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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?
You're going to attempt to stream 3 separate video and audio streams over a 512kbit link?
I think you need to look into more bandwidth, that's quite a low amount and I think you're going to see some issues from it.
Maybe think a little smaller. Instead of full video conferencing, perhaps use text and audio, sort of like the old "You don't know Jack" site. Use an IM client as the method of 'buzzing in', post the questions on the screens as you read it, then allow the user to speak a reply. As a fallback, make sure people at each location have the questions and answers in case there's tech problems, and to verify the answers in case 'shenanagans' are called. If you have the spare bandwidth, then maybe you can snap a picture every 5 seconds and post it. Best not to overthink it, save those braincells for the questions, and the beer!
You haven't explained the quiz-show setup. Where is the quizmaster? How are you asking questions and how are contestants answering? In a pinch: Use Yahoo Messenger for the video links and then create a Yahoo chatroom and turn on the voice-chat. Use VNC to control the remote machines; if you have three pubs, I would suggest getting another machine to handle the VNC'ing, and just leave all the others hooked up. Pub1 views Pub2 and Pub3, Pub2 views Pub1 and Pub3, Pub3 views Pub1 and Pub2 --- and they're all in the same voice-chat. Is it oh-so-hacker cool? No. Is it free and will it work? Yes.
Sync the clocks with NTP and have the first click win. A small delay while the machines poll each other wouldn't be out of order.
Trolling is a art,
From the summary, it looks like this is going to be a one-time thing, a charity event with the proceeds going to tsunami relief. Rather than spend all this time and money trying to set up a technological way to do this, why not just get three quizmasters with three PA systems? You'd have less expenses, so more money would go to charity. I'm assuming you are getting volunteers to run the quizzes, so I didn't figure in costs for paying the extra people.
Another thing I worry about is, if you're only doing it once, you can count on stuff going wrong. Things always do with something this complicated. I could see if you were going to do it week after week, because after a few weeks you'd get the hang of it and you could streamline the process. But if you're just planning on doing a one-shot event, stick to the tried and true. You could rent three PA rigs for the evening and be good to go. Hope this helps.