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?

Comments

take the time factor out

[superpixel2000]

Due to technology concerns (stated by others) I would suggest you take the time factor out of the equation. Then you can do round-robin questioning... Using a point system, you can tally scores in a fair manner. It's all about the game's design, and working around the limitations.

Once you've done that, just use iChat, MSN Messenger, or something similar.

It's a UK pub-quiz, not a game show

[YuppieScum]

Most of the posts I've seen to far have presumed that this is going to be a 3-site TV gameshow style event, with 2-way video streams and buzzer-sync issues. This is almost certainly not the case, and the below is based on the usual style of UK pub quiz... which means each team writing answers on a piece of paper, and marking each others answers when read out at the end. So...

Also, I'm not going to mention specific software, rather the infrastructure approach to doing this successfully...

First, each site has a technician. At the remote sites, they're responsible for feeding the video and audio to the projector, and for using some sort of low-bandwidth instant messenger or dedicated IRC to chat with the host site technician for things like question repeat requests and so forth. At the host end, the tech feeds messages to the quizmaster and runs the outbound video/audio feed.

Second, remember that the 512kb link is downstream only - the upstream is going to be half that for basic UK ADSL, which means much less bandwidth for the video/audio as most ISPs don't support multicast. It'd probably be worth contacting the ISP - if all three venues us the same one - to try and get some dedicated/increased bandwidth for the event, or at least some "preferred" routing for the video.

Next, the host site server needs to be the most powerful you have, in order to compress the video as much as possible in as close to real-time as possible. Hardware encoding is a big plus at this point. Also, forget about webcams for the video source - beg/borrow/whatever a decent video camera, capture card and lighting.

Also, have a backup plan. For example, feed the ear-piece output of a cellphone to the remote site PA, and have the host-site microphone also feed the mic input of two cellphones as an alternate feed. Return feeds would come from/go to the techs.

Finally, test everything off-site well before the event to make sure it all works, then test it all extensively on the day. It might sound obvious, but you'd be surprised how often it doesn't happen.

Oh, and if you're running this somewhere in the south-east of England, drop me a line if you want a tech for one of the sites...