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SKYPE FOR REMOTES

S

Steve Eberhart

We started using Skype on remotes at my station, KGAF in Gainesville and the results are outstanding.

We did a 3 day remote in the Spring over Skype that sounded like we were in studio at the station.

We do an hour remote everyday from my home and you really can't tell I'm not at the station.

It really is on par with ISDN and FAR better than Marti, and the best part is you can Skype from anywhere in the world and it will sound like you are sitting on mic #2 in the control room.

Best part: It is F R E E !

All we use is a small notebook laptop with an air card. For simple remotes, we just use a gaming headset and if you have to interview someone you just pull the headset off and hold the set like a handheld mic...sounds awesome. You'll want to buy a gaming headset with a 20-20 band mic (I found some for $20 that sound GREAT). You will get mix-minus back from the station in your headset so you can listen for your cues or hear your board op talk back to you off the air...With the small laptop and air card, you can walk around with the laptop in your hand and be live on the air...!
For football where you need more mics, you can use a Shure mixer and run it into the mic input of the laptop.

You can even have VIDEO on both ends so you can give each other hand cues!

In addition, you can Skype over an iPhone and even the mic on the iPhone sounds very good...can even doing it while driving down the road...

I couldn't be happier with our results.

Is anyone else using Skype for remotes?
 
We use it as a back-up for our Comrex Access.

Skype as a primary is extremely reliant on the quality of your Internet connection. The Access is able to adapt to some poor conditions, but Skype rapidly will break down into stuttering and echoes and delay with a poor connection.

In our case, we use a Verizon Wireless broadband connection. If the cell is overloaded or the signal strength is inconsistent, Skype becomes useless.
 
Steve,

We use SKYPE as our primary remote feed and for ballgames. I have used it for over a year and a half now. With newer updates of SKYPE over the past year the quality and the amount of break ups, stuttering etc. has decreased tremendously. We use Verizon Broadband as well...Since the latest update which was in May I have noticed that the connection is stable but on the Cell Broadband connection the quality has been downgraded, although still 50 times better than our other alternative Cell Cast. We always have a cell phone connection for talk back to the studio because the two way communication in SKYPE can cause a lot of echoing and stuttering, SO we just send a one way feed so as to not screw up the bandwidth. Plus we always have that as a back up if the internet skype connection dies. The Upload Speed from the Broadband card is the key...Verizon is launching 4G LTE in November and rolling it out across the country in 2011 with Upload Speeds that will make SKYPE perform better. Different cell companies may over better speeds I have only used Verizon for this.
If I have a wired LAN connection it sounds like we're in the studio. I also have a USB audio connection which I hook into a mixer board and that helps with over modulation of the sound card. We have done two football games this month and the audio will sometimes have the blip or skip you get when talking on a cell phone. Nothing that is so bad its not airable. I wish the owners would buy a comrex access or something similar but that ain't gonna happen. This is our best option. There is a SKYPE BETA version out currently that I am going to try and see if the bad connection quality is any better. Each version gets better and better.
 
Skype is a very useful tool for broadcast remotes. Even if the remote location is so outdated to require using a dial-up modem on POTS, Skype provides better-than-analog sound quality. In this age of ubiquitous WiFi and 3G, there's no reason to buy a Marti-type RPU. Technologies like Skype, Comrex, and Tieline are easier and sound better.
 
I used Skype to co-host a talk show on a weekly basis. I fed the output of my mic processor into the computer I was using to Skype into the producer's location and it worked quite well. In fact I had several people tell me my audio sounded better than the host who was in the studio.
 
Henry:

We do tailgate broadcasts outside a major SEC football game every season. The stadium, as are most at colleges, is located in an area that is far less populated most of the year. Hence, the cell systems are not beefed up for the influx of 100,000+ people in the immediate area.

In the last half hour prior to game time, maintaining a connection to the network for more than a minute or two is impossible. If you do manage to hang on, the data throughputs are just enough to keep a VNC connection back to the studio so that we can put the phone on the air.

Since we are in the lower part of a Top 100 market, we don't anticipate seeing 4G for another year or two. We didn't get an early form of Verizon broadband (non-3G) until 2006.
 
rrlane said:
There is a GOTCHA with Skype. They do have terms of service for Broadcast. So it is not really -free-
http://www.skype.com/intl/en-us/legal/terms/broadcast/
Click to expand...

Well it's still free - but requires acknowledgment that Skype is being used. The 24-hour news channels do that with an on-screen credit, but the TOS includes radio too.

For a client remote the credit could be as simple as "I'm SRP broadcasting live via Skype from...". And for PBP, just drop a Skype mention in every 15 minutes.
 
If you talk about it it on the air then it's not "free". Advertisers pay good $$$ to have those type of mentions. You're receiving a service or product and mentioning it on the air. It’s got to be on the log and in the books (traffic/sales/accouning).
 
