The Chelsea Football FanCast on Mixlr

The Chelsea Football FanCast is a weekly broadcast covering all things Chelsea. Produced by the fans for the fans, it brings the post-match pub environment online… literally – it’s broadcast live from a pub in Putney.

The well established, award winning podcast was brought to Mixlr last summer by producer and host Stamford Chidge. Fueled by plenty of Guinness, Chidge along with his co-hosts discuss the latest Chelsea news, with an element of banter, biased opinion and downright nonsense.

We caught up with Stamford Chidge to hear more about the show and how he uses Mixlr.

“Prior to Mixlr, the interactivity with the hard-core listeners was restricted to the odd tweet or post on facebook. Now we can engage directly with them when we are recording, by using the Mixlr feed on-line and crucially its ability to link with Twitter and Facebook simultaneously. Social media is vital for the FanCast as our growth in listeners has been very much down to our presence here.”

The guys (and girl) are often joined by football pundits,  journalists, ex-players and legends:

“One of the first shows we streamed live was perhaps one of the most important shows the Chelsea FanCast has done in its 5 years broadcasting. All out warfare was breaking out between Chelsea, the supporters and the press. We got together leading journalists including Martin Lipton, Chief Football Correspondent from the Mirror, Neil Ashton, Football News Correspondent from the Daily Mail, Rob Shepherd ex-NOTW and Dan Leven from the Fulham Chronicle to debate the issues live. The show went down extremely well – aided and abetted by the ability to stream live. It is the most listened to show we have done to date.

The ability to stream live and make the podcast more like a live radio show has certainly upped our game and aroused much greater interest in the show.”

Broadcasting from a pub may seem challenging, Chidge tells us more about how he does it:

“We use a Mackie Mixing desk; 6 studio mics and then take the main mix in to a Zoom H4n digital recorder (to record the podcast) with two L/R phono jack leads. We connect the Zoom to a Laptop with a basic headphone jack connection (from Zoom headphone out to Laptop Line in). And from there it’s just a case of getting the recording and mixing levels right in the mixer; the Zoom and the Laptop – and then just press the start broadcasting button!!”

The FanCast has some exciting plans for 2013:

“Over the next few months we will have guests such as Tubes from Soccer AM; TalkSport’s Jason Cundy; former Chelsea Players Frank Leboeuf and Pat Nevin and many others. The next phase will be to start doing Skype calls and playing in pre-recorded material such as player interviews.”

The FanCast takes place live every Monday at 7.30pm GMT – Tune in!