BSM and Backbone Tackle Sports Radio

Backbone Networks Cloud Radio production for Sports

Live Sports needs Live Radio, and no company on the planet provides a more agile, complete broadcast platform for sports radio production than Backbone. This football season, we have teamed up with the number one sports broadcasting publication, Barrett Sports Media, to expand our brand in BSM’s newsletters, web presence, and more. 

This week, BSM’s Countdown to Coverage series covers:
MONDAY (8/28): Best Local Show
TUESDAY: Best National Radio Show
WEDNESDAY: Best College Football Podcast
THURSDAY: Best TV Show
FRIDAY: Best TV Play-by-Play Booth

Backbone’s complete, integrated suite of services comprise the Backbone Radio Platform. Everything, including live production, automation, phones, studio quality remotes on smartphones, podcasting, streaming, terrestrial syndication, and studio-transmitter links, all in the cloud for you to broadcast from anywhere—easier, faster, and more affordably. 

Your Station Anywhere

 

Loving the New Rodecaster at NBA Summer League 2022

Backbone is happy to be back to the annual NBA Summer League in Las Vegas with yet more technology for the games’ radio broadcasts. This year’s event includes road testing new Backbone features we’ve integrated specifically for Rode’s new Rodecaster Pro II Production Console. We plan to bring you more information about how Backbone Producer and the Pro II together comprise a game changer for both radio and podcast production. Our thanks to the NBA SoundSystem, the Golden State Warriors, and the NBA Summer League organizers for the opportunity to advance the state of total cloud radio broadcasting in live, remote events.

Backbone and LUCI Wow WooSox Fans on Opening Day

From the back of a  World War II era amphibious “Duck Boat” Backbone Networks and LUCI Global® combined their technological prowess to enable Hank Stolz, host of Radio Worcester’s morning show ‘Talk of The Commonwealth’ to effortlessly broadcast live  — totally in “the cloud” — from the Worcester Red Sox, AAA affiliate of MLB’s Boston Red Sox, 2022 Opening Day Game at Polar Park in Worcester MA. 

Radio Worcester, built on Backbone’s cloud-based Backbone HUB™ platform, enables Stolz and his crews to cover the explosive growth of Central Massachusetts action with on-site broadcasts, and without the burden of heavy, expensive radio broadcast equipment. Utilizing standard local network infrastructure, HUB requires only a laptop, a portable mixer, and a couple mics. Luci Global’s studio-quality smartphone remotes integrate with Backbone’s Talk virtual broadcast call-in phone system, as well as low-latency cloud syndication, for a seamless live radio broadcast live on stations like WCRN Radio, Westborough MA, flagship affiliate of the Radio Worcester Network.

“Luci Global brings in remote two-way audio from anywhere in spectacular quality,” said Stolz, “and also from unorthodox locations, such as 1940’s Duck Boat ‘Boston Betty’ with incredible flexibility, quality and value. The Backbone platform also lets me handle standard listener phone calls and guests, as well as broadcast to our affiliates simultaneously while we’re live from anywhere I can imagine.”

Backbone Networks CTO George Capalbo explains,“All this was done with a standard laptop, WiFi at the stadium and a standard Rode mixer– simple set up and operation.  Competing broadcasts at the event required large engineering support, dedicated microwave networks – lots of complexity and cost that Radio Worcester is ecstatic to be without.” 

For more information – check out Backbone Talk at http://backbonebroadcast.com and Luci Global at https://www.luci.eu/luci-community-apps/

Guest Post: K-12 Student Radio – Making Media Educational & Fun

In today’s remote and blended learning environment, radio is becoming an essential tool for teachers and students alike. We’re thrilled to share a contributed post by Paula Neidlinger, media educator and co-author of Scripted, An Educator’s Guide to Media in the Classroom, the marvelous, new book that illustrates how to introduce 21st Century technology into K-12 schools, and why. Here she gives us a view of how she has applied these technologies in her middle school in Indiana with amazing success.

Scripted, an Educator's Guide to Media in the Classroom


“New Age” Radio: K-12 Student Radio – Making Media Educational & Fun

By Paula Neidlinger

Through the maze of desks, in the back of the middle school classroom, a pillar of tall, slender sound baffles, tower over a large, red wooden table. Student voices resonate like a small chorus. The red sign perched on the edge of the chalkboard, proudly affirms that this is the home of “Storm Radio,” the school Internet radio station.

