One of the principles of uncertainty is that the further out you go, the less control you have. Maybe. But if that were still true today, Gary Zocolo couldn’t do this: “Over the weekend, when we were having issues with the STL microwaves, I could sit at home and once the port was cleared, I could reboot the system from my desk at home.” ...

What separates the pros from the hobbyists in this business? The console, of course. By that standard then, a small community FM in Bendigo, Australia just went pro with the acquisition of its new WheatNet IP networked IP-12 console surface ...

If you have a fleet of codecs, you’re either dealing with a lot of live sports or news feeds coming into the studio or you’re really into logistics.  ...

If the following isn’t a testament to our ability to play just about any venue, we don’t know what is. Picture a large media center for a TV station, two radio stations, multiple streaming channels, and a statewide public media service. All in a five-story building, complete with two live performance stages for everything from a small orchestra and live bands to political debates. Then add the players: Ross production automation for TV, ENCO DAD playback automation for radio, and consoles ranging from our larger TV production mixing console to smaller radio surfaces and virtual interfaces…all tied together with WheatNet-IP networking. The studio gigs don’t get more fitting for us, a company with quite a few musicians, than WOSU Public Media’s new 52,000-square-foot media center located on the campus of The Ohio State University, Columbus ...

Our studio experts Chris Penny of Agile Broadcast and Marcus Bekker of Southern Broadcast weighed in on virtual versus hardware consoles in a recent Wheatstone sponsored panel discussion during #RadioWeek ...

In the spirit of the season, we asked AI for predictions for the coming year. After a long conversation with ChatGPT about “snackable” content, regulatory changes, media influencers and, finally, the inherent unpredictability of the future, we signed off and wished it a Happy New Year. The only sure way to predict the future is to create it after all. Here are a few events that stood out in our little world this past year, any or all of which could be telling for the future of broadcasting. Enjoy ...

Diversity and inclusion, now there’s a conversation we never thought we’d have at an NAB show. Every NAB is a turning point of sorts, but this year we happened to turn the corner on two very different studio trends: virtualization and thin technology (hence, our Best of Show awards). Our new DML digital consoles are uber-thin, yes, but not exactly the poster child for virtualization. That distinction is reserved for our Wheatstone Layers® Software Suite running on a local server or cloud. Imagine it then: a completely virtualized FM air chain with streaming, processing and MPX over IP running on AWS in one booth display and just a few steps away, a fully self-contained digital console as thin as most laptops. If you spent any time in our booth, it was hard to miss the obvious ...

If you think changing the tires on your car while driving down the freeway is impossible, try building new studios in place. It’s never cut and dried, especially if the build is for Chicago’s 24-hour NPR news/talk station and the place happens to be on Navy Pier on what is essentially a floating barge at the edge of Chicago. “The biggest challenge besides getting all the equipment and construction materials into the space was ‘what must we do to stay on the air?’” said Stephen Wright, Vice President of Technology and Operations for Chicago Public Media ...

Got a serious case of FOMO (fear of missing out) when it comes to AoIP? We’re going to let you in on a little secret. AoIP isn’t for everybody. If yours is a small operation, you might be better off keeping your studio routing and spending your money on replacing that 20-year-old console with a newer digital console instead ...

What is it about technical support lately that makes us think about paratroopers? Maybe it’s that with fewer CEs these days, broadcasters are turning to tech support to swoop in via remote access to solve problems and get the job done. Or maybe it’s because we manufacture the AoIP studio system that makes remoting in practical, or that we have a few brave paratroopers on the Wheatstone Tech Support team ...

Is metadata important? “I don’t think so… I know so.” Those are the words of Cris Alexander, DOE for Crawford Broadcasting, a WheatNet IP shop that recently added Streamblade appliances for provisioning, processing, and managing streams and metadata. In a recent Crawford newsletter article, he talked about the importance of doing a “metadata audit,” why he signed up for DTS Autostage, and how different radio displays use RDS/RBDS data differently and what he’s doing about it ...

For a DIY project that could only happen in radio, Burley Stapley devised a talk timer using a Raspberry Pi, an Air 4 console, and a little help from ChatGPT ...

We’re rethinking how to build a radio station. It wasn’t too long ago that you needed a studio for every station and a fader for every source in that studio. Then along came AoIP, and with it, every source on every fader and the shrinking size and number of studios needed. Now, with automation systems like Zetta, WideOrbit, and ENCO tightly integrated into WheatNet IP, we can do even more with less. “The automation system is now essentially driving things so when I hit the button to put my live show on air, the automation comes in and lays out all the faders and away we go. That changes the way we think about building studios,” commented our Tech Support Engineer John Davis, who commissions dozens of WheatNet IP studios every year ...

Sometime in April the Internet crossed a major sound barrier. Researchers transferred 301 Tbps of data across a single standard optical fiber, the equivalent of transferring 1,800 4K movies over the internet in one second and 4.5 million times faster than the average home broadband speed today. And to think, we used to consider a gigabit-per-second fast! At the rate things are going, we will all be ziplining live media across distance and space soon. Not so fast. In order for the real world to catch up to those speeds—and by ‘real world’ we mean live-streaming audio or video between studios, sports venues, and cloud server farms—we’ll need a much more robust IP transport protocol ...