and you'll probably be writing some software also. Another option can be just seeding a few phones around the area and have them report moving (or transient) towers.
swebs 6y ago
I guess if you were to build a map of static cell towers, it would be easy to see if a new one suddenly pops up.
- jackhack 6y ago
  additional temporary "towers" are sometimes added when very high but transient network loads are anticipated (such as a music festival, or county fair, etc.). not all new towers are sniffers.
  - g_p 6y ago
    If anyone is interested in trying to work around this, I have a few ideas for how to try distinguish a real and fake cell. Temporary event "pop-up" networks should announce valid neighbouring cells. Your baseband (radio) might expose neighbour cell data - iPhone field test menu shows the announced neighbour data. Hypothesis is that a rogue tower will not have valid neighbour cells announced. They could try listen in for valid ones and advertise those. A lot of the ways to detect will depend on the generation of network being spoofed - 4G networks will also advertise signalling for legacy 2G and 3G circuit switched networks. Rogue sites might not.
LinuxBender 6y ago
Sweet talk a cellular network engineer into giving you the engineering firmware for your phone and a list of all the cell ID's.
- gruez 6y ago
  stingrays can't spoof cell ids?
  - LinuxBender 6y ago
    They can and do, but they and the other cell sites can't up and move around. All cell sites have multiple transceivers that are directional. Each site has a unique cell ID and each transceiver has a unique ID. Your phone has GPS. If you drive around, you can find out who doesn't belong. Be careful about publicly disclosing this information.
    - ISL 6y ago
      The disclosure of facts is protected by the First Amendment.
      - lawnchair_larry 6y ago
        There are sometimes non-legal reasons to be careful.
      - elihu 6y ago
        That isn't universally true.
      - vertex-four 6y ago
        I dunno if you noticed, but the law doesn't always exactly mean much in terms of what actually happens.
      - gruez 6y ago
        Does that work for DRM encryption keys? I think sony went after a few people who leaked either the blu-ray encryption keys, or the signing keys for one of their consoles.

bochoh 6y ago

I was investigating starting a small personalized Scanner app with an AI twist but found that you're no longer granting licensees for mobile app developers - basically stopping all innovation in this area. "The broadcastify audio feed catalog API is only available to approved licensees. We are currently not issuing addtional licenses to mobile device developers at this time. " Can you explain the rational here?

blantonl 6y ago
Yes, it's pretty simple. There has been a proliferation of apps that all do the same thing - front end our feeds, and so we're protecting the investment that our core partners have made to write apps. We are extremely plugged in to AI efforts that are occuring around the use of our feeds, and so we have a pulse on what is going to work and not going to work in those area. You are more than welcome to use the feeds to develop AI models and present that back to us so that we could grant an exception, but the simple reality is that 99.9% of developers that want access to our feeds are simply trying to get yet another scanner app in the marketplace. It just dulites the environment, cheapens the brand, and presents a race to the bottom scenario in the app stores. I'll readily admit that we don't "know it all" and there could be some serious innovation out there, but the app store market has left a serious bad taste in our mouth of nefarious actors who will go to the ends of the earth to make a buck vs innovate.
- bochoh 6y ago
  Really appreciate the feedback here. That makes good sense on the low quality money grabs.
- VectorLock 6y ago
  Just wanted to say I appreciate how candid and direct your answer is, even though it might be displeasing to some people to hear.
- dvsfish 6y ago
  Thorough and satisfying explanation.

