thelinuxlink.net

This is my first post to the forums though I've listened to quite a few shows and have communicated with Linc over his very nice Bashpodder podcast client.

After listening to The Linux Show tonight however, I felt compelled to join the forums and post the following question. What sort of costs are incurred in doing a show like this? The reason I ask is because as I was listening to The Linux Show tonight I heard that they may be canceling their show because of their costs getting out of hand. At one point Jeff Geherdt mentioned that they may be $25,000 in the hole.

I really like these guys, but I'm wondering how in the world can it cost this much to do such a show! $25,500 freakin bucks?!? That just seems amazing to me. I'm guessing that the majority of their costs come from phone expenses. Could not Skype be used to very effectively cover phone costs though? Am I out of my mind for thinking this is a LOT of money for a show like this, or is TLLTS spending such amounts of money for the show?

Adam

The reason why The Linux Show costs so much is that they basically do a conference call using Verizon or some other phone provider. Those conference call services cost quite a lot. The guys here basically don't have that cost. If they have phone guests they use skype which costs nothing. The only real expenses are bandwidth for the live stream as well as for downloads of the archives. So far that has been manageable. A few months back I passed the hat around at one of the LUG meetings. Most people kicked in what they could. I might have to do same thing in the near future. Hopefully the guys setup a paypal account for contributions. This is a real grass roots effort and listener support is much appreciated.

Thanks Patrick. I guess that the phone costs are the single largest reason why the show cost so high. I know that they were trying to bring down the phone costs with an asterisk pbx, but it sounds like that cost them a lot of money too...at least in the initial setup. I'd hate to see their show go away. Maybe someone will suggest going whole hog to Skype. It's free and the call quality is quite good.

Adam

Over at LugRadio, our costs are minimal. In fact, zero. Jono already has the studio and our bandwidth for downloads is very kindly donated by our mirrors.

It seems odd that $25,000 is a bill for phone calls. Even at 10c a minute for a call, that's some 4000 hours. If there are three phone calls, that's still well over a thousand hours. There must be more to it than phone calls.

We talked to Jeff last year at the LinuxExpo in NYC and he said his main cost was the phone setup. The second most expensive was the bandwidth. I posted the show links on the Newsforge and Linuxtoday story talk backs. I hope the stream keeps on ticking during the show on Wednesday. If it crashes becuase of bandwidth you can blame me for trying to pull in more listeners.

Patrick and Matthew,

Now that I think back on everthing that Jeff said in the show last night I recall him mentioning that some company had already helped underwrite the show to the tune of $40,000. I'd have to go back and listen to the audio again, but if that $40,000 was for this year and the $25,000 previously mentioned was for this year that means that we are looking at a bill of around or over $65,000. That just can't be right. I remember now that the show's expenses also include the costs of attending conferenes and the like, but still...

Adam