Offline Station Capacity vs Online Station Capacity

[solaxun]

Offline stations have ~3 hours of playback, according to Pandora.  How many hours to the equivalent online stations have?  I'm trying to get a sense for "how much" of a station is preserved when in offline mode.

Thanks!

[AdamPandora · Accepted solution]

Good question, @solaxun!

In short, your online stations will continue to play as long as you are interacting with the website/app. So there isn't necessarily a "time limit" on any given station.

This being said, keep in mind that the timeout message comes up when we detect that you have not interacted with the player for a while. This is in place to avoid playing music to empty rooms and helps reduce our streaming costs.

Since we pay full royalties on every song we play, having a timeout interval enables us to prevent streaming endlessly to unattended devices. Ultimately, it allows us to maintain our current subscription prices.

When you encounter the timeout message, simply click or tap anywhere on the Pandora music player to continue listening.

Upgrading allows you to listen uninterrupted for longer periods of time. Pandora Plus subscribers have longer timeout periods than free listeners, and Pandora Premium subscribers have longer timeout periods than Pandora Plus subscribers. While you will experience fewer timeouts, the timeout policy does not go away.

Hope this helps!

[solaxun]

Thanks @AdamPandora  - what I was asking is a bit different though. I understand that the station plays forever (until timeout) but there are not an infinite number of songs per station - you eventually will get repeats.  My question is, how many unique songs does each online station have on average?

For example.. maybe "XYZ Radio"  has 1,000 unique songs, with an average length of 4 minutes.  That's ~67 hours of playback versus ~3 hours for the offline version.