Friday, February 04, 2011

Upcoming Changes To The Handsome Hour

Regular listeners to the Handsome Hour know how often we bitch about the technology and how often is decides to eat itself. We've lamented BlogTalkRadio's capabilities, but in the end, there aren't many avenues out there available to us that allow the real-time streaming and call-in abilities that you love so much about our show.

We like this, too, and we think it's what makes the Handsome Hour what it is... the fact that live callers can mix it up with us. Kind of leads a nice, unpredictable, natural environment.

However, we recently learned from BTR that they would like everyone, including longtime loyal users, to pony up a pretty significant amount of cash in order to continue using their marginal service. If we don't want to do that, we are limited to a half-hour of air time per day AND that airtime cannot be between 6 PM and 11 PM, because that prime-time real estate is reserved for paying suckers customers.

So what does all this mean? Well, next week's who (2/9) will now air at 11 PM, Eastern, and will be limited to a half hour. If we do take calls, all callers will be limited to 60 seconds to state their case, ask their question, give their thought, share a recipe, whatever. And then after that, we might be looking for another provider for our handsomeness. And it may mean no more live callers. (Wait, that sounds scary...no zombie callers, either.)

Regardless, we'll do our best to keep the show going in one form or another.

Thanks for your attention.

7 comments:

John said...

F those guys. By F, I mean flautg. Flautg those guys.

BoilerPaulie said...

It's a big internet... maybe you'll find something good. What OS platform(s) do you fellas run? (I'm pretty sure at least one of you runs a Mac.. because a lot of the screenshots you post end up getting uploaded with the standard screenshot filename for Mac OS X)

Word verification: corse. As in, stay the corse - there is someone btr than BTR out there... somewhere. Maybe. I dunno. Probably not. if not, that's just sad.

boilerdowd said...

I run a Mac, Paulie- you're correct.

J Money said...

Yeah...a Big Mac.

BoilerPaulie said...

This could be worth checking out. You could investigate using Skype conferencing. It would probably be a massive inconvenience though, because Skype isn't the ideal switchboard at all.

It's a start though?

http://umwdtlt.org/newmedia/recording-a-skype-call-for-a-podcast-for-free-mac/

Word verification: disepect - we are going to disepect this situation right down to the bone.

J Money said...

We've looked into Skype, but then every person who wants to listen/participate needs a skype account, too.

BoilerPaulie said...

Totally understand. It's far from ideal, but it's sort of doable. It would probably be more of a pain than it's worth though. Better keep scouring the interwebs.