Imagine a company who runs five shows in one city for starters. By law, they must buy five sets of everything they use at each show. Or pirate and watch out for ol' SpinDog! Now imagine a central location with five players and one operator. Each player is linked by whatever means to each club. Each KJ in the club is linked by whatever means to the operator. Getting the idea?

One set of disk for five clubs! Or ten. Why limit it to one city; why not the state of Oklahoma?

Each club would need it's own machine so guys like me who carry in Priddis disks could sing Neil Diamond.

I envision the signal coming raw from the central location so each KJ would still adjust, tweak and do whatever you guys do to make us sound good.

Would it be difficult? Maybe; maybe not. Would there be bugs? Sure, at first! Is it possible? Hey, imagine showing a TV, just a common TV to Abe Lincoln. Try telling him how it works and how we accept it!

WE KNOW IT WOULD BE POSSIBLE!! WHY ISN'T ANYONE ONE DOING IT?

And why does such a moron as I think of these things?

Dante

There is a place local to me that advertises itself as "America's First All-Karaoke Bar". Whether that is true or not is not up for discussion.... In any event, they also own a C&W club one town over. They do Country Karaoke every Sunday night. Now ... Having only one set of licensed discs, what usually happens is that they pull out a large variety of country stuff and send it over to the C&W club. This can cause a problem if you are in the original club and want to sing country... but everyone is used to that.

Now the owner had this "brilliant" idea...
(similiar to Dante's) What if he could somehow either string or lease cable between the clubs and have one central library of discs and have both clubs using it. Nice idea... but, not quite feasible or cost-effective with today's technology he quickly found out. Sending a signal of quality audio and video over great distances requires alot resources and bandwidth... much like a cable television signal. When you add up the cost of building a plant to supply this kind of transmission, it is by far cheaper to simply purchase the required duplicates for your software, unless you can serve so many places that it can make economic sense. There just aren't as many karaoke venues to make it cost effective. This doesnt even begin to address the issue of getting pole rights or permits for underground cable. As for satellite... yeah right. The internet, while not that far off as far as technology goes, is still a long way from being able to provide the reliability that a closed network would provide... and frankly, would YOU trust it to run your karaoke business off of? I'd hate to think some teenage hacker could close down my clubs with some sort of denial-of-service attack.

Now... assuming this was all feasible anyways... I wonder what the legal effect with licensing the music would be. Essentially, you may have a big problem with the FCC, as you have now sent your contained public performance out over the "airwaves" as a sort of closed circuit broadcast... Not sure how the licensing agencies would like that.

Maybe the future lies in a sort of video on demand service like the cable TV companies run... But I think that would be years away before that could be done efficiently enough to where the performance is equivalent to the KJ and his discs. Quite a bit of horsepower needed there... and the cable co's have enough trouble doing pay-per-view... imagine having to deliver songs every 4 minutes to 100's of places and keep track of it all ??? sheesh...

[This message has been edited by cliffd64 (edited May 24, 2000).]

Perhaps it's time for someone to challenge some of these laws as being unconstitutiional or something. I mean, crap, they want you to buy their product but not use it to the fullest extent. Like selling a hammer but only letting you drive six-penny nails; no eights!!

I fear you are right RC. Fights would most probably ocurr.

Oh, well! As I said, it was just an idea for discussion.

Dante

I was a feelin' like a moron there for a while. AOL and I are going to re-vamp my program sometime late tonight so I can travel to the forbidden website!

Anyways, what Dante was getting at struck me as familiar right here in my home town. There is a place here that has 10 karaoke rooms, served by 10 players and one set of discs, and it is all automated (once the clerk turns on the cumputer anyway). Each room has a sound system, TV, and a remote control. Punch in the song code, and this robot arm takes the disc out of a carousel, and puts it in the appropriate player for your room. Kind of neat, and the owner spent over 100k on this set up. He had plans on tying into this system to put karaoke in his house a block away. Don't know if he ever did, but he said it was quite feasible. But as Cliff and Chip point out, trying to something like this over a wide area probably isn't that feasible, compared to just buying an extra system.

I am feelin' a whole bunch better today. I worked out in the sun yesterday and feared I had cooked my brain!