Doesn’t this fall under the umbrella of you get what you pay for? I’ll bet that a TV station pays many bucks for dedicated bandwidth on the satellite.

I’m sure that you could have had a dedicated T1 installed in the booth at the PNME.

I don’t think that this is a technology issue, I think it is a money issue. The technology exists to give you a dedicated 10Gbps link from the PNME to your door step, but I don’t think you would want to pay the price.

What doesn’t exist is a way to make enough money from a podcast to pay for it.

Even if the upstream bandwidth was there, 802.11 is not designed for large number of users and degrades rapidly. You may have had better luck with a wired connection. I assume you thought of using an EVDO card? I have much better luck using mine at conferences than trying to use a WiFi connection.

“What doesn’t exist is a way to make enough money from a podcast to pay for it.”

Now that is a short sighted point of view.

I could launch a podcast today and by tomorrow have thousands of dollars in my bank account with no sponsors or ad buys.

What people do not realize is that all you need to do is have a premium podcast which you charge for and attach an affiliate program to it where you reward for referrals.

People pay for content.

And that is precisely what Paul Colligan is speaking about at the Podcast Expo as well as the technology that the Premiumcast.com booth is launching to the public at:

http://www.Premiumcast.com

I think a major part of the experiment for Cali and Neal was to see if acceptably good results could be achieved on a shoestring budget. For that environment, with those demands on the available network, the answer for the moment appears to be no. But we’re all doing things today that we couldn’t have afforded to do a few years ago. That’s technology. Cali and Neal just want to be the first to know when it does become possible, and you achieve that by constantly pushing a little beyond what everyone else is doing. Keep it up, guys! You’re an inspiration.

Here is a suggestion on how to do it on a shoestring budget and yet get something that looks and sounds great:

1. Set up a camera and mic at the interviewer’s location.

2. Set up a camera and mic at the interviewee’s location.

have a cell phone or skype connected laptop using only voice chat and use low profile (hidden or small) earpiece and mic for the phone or skype voice conversation on each participant in the two locations.

Have the tapes of the interviews at say the podcast booth fedexed to you as soon as the inerviews are complete.

Edit and mix.

Now you have newscast quality content on a shoestring budget.

All you need:

One camcorder and decent mic at each location (wireless lavalier if you are trying to cut costs on remote location).

One low profile mic and earpiece for each location. One phone or cell phone borrowed from a bystander at each location that the mic/earpiece combo can be plugged into.

Presto.

@ Josh Anderson, a double ender would have been great, with a phone connection and camera’s on both ends. We tried audio only Skype, the the hall couldn’t handle that any better.

Ultimately, we’re trying to push what’s possible with just broadband because sometimes there is a need to interview someone who may not be a techie. I’m pushing for the point where I can interview my Mom on Skype if I want to, and I would want that to be possible with her not having to know much more than it takes to make a phone call.

Cali sorry things did not work out. We missed you and Neal very much. I took some video at the expo and will put a lot of it out later this week.

It was a fun experiment! Wish we could have done a decent interview. Latency was horrible, but it was fun to try non-the-less.