In the age of live streaming, is there any gear other than cameras that should be hardware-based and not software? This week broadcasters are asking to be released from hardware EAS/Emergency gear.

47:07because you get full warranty too with anything that you buy from Apple. And you know they're virtually brand new at that point, coming directly from them. All right, what do we got next? Let's go to the next question. Next comes in from Madison, Indiana. Roscoe Jones asks, in the age of live streaming. Is there any gear other than cameras that should be hardware-based and not

47:33software? This week, broadcasters are asking to be released from hardware EAS slash emergency gear. I guess the emergency alert system, I guess that's what EAS stands for. And he has a link to an article from TV Technology. Well, I feel like sometimes, you know, it's like talking about religion. People have different opinions about this. And I know there are scenarios where hardware absolutely will make sense.

48:04I'm trying to move my whole... I would love to move to a software-based solution for production mainly because... And I'm already doing this on one of my shows. But the problem is I still have an ATEM switcher that does ISO recording for one of my clients. podcasts and I'll probably eventually move to MIMO Live for everything but I've got to now convert

48:25my whole studio to SDI and then I gotta get an external of course because my Mac doesn't have the capability to put PCI cards in there I've got an external I gotta get a Thunderbolt enclosure with a deck link card and so there's some some cost involved there but for mission critical stuff you know I'll say I do really small potato stuff but like for for stuff in live sports for like

48:48like big high stakes productions where you can't have failure. I know a lot of guys, they're all still using hardware. So hardware based switchers, hardware, everything, because, you know, when it's that much money, when millions of dollars are involved, like you can't really mess around. And I love MIMO Live, but you're probably not going to be using MIMO Live at the Olympics, right? So hardware has its place for certain things. And I'm sure Courtney

49:14Courtney has an opinion about that. Go ahead, Courtney. Yeah, there are some things, you know, that you might want in an emergency situation. You know, if you've ever if the Internet has ever gone down for a long period of time where you are, you may realize just how much of your life depends on it these days. You know, I have probably 60 or 70 devices around my home that I can only control through the Internet by voice control.

49:38You know, they don't have switches on them. I can't turn on some lights and some LED strips unless there's an Internet connection. A lot of them have to be a remote connection to a server in China somewhere just to turn on a light. So look at your IoT devices and see if they have a local LAN fallback so that if they lose an Internet connection, you can still control them with an app or something over your local area network.

50:07work. So in case your internet connection goes down, you can still run things. I think in the emergency alert system, what they're trying to get out of the regulations, the way the emergency alert system used to work, is that they had certain clear channel radio stations that are AM radio stations in the United States. This is how it worked. And in an emergency, like a nuclear attack

50:29or something like that, where everybody else may be knocked off the air, like FM stations, etc., the clear channel stations can up their transmitter power and cover the, like, 12 stations, I think, and cover the entire United States with 50,000 watts each. And they can even bump up their transmitters to more than that. They would turn their transmitters off and on, off and on, the carriers off and on,

50:54which would trigger receivers in all the emergency alert other stations that are not clear channel so that they could then switch over to monitoring the emergency alert AM channels to rebroadcast what they're broadcasting. So you still have a nationwide broadcasting system that is not dependent on any phone lines or any interconnects or any internet lines and still just using broadcast transmitters, which have backup generators running on them,

51:25which then can maintain an emergency alert and communications even the event of major power grid loss. And, of course, anytime we've seen, you know, Mae West or any of the major trunk lines go out on the Internet, you know, a whole area can lose Internet connection. So it still needs to meet some type of emergency lifeline in situations like that. If we become too dependent on that data connection between everybody,