Bulletproof Your Remote Interviews with Progressive Uploads
Upload & Protect Your Audio as it’s Recorded
You’re 45 minutes into recording the best remote interview of your podcast career & your Guest’s WiFi drops before you wrap up the conversation. Your heart pounds in your ears & freakout ensues. 😰 “Did SquadCast just ruin your best episode?!” You chat with Support, we manually recover & QA your Guest’s half of the conversation from our backups within a few hours. Cool, your episode is saved, but SquadCast could have provided a much better experience. We call this better experience Progressive Uploads & it is going to bulletproof your remote interviews while saving you & your Guests time.
Interruptions Happen IRL
You’ve been burned by WiFi in the past on Skype & you’re smart, so you follow Chris Curran’s advice with a wired ethernet connection. You’re good now right? Wrong. Comcast still sucks, computers crash, laptops die, Guests leave early. What then?
Interruptions happen in real life & pretending like they don’t does nothing to protect your recordings from them. Instead, SquadCast embraces reality & records your audio in a way that’s resilient to these interruptions. We upload your audio as its recorded to your cloud where its safe & sound until you’re ready to download your wav files. Best case scenario, that’s when you click Stop. Less than best case scenario, something interrupts your remote interview. SquadCast detects the interruption, automatically Stops recording, & immediately produces your wav files. Cool, but let’s assume the worst & have some fun. Let’s pretend that the Internet goes down globally. What then? When the riots settle down & you come back into your session, SquadCast will check for lingering audio in our cloud & generates your files. Bulletproof.
Don’t Wait for Uploads
When we first launched SquadCast 1 year ago at Podcast Movement 2017, it took Dave Jackson around 15 minutes to upload an hour long interview from his home studio. That’s almost a deal-breaker to ask busy people like Dave & yourself to wait around for 15 minutes while a progress bar inches its way forward. Luckily, Dave is a cool guy & believed us when we told him, “we will make it way faster”. Fast forward to March of this year & we rolled out an update that reduced the average upload speed to less than 1 minute for the same hour long recording. Boom, Dave & the rest of our hosts were happy but why keep people waiting at all? With Progressive Uploads there is no wait for your file to upload because its uploading in the background while your recording. Instant gratification.
From Beta to Stable & Beyond
Prior to rolling out Progressive Uploads, SquadCast recorded & stored your audio in Memory. This approach assumed that your device has adequate Memory to hold an hour+ of audio. That’s not a safe assumption on my wife’s Chromebook or even a maxed-out iPhone X. With Progressive Uploads SquadCast utilizes far less Memory, dramatically improving performance, & increasing stability.
Hosts want to give their Guest’s the freedom to join a session on SquadCast from their mobile devices & so do we. Who wants to be tethered to a desktop? To hold an hour long interview on a mobile network is possible, but never guaranteed, & Progressive Uploads are a major pre-requisite for great experiences on mobile, smart microphones, & beyond.