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Skype question

N

ncfradio

Guest
I know this has probably been asked a thousand times, but is Skype a viable option to broadcast weekly High School football games? We tried it a couple days ago and was impressed with the audio quality and virtually no delay. What are some downside issues with them? Anything else out there I should be looking at? Thanks in advance for your help!
 
I'd think the only problems with skype would be related to unreliable internet service, as a program it's pretty good.

They do ask however that you mention you are using skype if broadcasting commercially.
 
Skype is great for High School football from a Non Com view. You ARE paying if you are commercial right?

Indiana has Wifi in all gymnasiums and football fields. The big problem is failure. We carry a cell phone as backup. If Skype dies they call my home studio and I Skype the cell to the on-air computer. We use a JK Audio Remote Sport. This has a place to feed cell. If we use computer the same jack feeds our computer line in.

Log Me In works for controlling the board computer. (Playing underwriting announcements) Never try playing music over Skype. It sounds bad, at least.

Stations here have been using it for years. The quality beats any dial up line all to heck. One station had a retired dentist operating the computer and simple headset with mic into the mic input. We just used this for a State Fair Broadcast. Crappy low bandwidth midway wifi worked just fine.
 
I recommended Skype to my engineer for another project.

I am also going to *test* it at an away football game using a Verizon 3G usb dongle. Verizon has top notch service in our neck of the woods and we will still have good old pots online for backup.

Skype is very low latency and makes a big difference if your broadcast is on an fm. Skype is cool with it. Just get you liner voice to make them a sponsor of the game. It's worth a spot every half hour. Tell more people about them so they can grow and make money. It is a great help to broadcaster.

Look at how it is used on the TWIT tech network for video and audio. If it can handle that, a football game should be no trouble (on your own internet).
 
I've heard good things about it, but I managed to win a grant for our non-com so we got a pair of Comrex Access codecs instead.

I suppose the main factor in whether it works or not is the quality of your internet connection. Here most schools don't have internet available in the press box, or if they do it is so heavily port restricted or filtered that it's useless. We had a bad experience with Sprint 3G last season, not due to lack of signal coverage, but lack of network throughput for some reason. We're trying Verizon this time around and hoping for better results.

I'd think any decent PC at the studio end should work, as well as a laptop that has a proper line input, or used with a good PC card or USB sound card, for the remote end. Wire the mix-minus bus off the console into the sound input on the studio PC and presto, you've got 2-way comms so the board op can cue the remote guys.

Of course, have a cell or POTS backup ready to save your broadcast in case the IP connection dies.
 
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