Avalanche,
I happened to trial XSquawk today (both SP and ND) and it worked perfectly. XSquawk requires that your PC have a static IP address, and if you have a firewall, ports 2094 and 2095 must be opened for the XSquawk servers at 160.79.229.118 and 119. If you use ZoneAlarm, add those server IPs to the Local Zone.
You didn't ask, but I'll post my review here in case anyone else is interested. To use XSquawk, a client "player" must be downloaded from
http://www.xsquawk.com. The user registers at the website, and the registration password is used to access the broadcast. There are two different feeds. One for SP and one for ND. At this time, both feeds are no cost.
The SP feed started about 9:15 ET. From 9:15 to open it sounds like the guy is playing solitaire. The background sounds are also very clear. You might hear guys talking about fishing, the market action on Friday, another kind of action on Saturday, etc.
From the open and through the day, you're hearing the continuously updated bid/offer along with mentions of various market participants and other commentary. Anyone's voice around the open mic gets picked up. When price action is volatile, in addition to more excited reporting, you'll hear the increased pitch of the crowd noise in the background. The sound quality of the feed is very good. Nothing is garbled or hard to understand.
As far as usefulness goes, well, it's not for me. It didn't add anything. It's probably safe to say that anyone with charts and any experience already sees what's going on, and doesn't need the audio play-by-play. I found the audio to be just one more layer of market data input adding to the workload. Also, I didn't find all the frantic reporting and pitched crowd noise at key times to be helpful at all. It was distracting. Depending on the user, such auction-fever influences at key times might actually interfere.
So, the squawk box tested great but didn't add anything to the bottom line.