[Kevin Sevcik]

Yeah, connectivity IS the biggest issue. Sadly, this makes it are for one person to do a webcast at a regional without FIRST being intimately involved, since they've forbidden teams from trying to get an internet connection. Here's a list of what I think you'd need to do, and do in a hurry.

1. Get in touch with the regional supervisor in your area. This is bound to be tricky, as there's not a contact list for them that I can see. It's necessary though to get connectivity and FIRST's blessing. Also that way you can arrange to tap into FIRST's cameras to make things easier on yourself. I'd guess you'd need to go to the FIRST Conact List and email around to see what you get.

2. Get internet connectivity. This might be impossible for some sites. It will defintely take doing for most, but the regional supervisor should be able to handle the paperwork. They might not have the budget left to pay for it, though, so your team might have to put up money. And you might need an ISDN modem. This could come from the connectivity provider, or possibly NASA, since that's who got us ours at LSR.

3. Get someone to host the webcast. I'm thinking NASA might be the only option here as most hosting services would be brought to their knees by the giant sucking sound of a horde of FIRST teams gobbling up bandwidth. I'm hoping Dr. Bot knows people at NASA that can make this happen.

4. Get a computer with a cheap, yes cheap, video capture card. The key here is that it should not do any MPEG encoding in hardware. It should capture AVI files by default. Hauppage is a good brand. It doesn't take much computing power to pull this off, really.

5. Get the encoding software. Again, I'm thinking this might need to be a NASA thing unless you have a copy of RealStudio laying about.

6. Go to the regional, webcast, and see some of the stuff that happens behind the scenes. You'll need to show up Wednesday some time to set things up and get it all working. It's not terribly complicated for anyone that's computer savvy.

So that's it. I can't think of anything else you'd need to do, but that's a bit of a list. 1,2 and 3 all need to happen pretty much simealtaneously as they're the important bits you don't have much control over. And again, I'm really hoping Dr. Bot has contacts in NASA to ease some of this along. Now, if any team out there feels up to it, I suggest you get cracking.