NAB 2018: Comrex To Introduce EarShot

Comrex, a leader in VoIP and video-over-IP technology, will debut a new product, EarShot, at NAB 2018. EarShot is designed to help TV stations reduce costs and provide more flexibility for remote IFB feeds.

“It needed to happen,” says Chris Crump, Comrex sales director. “We’d visit TV stations and see banks of old telephone auto-couplers connected to expensive analog phone lines. Most other phone tech has transitioned to Voice-over-IP (VoIP), but remote IFB audio remains stuck in the last century.”

EarShot provides telephone-based live studio program and IFB audio to field-based remote broadcasts. Up to 30 users can listen to program or IFB feeds by calling into EarShot with a mobile phone. EarShot can handle up to 4 program feeds, or 2 IFB feeds. For higher fidelity, smartphone apps can be used to pull the audio in studio quality. EarShot can be connected to low-cost cloud-based VoIP service, or tied to a station’s VoIP PBX.

“With our years of experience in putting VoIP calls on air,” says Tom Hartnett, Comrex technical director.

“It was a no-brainer to provide a simple hardware solution to the IFB problem. The folks we talked to were sick of paying for a dozen or more POTS lines to provide this function. EarShot will pay for itself within a couple of months in phone service savings alone.”