Best setup for live call-in show broadcasted to web?
 

Hi everyone,

I am going to be hosting a live call in show soon and have a question about what setup I would need to go for.

So far we have 2 microphones for the hosts, speakers, a webcam, and a voip service and have setup incoming calls, outgoing calls, queues and a couple software phones.

What I need to know is basically, what is a method to get:
a) the callers audio
b) hosts audio
c) the webcam video
to all be broadcast at the same time to a service like ustream.tv

I dont want the caller to be able to hear themselves.

What I THINK I need is a way to map the hosts microphones into one group to be sent to the softphone. And then another group that contains the callers audio as well as the hosts into one device to then be sent to ustream.tv

Thankyou!

Hi, and welcome to the site. :)

That's pretty much it. Or something like it.

In the "old days", when everything was wired, audio was controlled by mixer boards. I've been re-watching my Frasier DVDs lately, and it often shows Roz and Frasier in the control booth at the fictional KACL radio station. Roz sits at a desk that's essentially just a great big mixer board. It's the same concept here.

These days, much of this is done through software, especially for low-budget web-based broadcasting.

It's really just a matter of "wiring" everything (either with actual wires, or with virtual connections).

Another benefit of mixers is you can control and normalize volume for all callers and for all show personalities. That's also done in software now (or can be), so don't overlook that. Maintaining quality levels is just as important as everything else. A poor and uneven loudness volume between callers is a typical hallmark of amateur operations.

Do you have dedicated/VPS server with root access?

I haven't done the video but did produce an audio only show for about a year all in house. Look into Icecast, it supports video streaming. I'll explain the setup we used for the audio if you're interested but it won't work for the video.

For our show since we weren't having random callers we'd do a sound check before it started and I'd just have them raise or lower the volume on their own setup.