Webcam

Video from the studio and from remotes

Radio is an audio medium, but a webcam turns out to be surprisingly useful for a station like this one. Seeing a host working — records stacked on the desk, the board, the mess — makes the broadcast feel like something a person is doing rather than a stream arriving from nowhere.

What the camera carried

• Live studio shows. The Sunday morning and Saturday broadcasts, where the video ran alongside the audio.
• Remotes. Broadcasts from festivals and halls, where the camera was pointed at the band and the floor rather than at the host.
• Special events. Anniversary dances, benefits and holiday broadcasts.

Current status

The video stream ran on a third-party service that has since changed hands and shut down its free tier, which is how most small-station video ends. Rebuilding it is a bandwidth question more than a technical one: video costs an order of magnitude more to deliver than audio, and for a station running on donations that is a hard trade against keeping the audio stream up.

Watching a remote

Where a remote is being covered on video, it is announced ahead of the broadcast on the live shows and on the programming page. The audio stream carries everything regardless, and for most listeners that is the part that matters.

Why video matters for this music

Polka is social music and most of it is played to a room rather than to a microphone. Audio captures the arrangement; video captures the thing the arrangement exists for — the floor filling up, the couples who have been dancing together for fifty years, the band watching the room and adjusting the tempo. A recording of a festival set without the room is a different and lesser document.

That is the argument for putting a camera on remotes even when the picture quality is poor. Nobody else is filming a Tuesday-night dance at a fire hall, and in twenty years the shaky footage will be the only record that the evening happened at all.