I hate it when things don’t work…
I spent today preparing for possibly the most interesting broadcast that BurnFM.com had attempted to date – a live commentary on a sports match, in this case the BUSA Mens Hockey final between Birmingham and Loughborough. They even plugged the station on their website at the previous link.
It didn’t work. I’m still at a loss as to why but something wasn’t right with the clubhouse network. The mixer and microphones worked perfectly and the laptop took the stream as expected.
Which is where the problems began.
For some reason the laptop did not stream the signal across the clubhouse network. Not even directly accessing the ip address of the laptop (a unique number assigned to a computer when it connects to a network or the Internet) using another computer on the network worked – simply put it did not stream from the laptop, or the network wasn’t configured to allow it to be broadcast.
As with all Internet-based computer activity a port needs to be activated to be used for a specific purpose – an available port is needed for web-browsing via IE or Firefox. A port is also required for a webstream – these were supposedly opened to allow us to stream.
It seems that it was setup to work – using a program called TCPview (thanks to Tim for directing me to it) it seemed that everything was setup to work. But it didn’t
Which meant that we couldn’t broadcast live and the live commentary for the entire game was out. We ended up having to do live commentary using Josh’s mobile phone which was far from ideal but at least meant the day wasn’t a total waste. But it’s still annoying that it did not work and makes me question why it didn’t.
Ian Devlin's Radio(ish) Blog 
TCPView is a nifty little TCP/UDP endpoint viewer program from Sysinternals (bought by Microsoft, surprise surprise) that lets you view which programs and services are accessing which local and remote ports on your PC, along with the status (listening, established etc). It can be useful to monitor programs to ensure they’re connecting to the remote host on the correct port, but also to monitor any possible “call home” spyware that periodically connects to a remote host.
Superscan is another useful program for scanning a remote computer to see which ports are open. However, it’s fairly old, there are newer programs out there and many hosts will block these sudden scans, as they’re essentially seen as DoS attacks.
Anyway, sorry to hear your broadcast didn’t work – I always recommend doing a full trial run of these things before the event, as there’s always something in the chain that will break on the day!