In an industrial section of Glendale, Calif., far from any movie or TV studio, sits ACE Broadcasting, the site of radio and TV personality Adam Carolla's extremely popular nightly audio podcasts and a slew of other shows scheduled to start production this fall. The warehouse space, small as warehouses go, is filled primarily with vintage cars. Only a small portion of the front is taken up by production space. There is a small front office, an even smaller booth where Carolla and guests can sit on couches to chat, and a tiny control room where the show is switched from. The Adam Carolla Show is currently an audio podcast available on Apple iTunes. The show will transition to a live-streamed video presentation in September.

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The centerpiece of this control room is NewTek's TriCaster, which ACE Broadcasting executive producer (and childhood friend of Carolla's) Donny Misraje sees as a major component of his vision of running a successful "micro broadcasting" operation. Misraje, who has worked for more than 15 years in television, first as an editor and then a producer, marvels at the power of this box that allows live switching of the three HD cameras in the studio, as well as compositing, titling, some fairly elaborate visual effects, a still store, a DDR and editing capabilities. "It's like a whole engineering 18-wheeler in a package a little bit bigger than a shoebox," he marvels.

And NewTek designed it to be easy to learn and use, even for people with zero experience in television production.

	Adam Carolla and Donny Misraje

NewTek senior vice president, strategic development Philip Nelson explains during our tour of ACE Broadcasting, "The box that's being used by The Adam Carolla Show is the same one that's being used by fifth graders in Las Vegas to do their morning announcements."

But Carolla is an industry veteran with a national fan base built up over years. He spent more than a decade as Dr. Drew Pinsky's sidekick on the radio and TV versions of Loveline, co-starred with Jimmy Kimmel on Comedy Central's The Man Show, starred for about three years on his own CBS Radio morning show and has been a frequent presence on all sorts of other radio and TV shows. For him, Webcasting and podcasting started as an afterthought.

In February 2009, when CBS Radio abruptly changed the format of station KLSX and dumped all of its talk show hosts, Misraje convinced Carolla to continue doing what he'd been doing and let people download it as a podcast. "Adam is a comedy factory," Misraje declares. "Even while he had his morning radio show, we'd go out to lunch or dinner and he'd be constantly coming up with stories and ideas and hilarious complaints. I'd think, 'My God! We've got to record this and get it out on the Internet.'"

	NewTek TriCaster operator Logan Moy

When the axe fell, Misraje started visiting Carolla's house with his Mac laptop and a handheld mic and let Adam do his thing. Misraje recorded the audio in QuickTime format.

"A radio show isn't like other kinds of shows or a sitcom," Carolla explains. "There's a tighter bond and a deeper connection between the people on the radio and the audience. If someone you like to listen to goes off the air, you get depressed. I'm the same way with other radio personalities. I think of them as family members and friends. And I wanted to keep doing what I was doing. The podcasts were a way that we could keep this going for anybody out there who, for some reason I don't fully understand, felt that way about me."

Interest was phenomenal. "I think the first episode was downloaded something like 250,000 times," Misraje says. "We're headed toward 70 million total downloads to date."

	Production booth

Carolla had no idea how popular his podcasts would be, or what even constituted good numbers in that world. "I didn't really know what podcasting was," he admits. "I wasn't part of that community. It was this new thing to me. You don't expect much out of stuff you've never heard of. It's like when you're explaining to Grandpa how big some band is in Brazil. You tell him, 'They sell out soccer stadiums!' And he goes, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah.' That was me. 'Yeah, yeah yeah.' It didn't mean anything to me. But that was academic because we were going to continue putting my voice out there one way or another."

Carolla had been told to expect server costs to hover around $1,000 a month, maybe getting closer to $2,000 at some point. "Immediately, cost jumped to $10,000 and then got close to $12,000," Misraje recalls. "There was so much traffic, they kept having to expand the bandwidth. That's when I think Adam started to realize the potential."

After a few weeks of kicking back at his house to record podcasts with friends such as Seth McFarland, Tom Arnold and Andy Dick, he decided, with some help from his wife, that it might be best to set up a studio in the Glendale warehouse he'd initially bought to house his and his friends' cars. That's when ACE Broadcasting set up shop in its Glendale location.

As the audio podcasts continued to remain at or near the top of iTunes' list of most popular downloads, Misraje expanded the offerings with occasional video clips and began building out the infrastructure based in great part on the TriCaster. The small studio is outfitted with three Canon VIXIA HF200 HD cameras that send video signals to the composite-in jacks on the TriCaster. (The cameras also can record ISO to SD cards.) "We use a kind of self-directed style right now," Misraje explains. "I just tell people if they look over at the monitor and they're out of frame that they should move over. At some point it would be nice to move into a bigger space and have camera operators."

But for now, hiring camera operators would add overhead that couldn't be justified. ACE Productions is finalizing the details of a subscription model that will allow people to access the forthcoming live video stream and subsequent streams as the show is repeated. (Misraje does not see video episodes being available for download.) The show has several sponsors in place who are eager to get their message out to Carolla's viewers. But the business model is still developing, as is the paradigm of how people experience The Adam Carolla Show and the other ACE productions in various stages of preparation.

"I think we're about two years ahead of schedule with this. We're not quite to the point where it's as easy to watch what we're doing as it is to turn on the TV or the radio in your car," Misraje offers. The show's audio podcasts are available via iTunes subscription and streaming radio app Stitcher. Archived podcasts are also available on the show's Web site, www.adamcarolla.com.

The Stitcher app and others like it, he says, are moving things in the right direction for ACE Broadcasting's slate of shows to realize their true potential, but he knows this won't happen overnight. Fortunately, overhead is low enough that ACE's shows won't live or die on a few Nielsen numbers, and the participants find that fact freeing from a business and creative standpoint.

Is all this the modern equivalent of the TV industry's intrepid beginnings? Carolla is philosophical. "Whether I'm doing a book signing or a live show or a podcast, I just expect people not to show up. I think my family did that to me. But we're going to do this anyway. If it catches fire and we all get rich, that would be awesome, but I'm not counting on that and it's not why we're here.

"When it comes to the entertainment business, I've always had a policy of 'move forward and don't ask too many questions.'"