Rays Baseball goes live with ACCESS

Andy Freed (left), Evan Longoria
and Dave Wills
Tampa, FL -- Ah! Spring is in the air. The smell of the grass and the crack of the bat. There's nothing quite like Spring Training in Florida! Fans of the Tampa Bay Rays have a lot to be excited about this year with a new look, great new talent and the prospect of 80+ wins this season. The Rays' broadcast team is also looking to score with fans by doing lots of great remotes this season. Armed with their new ACCESS Portable and Mixer, the Rays have been doing weekly remotes during Spring training for locations all over the Tampa Bay area.
Traditionally, the Rays have relied on ISDN or POTS for their remote broadcasts and ACCESS is usually in the "on-deck circle" as a backup. Well, at a recent remote at Champp's Sports Bar, Rays broadcasters Andy Freed and Dave Wills were all set to do their "Hot Stove Show: Countdown to Opening Day" live from the local eatery. But just moments prior to the broadcast, panic ensued when the ISDN line dropped and wouldn't reconnect!

Luckily, ACCESS was running and ready to go connected via Wi-Fi provided by the restaurant. It was a good thing too! The broadcast featured an interview with the Rays' new owner, Stuart Sternberg, as well as Rays' 3rd base prospect, Evan Longoria.

"ACCESS was connected and the broadcast was flawless. We were really up against it in the last minutes before the show and ACCESS really came through for us," says Rich Herrera, Rays' Director of Broadcast Operations. "We've been using ACCESS in a lot of different applications and plan to use it extensively for pre and post-game shows as well as various other remote broadcasts that we provide to our radio network affiliates throughout the season. Herrera continues, "We had been looking for a way to get mobile with our broadcast so we could talk to fans outside of the stadium or just be more spontaneous regarding our broadcast locations. By using widely available IP circuits like Wi-Fi, 3G cellular and broadband connections, ACCESS Portable is really the perfect solution for our operation."

Rays Sr. Director of Broadcasting, Larry McCabe
and Rich Herrera, Dir. of Broadcast Ops.

NPR Debuts ACCESS during Texas Primary Coverage

NPR's Don Gonyea

San Antonio, TX -- The Comrex email inbox has been pretty active these days with lots of great user stories and positive feedback about ACCESS! We were thrilled to read and hear (some of us are NPR junkies) that ACCESS made its NPR debut live from the 2008 Presidental Election campaign trail.

Charlie Mayer from NPR News writes, "The Comrex ACCESS debuted tonight on NPR at 8:07pmET from San Antonio, Texas.

NPR White House Correspondent Don Gonyea and producer Thomas Pierce used the ACCESS to talk live into All Things Considered during NPR's coverage of the March 4 primaries.

The ACCESS proved its utility in a situation where there was no time to order an ISDN line and-remarkably-no wireless internet provided for the press. Early in the evening there wasn't power at the site, so the battery was critical.

Our EvDO connection on Verizon Rev A was less than robust, but it worked. We suffered a delay of up to 1.8 seconds during our first live shot. That came down to about 0.3 seconds during our second hit.

I have attached an mp3 file of the ACCESS debut on NPR.

CLICK HERE to listen to NPR Audio

Thank you, Tom and Gino, for setting us up with this gear. We look forward to using it more as the presidential campaign grinds toward November."

Charlie Mayer
Director of Operations
NPR News

ACCESS "rubber" meets the BRIC road in Chicago

Chicago, IL -- ACCESS has certainly been thrown into a lot of situations lately where unexpected ISDN difficulties put BRIC Technology in the "go to" position to get the remote on the air. Chicago's legendary WGN recently found itself with no ISDN lines installed on the day of broadcast. Luckily, afternoon personality Steve Cochran was able to broadcast his show with the help of an ACCESS portable and a DSL line.

WGN's Steve Cochran

WGN's DOE, Jim Carollo, explains:

"When I bought the Access system it was partly because I knew in the future it might be harder to get ISDN and I was looking for alternate technology for our remotes. I did not think that would happen for a while but I got a surprise taste of it this past weekend.

Chevrolet's Camaro BumbleBee concept car

For the past 20 years we have had live broadcasts at the Chicago Auto Show. Some years it is only an occasional drop in but for the last three years we have been doing 9 consecutive days and two shows per day, including our entire afternoon drive show from 4PM until 7PM followed by a two hour sports talk show. For this show the client, Chevrolet, provides a space within their display area for our shows to originate from and they order the ISDN and POTS lines through the McCormack Place audio/visual group. For some reason the person ordering the lines ordered 4 POTS lines and an internet access line instead of an ISDN line. The display and lines are put in place the day before the first broadcast so we did not know until we went there to set up on that day before that there was no ISDN line. The A/V people could not get it changed before our first show so we were going to have to use our POTS Matrix unit for this show. I decided to give the BRIC a shot at this with the Matrix as a backup. It worked great. The delay was almost as short as ISDN and it was definitely less than the Matrix. We did all of our shows on Friday and Saturday on the BRIC. By Sunday we had the ISDN in place so we switched over to our Nexus with the BRIC being used as backup. It sounded great though. I used the AAC-LD algorithm. The most important thing is that the delay stayed constant and there were no interruptions or glitches during a 5 hour broadcast Friday and two additional hours on Saturday.

The attached audio cut demonstrates how it sounds. All of the voices you will hear are originating at the remote except for the traffic reporter at the end of the cut. I hope the audio is useful to you in evaluating the actual performance of the product. Needless to say, I was quite pleased to have the BRIC available."

Listen to file by clicking here:
WGN ACCESS Audio

Jim

James J. Carollo

Director of Engineering

WGN Radio
Chicago, IL

ACCESS....First in the Nation!!!

Dixville Notch, New Hampshire -- The last time we saw WOKQ's Mark Ericson, he had just commandeered a SnowCat and was broadcasting live from the top of ice-covered Mt. Washington. This time he's moved the show indoors to report live from the nation's first polling place in the U.S. Presidential Primaries. Even though there are only about 75 residents in this small (but lovely) town, all of the registered voters (which this year numbered 17) gather at midnight to cast their votes. The polls then close at 12:01 a.m. and Dixville Notch's election results are broadcast throughout the world. For this year's primary, WOKQ listeners were getting a live, firsthand account thanks to their new ACCESS Portable codec. Hey Mark, where's your cool hat?