Simple to use and lightweight, remotes are a breeze.
BY THOM HARTMANN
“The Thom Hartmann Program” began over 15 years ago and is ranked by Talkers Magazine as the #1 progressive talk show in America. The show is aired on commercial stations coast to coast and on the SiriusXM Radio Network. We also produce a nonprofit version for Pacifica stations across the United States and in Europe and Africa. Our commercial feed is carried on American Forces Radio to every U.S. military base in the world. Our audience is estimated by Talkers to be 6.5 million.
We have a television simulcast that’s carried on Free Speech TV, a news and opinion network carried by Dish, DirecTV and cable systems across the country. We produce “The Thom Hartmann Program” and the simulcast Monday through Friday from 12–3 p.m. (EST), so I need to be able to set up and host the show every weekday, no matter where I am.
We have used Comrex audio equipment since we started the show 15 years ago. When we began video streaming the show, we purchased a Comrex LiveShot. I’ve now used it to broadcast the show from Denmark, Iceland, all over the United States — not to mention from my home studio.
LiveShot Portable and Rackmount
On a regular basis, my experience with LiveShot is simple. I plug my portable unit into a Cat-5 Ethernet connection wherever I am, press the “connect” button and transmit to the rackmount unit back in our Washington, D.C., studio. All of the connection details for the LiveShots, like IP addresses and connection protocols, have been set and saved ahead of time with Switchboard TS, so I don’t have to enter any information. A connection is established, the video is mixed in real time by our studio team with a NewTek TriCaster, and the program is both fed to our satellite uplinks for Free Speech TV and streamed live on YouTube and Facebook.
I’ve found LiveShot extraordinarily easy to use. It’s lightweight — I can even take it on an airplane in a small carry-on bag. I also use the LiveShot Connect smartphone app, which allows me to check bandwidth and latency statistics from my phone. It’s all the functionality of a TV studio in a single box.
LiveShot provides me the freedom to do my show from anywhere with an internet connection.
Comrex equipment has helped our show be successful over the years — we’ve used it to make reliable field connections all over the world. If you need to take your show on the road, Comrex LiveShot is the best product out there.
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This article was published in Radio World. To read the piece there, click here.
The author is the host of “The Thom Hartmann Program”.