Most of the Guest and Remote contributions to stations have traditionally been using ISDN with many Corporates, Banks, Political and Government Organizations having their own small broadcast setups with ISDN codecs – same for Journalists working from home. As ISDN lines have practically disappeared over the last 5 or so years, Broadcasters have been using whatever is available to get better audio quality because Guests just don’t like being interviewed over the phone with Voice quality that sounds thin – so their opinions seem to be thin.

This has resulted in them often using downloaded software codecs and more recently Consumer applications such as Skype and FaceTime which have been sometimes “not bad” but quite often absolutely terrible, with phasy, gurgly audio and connections lost.

By about 2014, the BBC had a huge number of Comrex IP Codecs installed and we came up with the idea of letting the Broadcasters make more effective use of the hardware that they had bought whilst getting better and more reliable Guest and Remote contributions.

So what is CallMe ? CallMe puts high-quality audio connectivity in the hands of the broadcasters themselves without them insisting that the Contributor downloads special software or do any special setup and the resulting solution is what we call CallMe Click-&-Connect.

CallMe uses the capabilities of Web RTC and the OPUS audio coding algorithm embedded in most web browsers. Opus is remarkable in that the audio quality, even a lower bitrates like 32kbps sounds fantastic – though CallMe uses 64kbps by default, which is coincidentally the same as good-

old ISDN but with three times the audio bandwidth. The other advantage of OPUS is that it adapts its bitrate to the complexity of the audio being encoded.

The challenge was how to access this capability in a way that it could connect to the back-end hardware without it being too complicated for the contributor and after conversations with our BBC friends, we came up with a simple solution which they now use with an unlimited Enterprise package – working back to their hardware codecs.

Plainly you can have the guest download a software codec application of which there are few but in our case, the Broadcast Station is the entity that subscribes to CallMe and it simply sends out a web link to its guests to connect. From our side, the setup involves us creating for them a Web Page with their own Station branding – a background image and a logo which appears on the central control panel – and a suitable web address for connection.

That web address is mapped via the CallMe server which is hosted on Amazon Web Services to the Broadcaster’s studio IP Codec or codecs – by which we mean that if there are say 5 codecs in the studio using their MAC addresses – CallMe tries to connect to the first and if it is not available to the second and so on. A normal subscription is for one call at-a-time but additional simultaneous calls can be added to the subscription at a reduced rate. So if you want a maximum of 3 simultaneous calls using CallMe, you have the main subscription plus two more all mapped to your chosen back-end hardware. It works with everything we have tested – which includes Comrex, Telos, TieLine, Aeta, AVC, inQodec, Luci and SystemBase – and if your codecs aren’t on the list it is only because we haven’t tested them. So CallMe Click-&-Connect is a Browser to Hardware solution.

For our larger enterprise customers we can provide rich analytics as an add-on for CallMe Click-&-Connect, which offers detailed connection statistics for calls in real-time and second-by-second for any call in the last year. So for those rare occasions where a broadcast isn’t perfect, the engineers can go in and determine the cause of the problem.