Why are streaming urls so difficult to find?

[George Kildare]

Does anyone know why Internet radio stations make it so difficult to find their streaming urls? I would like to include some of them in my enigma bouquets, but cannot find the relevant urls. I know that there are stream-finding programs, but I cannot find any that work easily on the Mac.

[Trial]

Hi,
most of them wants you to watch their ads which is impossible if you directly switch to the stream.

ciao

[George Kildare]

You are probably right. However, presently large number of stations are sent FTA over satellite without ads. I wouldn't mind paying something for such a directory or for an app that would enable the addition of stations to an enigma bouquet. I paid a small amount for Tunein premium that allows me to listen to tens of thousands of stations ad-free on my phone. There are many other such ad-free services, e.g. Reciva Radio.

[George Kildare]

Here are the most useful instructions for finding url streams that I have found. just It uses Chrome and works on a Mac.
https://gist.github.com/flyswatter/7357098