posted on Jul, 8 2013 @ 06:54 AM
[Reality check]
Live shows require an awful lot of commitment, time and energy that - unless people are truly dedicated or, frankly nuts (the ATS live crew runs under
both banners) makes them difficult to do.
The beauty of the live shows we do at the present moment is that both Semper and myself have the SAM broadcast software and the ability to hook it
into Skype (its no mean feat, believe me, it took me months to figure it out) and as such can run independently on either side of the pond. Most of
the crew are settled and have no other committments on the nights we broadcast (except me, and I simply have no life!! LOL )
You either need two PC's and a lot of luck with sound cards or a copy of the Virtual Audio Cable software and the blessing of a deity that your PC
can handle running it while processing a Skype call and broadcasting to the internet - if you listen to shows 1-30 you'll see that I actually didn't
have that set up (although I covered it well!) and trying to do so with overclocking and tweaking a PC resulted in one of my cores actually
melting!
To get a level of clarity and avoid buffering you also need a fibre optic connection running at 100MB or more to ensure your bandwidth doesn't drop
to a level that you can't broadcast.
I now run an eight core Intel i7 with 12GB of memory and a 150MB fibre connection. Semper runs similar.
The SAM software runs in at $300 per license which is also a hefty expenditure - so unless you can persuade Semper to engineer a show for you there is
that outlay as well (with you guys being in the US time zones)
We start planning Live midweek, every week and believe me its a hefty job to fill three hours.
[/end of reality check]
There may be cheaper ways to do it, but that's the reason why podcast shows are easier
With that out of the way, if you guys can find a way to do it all then I'd LOVE to accommodate it, seriously, but I wanted to make sure you knew what
we go through - we do make it sound easy but that's because we've done it for so long. Behind the scenes there are times when both Semper and myself
have come close to melting down literally with seconds to spare before we go live and the highs and lows behind the scenes are enormous.