I would like to design a radio program for community in villages in my country. I wish to use computer telephony integrated systems to produce a menu to let my audience to choose the Live program of their choice. I am wondering if anyone could advice on technical details and how to go about doing this project using Asterisk.
Thank you.
Sounds doable with Asterisk, yes.
Users will be dialing in to your Asterisk system via their mobile phone calls ? How many users at the same time do you expect ?
Check out the basic-pbx samples in the Asterisk source tree. See in particular the references to Interactive Voice Response (IVR) using applications such as Background() and WaitExten(). Also MusicOnHold() for your radio/streaming portion.
Start small, try to get one call working, and go from there! 
Thanks @penguinpbx for your reply. I expect thousands of people calling simultaniously, via their mobile phones.
I am going to deploy Asterisk tomorrow, on a server i have. It will be my first time. But i hope i will learn a lot, i dont expect things to be easy, but i will try to use available resources and documentations.
If successful, I will share my project results here, for anyone with same needs to easily find a solution.
If face an issue, or get confused can i ask for help hereā¦? thanks for your kindnessš
1000s of people means that you are going to have to consider performance and the impact on your service provider.
You can scale your actual processing by using multiple machines to run the service, but I think you need to design at the whole system level, and assuming other villages will do the same. That should mean discussing this with service providers, and, as I assume this is an area with mainly mobile infrastructure, the mobile operator. Are you sure that FM broadcasting is not a better choice?
Both IP networks and telephone networks are designed on the basis of relatively few user actively using them at one time. If the dominant IP traffic in your country is web browsing, the network will not be designed to cope with most of a village listening to a media stream (even more so if it is sized just for email). If the dominant use is video on demand, you will probably have no problem, but, otherwise you may find that you become the dominant traffic source.
(Streaming media has always been a bad fit for IP, as it is a packet network, and packet networks are best when delivery delay is not particularly important, and traffic is very variable from any one source.)
The most efficient way of doing this in Asterisk is likely to be to use conferences. The most efficient way of doing this over IP is using multicast, but I donāt think Asterisk supports that, and consumer grade IP services also wonāt support it.
Hey @david551. Thanks so much for your time and reply.
To be franc, i prefer this over FM because i wish to generate some revenues.
I wish to have a number (preferably a short code). Then, people will have to pay a certain subscription fee to be able to call the number and listen to the audio streams of their choice via their mobile phone.
So, i was wondering if an asterisk based PBX canāt be the best way to go? 
Additionally, i wish to provide a vocal menu for the listeners to choose the stream of their choice.
The best example of what i wish to do is this:
AudioNow / Call to Listen
If it so doable, i will find solution to adress capacity and performance issues with the providers.
Again thank you so much for your kind and valuable responses.
Letās not forget you will have to license the rights to anything that you stream to your users. So youāve done that right? Youāll have to follow whatever rules there are to get the licenses because you have to pay for the right to use someoneās music/audio.
In the US the music publishers like BMG, ASCAP, etc. actively look for violators, including reviewing if a business is streaming MoH from a radio station or playing back recordings of artists they own the publishing rights to. Iām sure this happens in other parts of the world because thatās $$$ being taken out of their pocket and you need to always pursue copyright violations to protect your copyrights.
So all these users will be calling in to stream originally created content by you?
Please s/anything/somethings/ because concepts like free software, public domain, fair use, parody, sarcasm, etc., exist around the world!
For example, you might be able to stream out tons of Grateful Dead live sets from archive.org by dialing the date of the show you want to listen to via Asterisk IVR system.
But is that required in all use cases ?
For example, most public meetings of government officials produce reams of audio content immediately into the public domain.
So the model that was presented as the āI want to do it like thisā and charge for it means people are going to pay for public domain music/content? Iām not sure how that model will work out.
Yes, for example you could just stream any of those URLs in your MoH or whatever for Asterisk. Just because youāre getting from X source still doesnāt mean you have the rights to use that material in your project. You buy the CD for the Grateful Deadās greatest hits doesnāt mean you can start streaming it over the MoH of Asterisk. You still need the rights to broadcast that music.
I donāt know. The OP said this was going to be original content created by them. I questioned the āIāll have 1000 users calling inā because if this is original content then it must be well known already to have a starting base of 1000 users to pay a subscription to hear this original content.
And while the OP dismissed copyright issues because their own content. There are still copyright issues, theirs. See as a subscriber I could then have my PBX dial into his service and I could stream his content. Iām sure the subscriber agreement will not allow a single user to then share the content with another 1000 users that arenāt paying. If it doesnāt and it allows that then it is a poor protection of said copyright/ownership.
Disney made/makes a mint from The Brothers Grimm.
Maybe OP plans to read locally translated fairy tales in funny voices as dial-on-demand bedtime stories ?
I donāt know the copyright status of the specific material (although it canāt be public domain in the UK), but I have seen cases where people upload pirated content to archive.org, although I think it was magazines, and the copyright owner then asserted their rights, and had it taken down. (I couldnāt find any copyright release, on the web page, so my assumption has to be that copyright is still in full force,)
For example, most public meetings of government officials produce reams of audio content immediately into the public domain.
Thatās not possible in most countries, and does not necessarily apply at state level in the USA. It took a long time even to get the right to broadcast the UK parliament and I believe there are still significant moral rights restrictions and are probably copyright ones as well. See https://www.parliament.uk/site-information/copyright-parliament/pru-licence-agreements/
Interesting, thanks for the link!
IANAL but I checked a little more on the most populous states of California, Florida, New York and Texas and they appear to allow such recordings (thatās 1/3 of the USA population.)
This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.