Travelling Light
In the comments recently Trig pointed out Sidepodcast has a habit of making him want more gadgets and gizmos. It reminded me I was supposed to write a behind the scenes post about recent changes to our live setup. This is that post.
Know Your Limitations
Last year, around the time of Silverstone testing and the British Grand Prix, we put in place a rudimentary system that allowed us to follow comments on this site, upload photographs and even stream some live video. In most respects everything worked as planned, but we found ourselves with an excessive amount of equipment to carry, whilst being severely restricted by battery life. Additionally as soon as a website thread hit more than 500 comments, it became nearly impossible to load it over the air.
For 2009 we intend to solve those issues and improve our coverage, without breaking the bank.
Keeping it Real
More by luck than judgement, the real time commenting system that was introduced to help us follow conversations during a live show, actually appears to solve the limitations we experienced connecting via 3G.
Previously it was necessary to load a whole thread’s worth of comments just to catch up on the most recent submitted entries. With the new system however, we’ll be able to quickly access only the latest comments and add to the conversation with the minimum of fuss. The amount of data transferred is relatively small (and we’re working on reducing it further), which means costs should also be lower than before.








