Well this is kind of interesting, I shoot on contract for two Toronto area stations and at one we've been using technology for quite awhile, ftp'ing video from the road and it's been quite efficient. The other station as I mentioned before still stuck in the 80's until recently, up here Telus (Telus.ca) launched thier new 3.5G network in Ontario and let's jet say after the old fashioned live trucks failed three times in one week they decided to let me show them and what better timing with this new network, totally wide open un-throttled upload as well and I am sending let's say 5 min of broadcast video down to the station in 4 min, and our live stuff now looks ten times better and people are starting to "prefer" this new way not to mention we are saving a fortune on satellite costs and other feed point costs.

Just to be able to send back you're video or story from anywhere and 10 minutes to air is awesome but I also feel sad that we didn't' have this technology ten years ago, I think of all those frantic runs down the highway to try and get tape back, pulling into the parking lot with heavy smoke coming off my brakes and now we I can send video from the scene in minutes.

Of course now I am working harder than ever and doing more shoots becuase I don't have to drive back to the station anymore!, there are only two of us equipped right now and of course when it's a deadline dash guess who gets rushed to the scene?

Next projects for me are to build a fully self-sufficient live truck out of a pelican 1610 case, lower level will be a layer of gel cells and upper later an Asus G51 and in general to put the kit together and have it working with as much simplicity as possible because there is no time to get technical at 20 minutes to air, this stuff has to power up, connect and work fast!.

Of course now that they like this so much I am throttling back the amount of information I give them on exactly what I am using, believe me in the last three weeks things have changed quite a bit, been telling them for a couple of years now but after a week of showing them (at my expense BTW) suddenly when the video magically really does appear at the station they suddenly "believe".

Every live truck operator should learn this stuff and campaign to have it as an option on their trucks as by doing so it means some job security.

I think though the days of $500,00 and million dollar trucks are winding down and the new truck will be in Pelican 1610 cases.

mark