Webcast to the World

Webcasting is basically broadcasting over the internet.  Popular platforms like UStream and Livestream allow you to webcast live events while watching the number of viewers in real time. These statistics are valuable as they can provide insight into your capability to sell sponsorships or commercials.  Over the years, social media and chat have been added to these stream capabilities allowing viewer to interact and share the events.

YouTube has recently gotten into the game with YouTube Live and Telestream Wirecast.  YouTube Live isn’t available to anyone with a YouTube account.  You need an account in good standing among other requirements.

We recently webcast the Tri-County Swimming Championships in southern New Jersey.  The event took place over two days and it couldn’t have been more exciting. Champions were made and records were broken.  We were so glad to have been able to document these events and give them to the world.  We received many messages from people around the globe who appreciated the chance to see their loved ones swim.

We used two cameras to capture the races, a third camera for the announcers and a fourth camera that we called the weasel to capture anything else like crowds, close faces, etc.  We put a headset mic on the announcer and put up an ambient mic to capture splashing and crowd noise.   We fed all this into the Blackmagic ATEM Television Studio to switch between cameras and we also recorded the races separately on an Atomos Ninja Assassin.

Our streaming service of choice was Telestream’s Wirecast, which allowed us to stream to a YouTube account.  Let’s be honest, the main reason is YouTube is where the eyes are and we wanted as many eyes as possible to find the stream.  The cool thing is, this event was streamed the same day as Olympic swimming events in Rio and we did have a few people who stumbled upon us by googling “championship swimming”.  We naturally told them this wasn’t the Olympics but they hung out anyway!

webcast text

Why, thank you, Dimond Gamer! I wonder if he knew he misspelled diamond?

It’s time to take advantage of this technology.  Big companies can now share their Town Halls meetings globally.  Townships can do a community service by broadcasting their council meetings and keep the archives on their website for posterity.  People with small kids, busy work schedules or with disabilities that wouldn’t normally have been able to attend could watch and participate in the meetings.  It’s a big world out there and offering your events on the internet can mean a lot more followers and a much bigger audience.

If you like watching competitive swimming, check out our Tri-County Championships archives and tell us if they look like the Olympics.  TheDimondGamer thought so.

 

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