Internet streaming company StreamGuys and IP audio equipment manufacturer Barix, with a little help from Barix’s Swiss neighbor MOH Technologies, have developed an IP audio system with the capability of handling local ad/spot insertions, painlessly.
Showing a system at the IBC show, Barix, et al. claim to have solved a key problem. Generally, it is difficult to insert local ads into and a live audio-over-IP stream. It usually requires delaying or holding the IP audio in a buffer while the local ad is played and then restarting the IP audio stream.
This new system offers the luxury of an almost hands-free operation for a local station. The key to the systems is MOH’s Adiosys middleware and Barix’s Barix Real-Time Protocol (BRTP) IP audio standard.
The operation goes something like this: a station uses a Barix encoder (e.g., the Instreamer 100) to encode a stations signal and send it to a StreamGuys server. That server has MOH’s Adiosys loaded onto it along with a station’s local spots, jingles, FX (if necessary), etc. Without even having to decode the digitized audio, Adiosys is capable of inserting the ads, spots, everything on-the-fly according to a schedule provided by the station.
The now spot-loaded (and fully FX-assembled if necessary) audio then is redirected back to the station, transmitter, and/or Web streaming server where it is decoded by a Barix decoder such as the Exstreamer 100. According to Barix, latency is kept to a minimum.
