Cup

It’s been a few weeks, but yesterday I was on NPR’s All Things Considered with a segment about how the World Cup is affecting Internet traffic, how to watch it online or on your phone and the debut of 3-D TV sports on ESPN.

The audio of the segment is here and you can see the blog post I wrote to go with it on the All Tech blog.

Apart from the fact that I don’t follow World Cup too much (especially now that they allow a million bees in the stadium), there was another little curveball with this segment: I was chosen as the guinea pig for an experiment.  We did my half of the segment not in the KUT studio like we usually do, but with an app called “Report-IT” on my iPhone.

The app was able to connect to their ISDN line and apparently the sound was pretty good.  The only thing I notice in hearing it back is that the room I was in sounds very echo-filled, but that’s the room’s acoustics, not the app’s fault. I could have switched to a sound-proofed room in my work building (yes, we have one), but the Wi-Fi connection I was using didn’t reach that far and when we tried it with 3G, the quality dropped considerably and there was too much lag.

The best part was talking to Michele Norris while an engineer instructed me to move the phone to different positions around my mouth. “Now hold it upside-down and away from you at a 45-degree angle, like you’re talking across the top of the surface of the phone.”

These guys know audio.  It’s incredible how well they know what works and what doesn’t.

Not sure if I’ll be back on a regular schedule on NPR, but at least for this week I got to feel a little bit like a radio pioneer. (Or “test subject” or “guinea pig.” I’m fine with any of those.)