_curious_ 6y ago

Interesting product/service! I've been familiar with it in the past but really used it a lot over this last week - thank you for offering a free n accessible tool. When, Why and how did you get into it? Does it generate meaningful/worthwhile revenue or is to more to cover overhead? (I only noticed the occasional 30 second commercial intro) Maybe you have a lot of premium subs? Why sometimes do certain cities/counties change their feed? For example one night the Minneapolis police were on a completely different county that was hours away. Majority of the time, these feeds are relatively low key right...with actual concerning/escalated incidents few and far between. Wondering: is there someway to us ML to identify specific things and provide push notifications to people in a given geography around that? For example it could listen for "shots fired" in a specific area and notify me via sms or whatnot when that occurs. And AI could be used to show more of an abstract map view if and when "violence" is rising based on action on the scanner, right?

blantonl 6y ago
My Grandmother had a police scanner that she used to listen to drama going on in her small town in Virginia. Old ladies with police scanners is still quite common. It sparked an interest and my parents got me one as a Christmas present. I spent many years in the IBM ecosystem as an technical SE, but developed an online database (RadioReference.com) in the late 90's that consolidated frequency information for all the municipalities around the world. When online streaming came to the Internet, I purchased a small business that was putting scanners online and launched it as Broadcastify. The business is wildly successful. Revenue is a split between paying subscribers, license and royalty revenue, and advertising. About 90% of the feeds are provided by volunteers who simply connect a radio to their computer and broadcast to us. The other 10% are actually provided by the agencies themselves. We probably turn over 20 feeds a day, so coverage comes and goes all the time. There is a lot of work going on in the ML / AI space around the content, but it is a hard problem to solve because the quality of the content diverges wildly. Vernacular differs. Coverage comes and goes. Organizations like Citizen, which have HUGE funding (60 MM lol!), are trying to solve this, but they still end up just employing armies of workers to sift through the data and audio and normalize it all. We're doing a lot of innovation in the space on our end, including using SDRs to vacuum up wide swaths of RF and then store call data, which is going to be the next "revolution" in our space. Interesting times...

larrywright 6y ago

Is there a way to report incorrect feeds? I was listening to our local scanner feed last night and growing increasingly alarmed at the amount of activity, until I realized that the scanner audio was actually for a larger city an hour away. I’ve listened before and it’s been correct, but last night it was definitely not.

blantonl 6y ago
You can always open a support ticket with us. Feeds are provided by volunteers so we battle quality issues all the time. It's a tough problem to solve.

z9e 6y ago

I don't have any questions but I'd just like to say how much I love what you're doing, thank you. When I was a kid I loved geeking out with my scanner I bought at radio shack, your site relights this flame for me and it's awesome to explore all of broadcasts going on in the world through your site.

blantonl 6y ago
Thank you for the kind comments. I started out in the hobby the exact same way, my parents got me a scanner for Christmas and I was hooked ever since.

save_ferris 6y ago

Do you have a sense of how many precincts are encrypting their scanner comms these days?

blantonl 6y ago
Every year new technology drives some agencies to remove their routine general dispatch operations from public access. Some agencies really like their communications to be publically available, and some don't. If I had to back-of-the-napkin it, I would say that 10-15% of all law enforcement general dispatch operations are encrypted full time. The vast majority in this country is still unencrypted.
duskwuff 6y ago
Not OP, but: many common voice encryption implementations have serious usability issues which lead to users inadvertently -- or often even intentionally -- disabling encryption https://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/p25sec08102011.pdf https://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/p25sec0810...
- parliament32 6y ago
  That was actually a great read, thanks!

vidanay 6y ago

Is the poor audio quality a function of the participating scanners that feed your service, your infrastructure, or the current workload? My local feed is nearly unintelligible.

blantonl 6y ago
It is solely a function of the participating scanners. There is a report a problem link on each feed's page which allows you to let the provider know there is a problem. There are a lot of times providers simply don't know that there is a quality problem. Edit: there are also a lot of problem vectors. Poor reception, failing equipment, old equipment, and even the case of some providers that don't care and just rush a feed online just to get the premium subscription. Crowdsourcing content isn't always easy :)

PappaPatat 6y ago

Thank you so much for the possibility. I grew up with scanners and am truly reminiscing while listening on these intercepts. Here in Europe there is close to no police still using analog and listening to air traffic control or couriers just does not cut it for me. Bought the app, hope you'll be able to keep this up.

pmarreck 6y ago

Is there a way to listen to the broadcasts in a web browser without Flash Player?

