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Producing a Quiz Show from Multiple Locations?
Bloke in a box asks: "One of the pubs I help manage is putting on a quiz show. The landlady's two sisters also run pubs, so we have decided to do this quiz for charity (for the Tsunami disaster). At the moment I have: three pubs, three webcams, two laptops, a desktop, three microphones, three sets of 512kb broadband, three big screens, three projectors and one willing quizmaster. I'm aware of various remote admin software which will aid with this, but I'm wondering if there is conferencing software that might be a better fit for this, since I'd need the ability to control the communications between the pubs (like when questions need to be repeated, and so forth)." What other pieces of software would you recommend for such a production?
Check out Windows Media Encoder.
You can attach to your input streams and send them to a central location with more bandwidth.
This could be built fairly easily using the Flash Communication Server for data comm and video streaming, and building the quiz show client in either Flash or Director. (Despite its name, FlashComm works with Director just fine.) Keep the quiz logic in the client, and use a bit of server-side Actionscript to do the scorekeeping/results arbitration.
I hate MACR's pre-built components, but given that real-time video streaming is pretty much drag'n'drop with them, you could have a prototype up in a couple of hours.
I regularly conduct video conferences between New York, LA, and Atlanta. Standard video conferencing equipment works quite well over 384k ISDN connections via a bridge, and even 128k isn't bad.
I'm guessing that the three pubs aren't that far apart, so 512k should be plenty even with the IP overhead.
I don't know much about running video conferencing over IP, but check into the H.323 standard. I've seen a bit about it on http://www.openh323.org/.
There is no video tie in with this but I use TeamSpeak all the time to keeping in touch with my gaming pals. It does not use up so much bandwidth that it will crush you, but the performance is pretty good. Best part is there is a Linux server version. http://www.teamspeak.org/
Thats how pub quizzes tend to work in the UK.
A set of questions is read out. Each team answers all questions. The winning team is the one that answers the most correctly.
Hence no buzzers.
Sweet jesus. The flip side of "every ask slashdot is stupid" is "every decent ask slashdot gets stupid answers." The only valid responses above (Webex and Flash Comm Sevrer) were modded to 1, while all the useless chatter about Tiger and iSights and not enough bandwidth are modded up. Crazy.
Anyway, this is exactly what our company's software does, so pardon the self promotion.
Let me answer some of the points above:
- Not enough bandwidth: You can easily do this on a 512k link, although you're not going to fall in love with the video quality. With three locations, Flash Communication Server would do fine. In fact, I think the developer edition supports a max of three users an 1Mbit of bandwidth, so you'd be able to use it on the cheap.
Even if you didn't use FCS, you could roll your own using Windows Media Encoders at each location pushing streams to a windows media server. You can make a page that hosts all three videos in it, with an area below for the quiz. Don't like WME? You can use Real's Helix, although it's a little harder to set up the first time. Both WME video and Helix introduce significant buffering delay, so you'll have to configure all components (encoder, server, and client-side playback control) to use the minimum buffering allowed. You'll still end up with at least 5 seconds of buffering.
- Lag: I doubt you'd have enough lag to make a big difference in determining whose answers are correct. Regardless, in our system, every message up & downstream is timestamped (down to thousandths of a second), and the client and server clocks are synchronized together, so you'll have a very decent idea who answered first. Not that it really matters, since it's for charity, who cares if it's slightly off, right?
- Webex is a fine choice if you DON'T care about video. Their video is very lousy, hugely bandwith intensive, and doesn't support n-way video conferences. The price mentioned above does not include video, I don't think. A better pay-per-minute options would be Breeze Live. They also have a 15-day free trial, which is nice.
Also, you should consider something like a Polycom, Tandberg, or other traditional video conferencing product. For one, lots of companies have them, so you can probably get loaner units easily.
Or (ahem) maybe give us a call. Our software does polls, quizzes, slides, chat, moderated Q&A, all synchronized to the video and and internal clock. Up to 5-way video conferences are supported using the Flash Communication Server, and we have bandwidth partners in the UK if you need them.