This is taken from the BBC College of Journalism web site.  If you go to the page you can hear an example of what this story is talking about:

iPhone therefore I am ... on air
by Sam Upton
Tuesday 16 November 2010, 10:59

Imagine you're in your local coffee shop/airport/street; you pick up your phone and go on air live and in quality on the radio; possibly even with a live guest.

The BBC is testing a system which will enable you to do just that. It is called LuciLive and is available as an app on the iPhone (at a cost).

So, as long as you can find a wifi or 3G signal, there is no need for a radio car, satellite dish or ISDN.

A bit of background - LuciLive is a VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) programme which the BBC has been using to broadcast radio two-ways live from laptops for a couple of years.

The software - the licence for laptop use costs about £230 - lets journalists broadcast in quality from wherever they have broadband, wifi or a good 3G signal. Most of the two-ways you hear on the Today programme or 5 Live in the morning are done using LuciLive.

Why not use ISDN, as the BBC has been for years, you might ask? In the past the BBC installed ISDNs in the homes of correspondents who reported regularly for the early morning outlets. The price for ISDN installation has tripled in recent years, so it became very important to find a way to broadcast which was cheap and yet reliable.

A few forays into Skype proved unsuccessful. Yes, it was cheap, but the quality was extremely variable and sometimes worse than a normal phone. LuciLive, although not quite as reliable as ISDN, has filled the gap. It also allows correspondents to broadcast not only from their homes but from wherever a wifi or 3G signal can be found.

Now we come to the iPhone. Within the last couple of months Technica Del Arte, which developed LuciLive, has released an app for the iPhone 4. The cost in the iPhone App store is currently just under $400 (£250).


The BBC is now running a trial with five journalists - Phil Mackie from 5 Live, Jack Baine from Newsbeat, Nick Garnett from 5 Live, Christian Frasier in Paris and Peter Bowes in Los Angeles. If the trial is successful - and the BBC can come up with a deal it can afford - then it will be rolled out to selected reporters and producers.

It is very easy to use. The iPhone microphone itself is good enough for broadcast, but you can also use an adaptor which allows you to plug in any standard microphone. The results have been mixed but promising.

In the initial trials, a number of issues have arisen:

There is a problem if you are using 3G and you have an incoming call on your iPhone - the connection is lost! All incoming calls need to be diverted to voicemail.

And there is a very small delay which means you hear yourself back in your headphones a fraction of a second after you speak - very off-putting unless you turn down the headphone volume.  

This is a two-way Phil Mackie did on 14 November on 5 Live. It was from Coventry on the 70th anniversary of the German bombing raids which devastated the city. Phil used 3G for this two-way, which included a live interview with a contributor.

The BBC is looking at other systems aside from LuciLive to achieve the same result, but it seems that some kind of VOIP system is the future for much of the BBC's live radio broadcasting.

Sam Upton is a radio trainer at the BBC College of Journalism.

Interesting isn't it....you can do away with the cable, do away with the tape and the tape recorder....do away with a huge satellite van, even. But you still need a mic!      Long live the apple and biscuit!

The music track?
Where else?
All over the piece, from top to end, peaking "8", and render the speech inaudible.

Perfection.

Sorry, have I missed something?

No, Gizmo was made redundant last year, they now have something called a "Word Processor".

i.e. it processes EVERYTHING.

Badly.