blantonl 6y ago
We’ve abandoned flash as our default player long ago in favor of html5 audio. I’m not sure why you’d be seeing flash as a default unless you previously set flash as your default player.
- yellowapple 6y ago
  When navigating via the map to Nevada, then Washoe County, the big button for "Launch County Web Player" defaults to the Flash version with no apparent option to change it. The other options below it seem to correctly default to HTML5, though, so I'm able to listen to RPD's radio chatter.

primogen 6y ago

Thank you for you this! For the last couple of years, I play Broadcastify combined with one of those downbeat live channels in YouTube while I code. This after I tired of http://youarelistening.to/ http://youarelistening.to/

turrican 6y ago
You may already be aware of this, but SomaFM has an ad-free version of this idea streamed 24/7. I enjoy it. https://somafm.com/player/#/now-playing/sf1033 https://somafm.com/player/#/now-playing/sf1033

kebman 6y ago

Isn't police radio usually scrambled? It is where I am in Norway. It was legal to listen to it before it was scrambled though. Not sure if it's legal to de-scramble it, if it's at all possible. AFAIK you can still listen to the ambulance channel, though, but sometimes the details are ... grisly.

shadowgovt 6y ago
In the United States, no. Police, emergency, first responder radio transmissions are generally in the clear. I don't know the precise history of it, but I have always assumed it is a combination of legacy (emergency radio in the United States is very old, and predates cheap and convenient electronic encryption standards), compatibility (first responder funding and maintenance in the United States is generally a local and state issue, so practices vary widely; for anybody to successfully come up with an encryption standard would require an unusual top-down standardization that has only been seen in extraordinary circumstances, such as after September 11th), and utility (in a disaster scenario where disparate groups coming from disparate points of the country might need to quickly ad hoc communications with each other, the absolute last thing you want is lives on the line while people are configuring their encryption protocols for their radios... Nor do you want to deny local volunteers the ability to understand where first responders are and how to get to them by having that information communicated in scramble).
- simcop2387 6y ago
  This is starting to change, but it does take time since it usually requires replacing hundreds of radios at one time and a bunch of additional training on how to use the new radios properly.
  - thephyber 6y ago
    Yeah, San Jose just scrambled theirs 6 weeks ago. One article from 2015 claims only 2 departments in California did this for the primary radio communications, so things are changing that way.
  - 6y ago

autojoechen 6y ago

Is there a text transcript feature for users who may want to search through the communications? I'm curious how well those speech-to-text tools work for the audio feeds.

mstade 6y ago
I suppose maybe you can try running it through Otter[1]. We’ve used it with varying degrees of success when interviewing customers, and it’s also what powers Zoom’s transcript feature which is what we use these days. It’s hit and miss, in my opinion. It’ll give you a good enough base to refine the transcript from, but I’ve yet to come across a transcript that doesn’t need editing. (Which is annoying, since Zoom doesn’t give you that option.) I’d say it’s more valuable having the tool than not, but don’t expect miracles. (I’m not affiliated with Otter or Zoom in any way.) [1]: https://otter.ai/login https://otter.ai/login
lunixbochs 6y ago
Hi, this is a difficult problem but I've been working hard on it for a couple of days with some help. I have a pipeline and website that automatically transcribes scanner feeds that is working pretty well, and the website allows users to correct and vote on transcriptions. My goal is to train my own models on the corrected transcriptions (I work in the speech recognition space) so I can transcribe many live feeds inexpensively. I will respond with a link here (hopefully very soon today) once I've fixed a couple of remaining UX bugs.
- ciarannolan 6y ago
  I thought there were some open source speech-to-text models already [1]. Maybe there's something unique about how these low-quality radio transmissions sound that make these ineffective? [1] https://voice.mozilla.org/en https://voice.mozilla.org/en
  - lunixbochs 6y ago
    I work in the speech recognition space and train my own models already. The existing open-source models aren't very good at noisy radio speech. I will specialize one of my models to this task once I have some data from the site.