Storm Radio is a middle school radio station run by 7th & 8th-grade students during 45-minute class periods throughout the school day and facilitated by one media teacher. For the last five years, Storm Radio has been “riding the waves” on the air, 24/7, using Backbone Radio as the core broadcasting software. Although “The Golden Age of Radio” might be in the history books, student-run radio stations are creeping into the K-12 classrooms around the country, capturing the imaginations of listeners using words rather than pictures to engage their listeners.

Student-run radio stations provide a platform for students to build communication skills and express their thoughts and ideas, unleashing imaginations for all to hear and enjoy. Students are able to develop their radio shows based on personal interest and current school and community news and events daily. Very few schools are equipped with state-of-the-art studios; some stations are housed in small workrooms, corners of classrooms, or even closets. Storm Radio started with nothing more than a rolling desk, computer, a microphone and headsets.

School radio affords students of all ages the opportunity to master broadcast technologies, including audio production and recording, streaming, scheduling, and how to use “the Cloud.” Students learn by producing live on-air broadcasting including remotes, creating and publishing podcasts, launching school news briefings to smart devices like Alexa®, and maybe even engaging call-in listeners, such as Backbone Talk, which allows listeners to call in and join the broadcast.

Is radio only for a media class? Building a station offers numerous cross-curricular opportunities for all students within the school building. Promoting radio broadcasting possibilities is key to a successful school station. Consider some of the following ideas:

  • Producing radio commercials for community sponsors.
  • Producing PSAs.
  • Producing radio promotions for marketing purposes.
  • Broadcasting play-by-play sporting events and special school events, such as dances, plays, or music concerts.
  • Broadcasting on-location community special events.
  • Hosting radio days.
  • Hosting local civic organizations in-studio podcasts and radio shows.
  • Hosting student-produced Vinyl Fridays.

Who’s Listening? How many times has a student asked, “Is anyone actually listening?” One of the greatest benefits of 21st-century technology-infused classrooms is the integration of authentic audiences. Launching a student-produced radio station enables students to reach listeners worldwide with “live, local” shows produced solely by students. Most importantly, they have a global audience.

Let’s get technical. At the helm of Storm Radio is Backbone Radio. Backbone’s advanced technology “virtualizes” (in the cloud) all of the expensive production and broadcast equipment, including automation, storage, servers, and even phones. This automation allows schools to broadcast essentially, anywhere- home, sporting events, dances, and any classroom throughout the day as long as there is an Internet connection and a computer.

What if I teach in a blended or virtual learning environment? All stations on the Backbone platform are on the air all the time, 24/7. When your students are not broadcasting LIVE, the automation system takes over to run your recorded content, like music, concerts, interviews, old shows, or your podcasts—overnight, weekends, or during vacation. Teachers and students are able to program it from anywhere and can go LIVE anytime.

K-12 Student Radio teams with Scripted, the Educator's Guide to Media in the Classroom, for remote and blended learning environments
See Backbone’s K-12 Media Project page

Backbone Radio has created a K-12 Student-Radio Media Project, aimed at helping schools of all levels develop productive, fun, and professional sounding student-run Internet radio stations for the benefit of students, families, alumni, and the schools themselves.

School radio provides an exciting and engaging medium for your students to develop their communication skills, build confidence and discuss the issues that are important to them within a classroom, studio, or virtual setting. The station can become a focal point for your school where students express their views in a safe environment, which will promote inclusion and the school community. It is perhaps the “New Age” of radio.


We at Backbone thank the authors of Scripted for illustrating how easy it is to start teaching media technology as early as possible in the K-12 system, and how important it is to do so. This book could be the turbo boost your school needs, especially today and into the “new normal”. Please order your copy of Scripted from Amazon or Barnes & Noble today.

About the Author

Paula Neidlinger

@pneid

LinkedIn

Scripted Educators- @scriptededu

Scripted Educators- Facebook

Website- Scripted- An Educator’s Guide to Media in the Classroom

Publisher- EduMatch Publishing

An Indiana University B.A. & M.S. graduate, Paula Neidlinger is a globally connected, 28-year middle school, veteran media and English educator, presenter, and author.