Got excited for a second on the possibility of using Skype for our remote call in talk show, then realized there is a delay which would cause major problems with our host trying to talk to the callers.
 
Hiya. Just wanted to add my two cents. We started using Skype for remotes and talk show guests recently, and it's been outstanding. Two highlights are a weekly paid programming show where the co-host is on the other side of the country, and a recent interview we did with a guest in Turkey. And I don't mean Turkey, Texas - I mean Turkey the country.

In all cases, Skype has worked *flawlessly*, and as someone stated earlier in this thread, it sounds like they're in-studio.

We set it up on a dedicated PC with a decent sound card, and send a mix-minus as we would with any remote device. The only wide variable is the quality of the microphone on the remote end. As long as the mix-minus is correct, echo/delay is not an issue.

These times, they are-a-changin. The internet has changed EVERYTHING. I'm a super-hardcore remote freak, and I've engineered over a thousand remotes in recent years. Everything from a Comrex Hotline/mic/phones to a fully-equipped Ford E350 remote truck with generator & Wilburt mast. But now we don't need all that any more. We don't even need remote engineers any more. Remote talent can show up with a laptop under their arm, boot it up, plug in a USB headset, and do the remote through an "air card. All set. Done. Fin. Zinp. Bing. It's that easy.

As much as I loved the pomp & circumstance of rolling up in big remote truck, there's something to be said for the microscopic simplicity of doing it all from a laptop, and having the free time to do all that maintenance around the studios & transmitters that I never seem to get done. =-)
 
Just tried out Skype for the first time yesterday and yes, it sounds great, computer to computer but there is another problem. I loaded it on a computer that also contained Adobe Audition which I use extensively to produce spots etc. It took control of the sound card as well as the functions away from Adobe and would not relinquish them even when not in use.
I removed the program and the problems ended.

I now have it on an alternative machine without Adobe Audition. Anybody had a similar experience?
 
YES. YES. YES. :mad:

The problem is not Skype. The problem is Adobe Audition. :mad:

AA3 does NOT play nice with other programs. It wants exclusive access to the sound card. We have it here on many machines, and simply playing something with Flash in IE or Firefox messes it up. Everyone here has been taught that if AA3 does not play or record, shut everything ELSE down, and then click Edit > Audio Hardware Setup, and set everything on all three tabs back Lynx (our sound cards).

I have gone so far as to try a crazy bass-ackwards workaround with two utilities I purchased called "Virtual Audio Cable" and "ASIO4ALL". Essentially what I did was to create a virtual "Y-cable" that Adobe could suckle on all by itself, and think it had complete control of the sound card. This worked, but, oddly, only on older/slower machines.

When I started trying it on our new/faster control room computers, it had severe clicking & popping do to huge buffer underruns in the ASIO driver. I haven't had time to figure it out; it may be as simple as increasing the input & output buffers to astronomical sizes. As it was on the slow machines, the buffers were already 16x larger than the default size. The help file for the ASIO driver said that in the end, the limit is based on system resources. But in the beginning, no matter how high I cranked them up, I could see no impact on memory or CPU usage. So...it's possible that "astronomical" wouldn't really hurt anything.
 
I need to know if you can do a talkshow taking phone calls using Skype. We currently use the Scoop Reporter on our talkshow. It works great with the host talking to callers. However, wouldn't this be a nightmare with Skype if there is a delay?

For example - our talkshow host, who is in a different city, would use Skype to send his audio to the station. We then would feed his audio through the board - allowing the callers to hear him so they could converse back and forth. But is there a delay between the talkshow host and the callers using Skype?
 
The amount of delay depends on the quality of the internet connection between you and the host. In my experience, the delay would be measured in hundreds of milliseconds.
 
I have not yet encountered _any_ audible delay with Skype. I would characterize it as less that the G.722 codec on the Telos Zephyr.

If it had much delay, people couldn't use it for phone calls. Just think of how frustrating a simple call phone call is with even a tiny bit of delay.
 
Re: SKYPE FOR REMOTES (Google)

Has anyone tried Google voice chat yet? It may be an alternative for Skype. Can't find any "broadcast" terms of service at google.
 
Thanks spinjector and PTBoardOp94. That's what I was hoping to hear. I would be interested to know if anyone has used Skype in the manner I mentioned - The talkshow host would be at a remote location using Skype and his audio would be mixed back at the station with the callers. I know TV anchors have delay problems when talking via satellite to reporters. I thought there may be similar problems.
 
Remember that even cell phone connections have a delay--but it is not between both ends of the call, only in relation to real time. (Think about it--you are on a cell phone with the studio--conversation seems in real time. But if you were to listen to the air signal you would discover your audio shows up on air a significant fraction of a second after you talk. Enough to throw off your conversation)

So there would not be a problem with a call in show. But using Skype or similar devices for a "live" remote where you need to hear the air signal would be difficult, if not impossible, without some kind of ifb feed back from studio.
 
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