Advanced Authoring

The glacial pace and inherent misunderstandings of bureaucracy and legislation hold true in the streaming world, like any other. Each live streaming situation has its own special issues to work through, and KPIG is no different.

Ad Replacement

The byzantine fee-payment system for most of the national advertising that runs on a radio station is administered by a trade union that represents the voiceover talent. Someone within the union decided that Internet streaming was very profitable. Based on this decision, the union set rates for Internet use at approximately 300% above the rates for standard broadcast use. As a result, many traditional radio stations have found the costs of running the same advertising on their streams prohibitively expensive and have ceased online streaming entirely. KPIG, showing practicality and common sense, chose to replace the ads in their streams with other content. For their MP3 streams, pre-encoded on-demand MP3 files are inserted in place of the ads. The Hiwire Windows Media system has extra technology built into the listener's player that instead inserts localized ads based on the listener's geographical location.

As mentioned earlier, the Linux Encoder #1 has two audio cards. The mixer output goes through the Behringer processor and into sound card #1. When the DJ's program broadcast is about to play an ad that needs to be removed from the Internet stream, the computer in the DJ booth tells Linux Encoder #1 the start time and length of the ad via direct network (TCP/IP) communication. Goldsmith's custom software on Linux Encoder #1 fades down the live audio input, mixes in some filler audio from a database of on-demand MP3 files, and when the ad is done, fades out the on-demand file and fades back into the live audio. In this way, sound card #1 is acting as an automated mixer between the live audio and on-demand files.

Ad start time and length are also simultaneously sent via a serial signal from the program broadcast computer to the Hiwire encoding computer. Because the Hiwire Windows Media player handles the ad insertion through the player on the listener's computer, no other preparation at KPIG is necessary.