kaitai 6y ago

Hey, just wanted to say thank you. I'm in the Twin Cities (Mpls/St Paul MN) and I've absolutely been on Broadcastify for hours in the last week. On Friday/Saturday night things were getting pretty wild near my house, and being able to hear where dispatch was reporting incidents was really helpful in being able to calibrate my sense of personal danger, to be frank. Just sitting on the front porch listening to the scanner and watching for cars with no license plates the last few nights... and using what I hear on the scanner to try to convince the guys with their impromptu militia that they ought to at least sit down in f*(&ing lawn chairs to indicate they're local instead of pacing around after curfew looking like the very folks we don't want to see (they had the police dispatched on them 3+ times). Broadcastify, Unicorn Riot, and some select trusted sources on Twitter have helped me understand much better what is going on as these protests unfold.

ISL 6y ago

Any surprises with the uptick in traffic? Do you see increased usage ahead of news-reports of protests? Also: Thank you! I've been listening to Broadcastify both at the beginning of the Covid-19 outbreak and yesterday, to track nascent looting <2 km from our home.

blantonl 6y ago
The past few months has resulted in us seeing record traffic and revenue... it turns out that people stranded at home due to stay at home orders are thirsty for entertainment and information. I can't say that I'm really surprised by anything anymore after all that has happened over the past 3 months :)

imjustsaying 6y ago

Your site helps me know what's happening when I'm in Chicago. Robert thanks you for your service and for checking those keys. o7

ta0vb0ndsdf 6y ago
Same, hope that robert stays safe out there (and remembers to check his keys)
- Scoundreller 6y ago
  In Chicago, try this one. Much. Nicer because you can put different channels on each headphone and manage multiple feeds more easily: https://crimeisdown.com/audio https://crimeisdown.com/audio
Scoundreller 6y ago
I’m Chicago, this one is much clearer and interesting scanner: https://crimeisdown.com/audio https://crimeisdown.com/audio

rowawey 6y ago

Oh nice!! I was listening to your platform for NYC Citywide-1 for a couple of hours last night after someone in YT chat of Louis Rossmann's security cam feed (retail store that fixes Macs in Manhattan) dropped some Broadcastify stream links. https://www.broadcastify.com/listen/feed/32890 https://www.broadcastify.com/listen/feed/32890 CW-1 https://www.broadcastify.com/listen/feed/31439 https://www.broadcastify.com/listen/feed/31439 Manhattan

pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
https://broadcastify.cdnstream1.com/32890 https://broadcastify.cdnstream1.com/32890 https://broadcastify.cdnstream1.com/31439 https://broadcastify.cdnstream1.com/31439

ChuckMcM 6y ago

Thank you for your service! FWIW, this was one of the things I wanted to do and learning about SDRs made that possible.

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denkmoon 6y ago

I used your service to listen to emergency service radios during the recent Australian Bushfires. The fires got really close to my family's home, your service allowed me to keep up with what was going on in real time. It really helped. Thanks.

lerie1982 6y ago

I just wanted to weigh in here and say thank you for this service, I have been using it for quite some time now to monitor and follow emergency services in my area to report news. A truly awesome and bad ass service.

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mariojv 6y ago

Thanks so much for providing this service! Here in San Antonio, there were over 1000 tuned in a few nights ago. Some local news channel management asked reporters on the ground to leave the scene quite early in the night, so this service was really invaluable in helping me understand what was going on in real time. The difference between live local news and reality on the ground was drastic at times. How did you get into this business?

tzs 6y ago

In a few states it is illegal to use a police scanner while operating a motor vehicle unless you have a license from the FCC or permission from local law enforcement. Do any of those states consider those laws to apply to using one of those apps? PS: for those who live in one of those states (Indiana, Florida, Kentucky, Minnesota, and New York) a ham radio license counts, and the entry level ham license (Technician) is not very hard to get.

aviditas 6y ago

Have you considered putting the app on f-droid?