Satellite distribution is expensive
So I looked into what it would cost to have PRSS (the public radio satellite system) give us a 24x7 satellite feed - which would make it really easy for any over-the-air station to broadcast us (since they already have the equipment for it in place).
It's expensive. $13,000 a month. A 12 hour a day feed would cost $9625. Add onto that the cost of a T1 back to Washington DC to feed their uplink - that's going to be about $1000 more a month, plus another $3000 or so for the Musicam encoding hardware.
I also talked to the folks from Clear Channel Satellite Services when I was at NAB. They're a bit less expensive; but with everything (the T1, sat time) it was going to be around $9500 a month with a 2 year commitment. The caveat is that most public radio stations don't have the satellite gear to receive the Clear Channel satellite feeds; on the other hand, most commercial stations do.
Alternatively, we could use an internet-based solution, the problem is that many of them now have too much buffer delay (10 seconds or more, vs half a second for satellite). There are low latency "over the internet" systems from Musicam, Comrex and others, but they require expensive hardware at both ends.
We'd love to get our programs out there in more places, but the non-internet distribution costs are still quite high.
Labels: NPR, terestrial radio, the new distribution
posted by Rusty Hodge at
Friday, May 30, 2008
3 Comments:
Satellite is cheap if you use an SCPC link. The uplink gear would cost about $20,000 and the satellite service would cost $1500 a month. You lease the uplink gear so you don't have a large outlay cost. Your affiliates would have a receiver and a dish at their facility and away you go. Let me know if you are interested in this, I would be happy to help out.
If buffering delay is the problem, why can't the radio stations in question pre-buffer? Also, if they want to use your station for a few hours late at night, a ten second once-a-day switch time is certainly not worth $10K/mo. to eliminate...
The issue is not the delay, it's not being able to accurately sync to a top of the hour clock. And because the buffer time varies on the player and connection, the delay can be from 5-20 seconds.
Since most or all of the stations that would take us are automated, they need to be able to cut into and out of a program right at the top of the hour. The programs we do for NPR HD affiliates are all timed to :59 minutes blocks, with a fade out at :59 minutes, 5 seconds of silence, a short instrumental song starts and fades out at 5 minutes before the hour, 5 seconds of silence, and then the next block starts.
Hopefully that will change in the near future, as automation systems take internet distribution into account.
Also, most broadcasters don't consider the internet to be a reliable distribution method. In fact, a lot of broadcasters only have DSL connections, not T1s, which often have 5-10 minute a week downtime windows.
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