TALKERS Magazine Profiles Backbone’s Cloud Strategy

We keep a fairly low profile at Backbone, working in the background while our esteemed stations take center stage. After all, we simply provide all or most of the technology infrastructure for our clients’ “white label” radio stations. That’s why it’s such an honor to be called into the limelight by “The Bible of Talk Radio”, as TALKERS Magazine was dubbed by Business Week Magazine.

I want to thank Mike Kinosian, TALKERS’ Managing Editor for telling the Talk Radio world about what Backbone has been doing to help the broadcast industry and hosts during this long COVID crisis, as well foster media learning in K-12 through college radio curricula.

See the full article at Talkers.com.

Scripted, Educators’ Media Guide Launches, Backbone Supports K12 Stations

Just released, the media education resource K12 educators have been waiting for: “Scripted” An Educator’s Guide to Media in the ClassroomThis comprehensive, step-by-step “recipe” book is the manual we, too, have been eagerly anticipating. It opens up the world of hands-on mediaScripted, an Educator's Guide to Media in the Classroom experience to students at an age when they can absorb so much more, and at an age when they critically need to develop their lifetime communication and presentation skills.

How does Backbone figure into this? Well, for the last dozen years we have operated the largest college and high school radio network, The Intercollegiate Broadcast System‘s Student Radio Network (IBS-SRN) on behalf of IBS, the 1,000 member, all volunteer college radio & TV association.

Backbone provides the technology infrastructure in the cloud — the 24/7 radio station. Plus, we are happy to populate the station’s automation library with a few thousand free indie music tracks courtesy of Pirate Promotions. However, the entire choice of content and curriculum is up to the school and the teacher or faculty advisor. Historically, that has been a speed bump for many educators when there is very little published guidance to help them build a media program. Scripted, as far as we can tell, is the first such guidebook that starts with easy-to-use 21st century technologies, then actually lays out an extensive set of templates upon which schools can confidently build a curriculum pathway, evaluate progress, project budgets, specify products with the best ROI, and even ways to self-fund the entire program with local business sponsorships.

We want to thank and congratulate the authors, who all happen to teach with Backbone Radio in their respective schools. This, we believe, will be a watershed moment for student-run radio, where every school can now easily create and afford its own broadcast/podcast program, and do it with the guidance of a systematic yet flexible set of proven methods and benchmarks.

We look forward to seeing Scripted become the nucleus of a media movement in education, and we hope to be creating one or more radio networks just for schools that want to extend their reach. See more at https://www.scriptededucators.com/

Radio World Follows Up on a “Volunteer Miracle”

How do you pop up a radio station virtually overnight to fight a deadly pandemic? Ask Bill Trifero who assembled an all-volunteer army of professionals and a few companies like Backbone and Technical del Arte to chip in state-of-the-art technology. He reports how it came about in Radio World

For the past four months, it’s been our honor to work with Bill on tackling this crisis with 24/7 radio coverage. Equipped with just smartphones, laptops, and Backbone Production Suite, which includes LUCI Global, operating in the cloud, the station was up and running in a matter of a hours and days instead of weeks and months.

Multiple hosts and reporters worked simultaneously, remotely in collaborative broadcasts, without having to buy or borrow many thousands of dollars in hardware. Virtually, every function an agile radio station needs to operate, including phones and terrestrial program syndication to their participating local station, was at their disposal. This is how the cloud can work magic, and Backbone is proud to have been there to help.
Read more in Radio World

Broadcast Free—from Home or Anywhere

Powerful Remotes with the Gear You Already Own

Backbone CoHost™ with LUCI Global® apps, Free for 45 Days!

We need to stay safe, and we need to stay on the air. Working from home is no longer just a futuristic perk, it’s our current duty. This should be easy and affordable, and it can be. There is no need to outlay capital to survive, thanks to our unique, integrated Virtualization in the Cloud.

Remote radio broadcasting in the cloud with LUCI and Backbone

Versatile Party Line topology means unlimited remotes using free, downloadable apps. Switching amongst remote feeds available in paid accounts.

Backbone CoHost PL is a fast and easy way for stations to create an always-available “Party Line” conference room for one or more hosts, guests, and correspondents to contribute live audio for your broadcasts. These two-way conversations are enabled by using the groundbreaking LUCI Global service from Technica del Arte and their free, downloadable apps for iOS, Mac, Android, and Windows platforms. LUCI enables these phones, pads, and computers to communicate with and using the same standard formats used by commercial hardware. including COMREX® and TIELINE®.

