Most stations still use POTS (Plain Old Telephone System) lines to supply their IFB feeds. Television broadcasters need ways to reduce costs and stay within budgets - and using POTS lines can burn a lot of cash. We built EarShot IFB to bring the power of VoIP (Voice-over-IP) to IFB technology.
Comrex EarShot IFB is a hardware-based system that delivers live audio feeds to callers. EarShot IFB is designed to provide telephone-based live studio program and IFB audio to field-based remote broadcasts, like TV ENG reports. Up to 30 callers can dial in and listen to the audio feeds - this makes it possible to replace up to 30 POTS lines with one simple box.
Multiple Audio Inputs
EarShot IFB has four audio inputs (or feeds). Two of the feeds can be alternately configured as IFB inputs. Up to 30 callers can dial in and listen to audio from standard telephones. Callers can switch between the feeds using DTMF (Touch Tone) selection.
Selectable Audio Feeds
EarShot IFB features selectable feeds. Users can configure some feeds with full program audio, and implement mix-minus on other feeds to prevent echo and other audio flaws. This versatility makes it simple to tailor EarShot IFB to your needs.
VoIP
EarShot IFB interfaces to Voice-over-IP (VoIP) telephone circuits using the SIP protocol. This makes it possible to replace up to 30 POTS lines with one simple box. EarShot IFB can handle 30 POTS calls or 10 wideband calls - users can also configure the box to handle a combination of each. VoIP phone lines can be delivered from cloud-based VoIP providers, VoIP-based PBXs (in many cases), and via hardware gateways devices that bridge legacy phone circuits (e.g. T1/E1, POTS) to VoIP.
Audio Quality
EarShot IFB can interface to most normal calls using standard telephony audio encoding (G.711). EarShot IFB can also deliver audio to "pure" end-to-end VoIP callers with higher fidelity, using encoders like G.722 and Opus. A special app will be available to make high-fidelity connections easy.