Many stations that carry sports programming—particularly pro sports broadcasts—are likely to be limited by league rules when it comes to streaming game broadcasts due to copyright regulations. As the flagship station for Chicago White Sox baseball and Chicago Bulls basketball, we are one such station here at WLS-AM in Chicago. Due to licensing restrictions of MLB and the NBA, WLS isn’t allowed to stream these teams’ games on their normal internet stream. Instead, alternate programming such as “Best of” editions of local or satellite-delivered shows—usually put together and aired by a producer in the control room—are routed to the internet stream.

To make the routing of the alternate content easier, I devised a solution using Axia Pathfinder. The only requirement is a spare PC capable of running Livewire audio drivers and VLC.

As I travel throughout the US, I've seen a number of great Axia Livewire+ AES67 AoIP installations, and enjoy sharing some of these concepts with readers.

IP Audio Networking and clearing out analog wiring has been a key theme of late. Clearing unneeded cabling is an essential concern when converting to Livewire+ AES67, and it's crucial to label your Axia Livewire+ AES67 CAT5/6 cabling. Over time, networks grow, and labeling your Ethernet cables ensures the wiring won’t get out of hand.

Anthony Eden is a broadcast engineer and systems integrator in Australia. And, he's a big fan of Audio over IP technology, particularly Livewire+.

PathfinderPC and Pathfinder Core PRO provide powerful and flexible scheduling, routing, monitoring, and alerting for Livewire+ AoIP networks. However, Anthony Eden needed a bit less horsepower for a particular application. His client simply needed to select which studio would feed the station's air chain. So, Anthony wrote a Windows application in Python to do just that - and only that.

Considering an Audio over IP (AoIP) network for your facility makes sense; it’s faster, cheaper, and better than previous technologies. By converting to AoIP, you not only tap into the power of current technology, you allow your facility to leverage the enormous universe of “off the shelf” IT devices that are used worldwide, and not just in the broadcast industry.

Fans of public broadcasting outlets PBS and NPR living in southwestern Florida are served by WGCU, where the TV-FM public broadcaster has operated from the campus of Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers for two decades. The station's Director of Engineering, Kevin Trueblood, has likewise been in the broadcast industry for 20 years, though only the last two of those years have been spent at WGCU.

The Telos Alliance announced this week that we are now shipping the Axia Pathfinder Core PRO Routing Control and Facility Management Appliance. So what is Axia Pathfinder Core PRO? It's everything Axia learned in the 10 years since launching the Pathfinder family of software wrapped up in one appliance that frees you from your PC while providing sophisticated, yet streamlined controls.

Need to know more? Find the path to more detailed information right here with these quick FAQs. 

In the last several years, the broadcast industry has begun making the rapid transition to IT-based infrastructure both for new facilities as well as upgrades of old facilities. Standards such as SMPTE 2022 have facilitated the transition from specialized rack-mounted appliances to commodity hardware that is increasingly cloud-enabled for scalability and redundancy. Encoding, decoding, packaging, switching and more are all virtualized to the point where even connectivity now is becoming largely virtualized for both traditional linear broadcast and second screen.

When Steve Church unveiled IP-Audio, the technology which became our Axia brand, at NAB in 2002 he told everyone his vision: all broadcast equipment speaking a common language of networked control and audio, finally doing away with soldered, single-destination audio circuits and the stupefying array of connectors that accompanied them. Steve’s desire – and ours – is that all broadcast gear should interoperate. And not just operate together, but do it easily, seamlessly and without drama.

Fast-forward to 2014: our customers tell us that we’ve made a bit of progress! We’ve come to refer to this synergy, this co-operation of broadcast gear, as an ecosystem – all parts working together in harmony, with the sum of the parts being greater than the whole.

You probably remember learning to drive. Your Driver’s Ed teacher (or other responsible adult) would constantly monitor your speed and point out when you were going too fast. In your own mind, you could never go too fast! And for some of us, once we got that adult out of the car, we put our foot down to the floor. We never changed our thinking, and we have the speeding tickets to prove it!

It would be easy to think of AoIP networks in the same terms: if fast is good, faster is better — right?

There’s a whole lot that goes into building AoIP studio gear. And there might be even more that goes into choosing the system that’s right for your studios!

One key decision you’re faced with almost immediately in your selection process is which design philosophy to align yourself with: Purpose-Built, or the Kitchen Sink.