CoHost PL is a simplified, unswitched version of Backbone CoHost, allowing users to instantly join the broadcast with the touch of a finger. There are no IT settings to configure, no port selections to worry about, and no equipment to purchase or forget in the car. It all works with whatever you’re carrying and over any decent Internet access you can find. (watch video)

Free 45-Day Demo
Backbone is offering a fully functional demo of CoHost PL and LUCI Global to our existing Phone (Talk) and Radio Customers, as well as U.S.-based call-letter radio and TV stations, for 45 days, starting March 30th. Customers who wish to continue with paid service will also get the premium switched version of Backbone CoHost and a full, unlimited version of LUCI Global, for a bundled monthly price of only $275.
To start your free 45-day trial, please email your contact information and a brief note about your organization to: info@backbone.com

“Backbone is Changing The Way Audio Programming Is Delivered”, in The Broadcast Bridge

Our thanks to The Broadcast Bridge for reporting on the role Backbone is playing in today’s “broadcast from anywhere” world. At Backbone, we have quietly focused on building the fully virtualized radio station in our highly reliable cloud, from automation and production Backbone makes collaborative, distributed audio broadcasts easy in The Broadcast Bridgecommunications, to streaming and syndication. Recent events are now spotlighting the importance of agility and geographically distributed, collaborative broadcasts, Backbone’s core strength.

In olden times, you would need a lot of expensive hardware, plus an IT guru, to pull together a highly distributed audio broadcast. When you wanted to include multiple cohosts and roving reporters in studio quality, the IT issues could get tricky, involving port assignments and routing, not to mention the hardware management issues and equipment cost. Add phones to that, with PBXs and hybrids, and the problems compound exponentially with the complexity of the broadcast.

With Backbone in the cloud, all you need is a Mac laptop, a portable USB mixer, a couple of mics and headsets, all situated wherever you call your main studio(s). Your call screener and/or producer can be local or in another city, with a separate Mac. Then, you only need a smartphone (or tablet or laptop) for each of your remote contributors and collaborators, thanks to the free, downloadable LUCI Global app for iOS, Android, Mac, and Windows. All the calls and remotes are mixed in the cloud and managed by your producer, screener, or primary host.

Even though there are plenty of powerful features built into this integrated suite of services, it’s incredibly easy and intuitive to use. Please contact us when you would like to take it for a 30-day test drive.

COVID Virginia Station Helps Listeners Be “Together in Isolation” — Radio World

COVID Virginia Radio Station with Backbone NetworksThe TV/Radio industry is suddenly embracing the benefits of cloud broadcasting as the world fights against COVID-19. In the new Radio World, read how one Roanoke resident has quickly launched a powerful emergency radio station with the help of his community and Backbone Networks, using the gear they already own: laptops and smartphones.

COVID Virginia Radio, via BackboneCOVID Virginia, a hyper-local station created by veteran radio reporter Bill Trifiro, promises to be a template for communities in dealing with national, regional, and local crises. Bill recognized the importance of employing an integrated cloud approach like Backbone Production Suite™ in terms of ease of use, quality, reliability, and affordability.

The station’s cloud-based core, donated by Backbone, provides live radio assist, automation, streaming, terrestrial syndication, multiline call-in phones with SMS handling, studio quality remotes, multiple co-hosts from their homes, podcast generation and hosting, and a branded website with HTML5 player.

With Backbone’s cloud topology your station can:

  • Produce better broadcasts, made easier, by more people, at a lower cost
  • Avoid specialized equipment, just use your laptops and smartphones
  • Scale up to as many remote contributors as desired via the downloadable LUCI Global app
  • Manage phones and take calls from anywhere
  • Eliminate the IT issues of complex studio equipment
  • Transmit professional sound, rivaling conventional hardware solutions
Backbone Talk Radio Production Suite, in the cloud

Manage all broadcast communications on one Mac® screen.

During this COVID pandemic and beyond, your Backbone friends want to help in any way we can. We think Bill’s brilliant concept is a game changer in battling this threat and perhaps threats to come.

If you are an existing AM/FM/TV station or municipality, please contact us. We have a limited number of slots available for a 30- to 60-day “free trial”, maybe longer. If you want to keep or repurpose it when this all goes away, it’s less than $700/month, fully loaded, including unlimited LUCI Global users and usage.

 

 

 

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