Create Streaming Audio Webcasts from the Telephone

Active Call Center can be used with streaming media tools to produce audio webcasts.

The basic idea is as follows:

• Have Active Call Center answer a telephone call and enter a loop.
• Make sure that there are only action nodes within the loop and that no audio playback will take place during the loop.
• At the very start of the loop, start a recording application that will record from the sound device of the line on which the call has arrived. To determine the name of the sound device, match the incoming line number to the sound devices listed in Control Panel ... Sounds and Multimedia.
• During the loop, optionally check the AllTouchTones variable to determine when to end the loop.
  
• When the loop ends or during the hangup script, stop the recording application.
• If you use a recording application (for example, RealProducer), the application will be able to publish the recorded audio to the web (for example, RealServer).

We haven't done much experimenting with audio webcasts ourselves, but we are hearing customer reports indicating this concept works.