About The Rose City Rollers

The Rose City Rollers are women of attitude, passion and athleticism playing a hard-hitting sport of speed and skill. They were pioneers in the rebirth of roller derby and continue to foster its growth. Their goals are to serve their community by empowering women, providing entertainment for their fans and supporting charitable causes.  The Rose City Rollers are a 501c3 non-profit organization and a founding member of the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association.

Growth of Live Streaming Derby Bouts

Derby News Network plays a large role in uniting the national derby audience.  They first experimented with video “boutcasts” in late 2008.  Since then every major derby competition has included live internet video coverage.  It has occurred organically.  The community working to produce and share content with each other. Typical bouts are covered with 1 to 2 cameras that focus on a wide shot to ensure the action can be followed.

We have endeavored to tell the passion of the sport through multiple cameras, close-ups, off-track character shots, and post-bout captain interviews.  It is a challenge to compress the energy, fun, and action of the live event into a camera lens that eventually ends up a window on a web page.

The Season opener featured all 4 of Portland’s teams in four 30 minute bouts.  Many, Many thanks to the all-volunteer crew:

Nate DiNiro

Kimberly Gehl

Mike McClure

Mike “Dr. Normal”

Next Event?

We will be broadcasting the Wild West Showdown Febrary 26-28, 2010 from Bremerton, WA.

More to come after encoding is complete.

Timeline:

MM:SS

37:00  Introductions of Teams

92:00  Half time Interview #1

97:00  Half time Interview #2

161:00  Between game interview #1

164:00 Begin of 2nd bout

209:00  Half time Interview #1

270:00 Post bout Interview #1

email your feedback to joe@blazestreaming.com or use the form below.

Ignite is a community event that was started in Seattle, Wa and now occurs worldwide. Speakers have 5 minutes and 20 slides to say anything. The slides advance automatically every 20 seconds and the topics vary from educational to humorous. Often the talks are a mixture of both. Ignite Portland 6 took place at the Bagdad Theater on July 16, 2009.

Production Goals

I worked with the event organizers to plan and produce a live event stream.  The deliverables were:

• Multi-camera production including slides
• Live Stream to a web audience with chat and twitter integration
• Audio/video feed to the backstage bar
• High quality master files and web files saved to disk

Planning

The event started 2 months out with the reservation of dates and brief overview of the effort involved.  Major planning events were:

• 2 Months out:  Confirmation of event resources and general goals.
• 1 Month out: Site visit to review requirements for audio/video feed to BackStage Bar.
• 3 weeks out: Production meeting with sound, slides, and video teams.
• 1 week out: Onsite technical rehearsal.

Day of Event

The audio/visual teams arrived onsite at 12:00 to begin the setup.  This involves unloading gear, placing the equipment, and testing.  For the video requirements we laid over 1,000 feet of cable to the cameras, the projection booth, and to the BackStage Bar.  A clean source of audio was not available and we were forced to utilize an open wireless lav mic.  This is not the case at most events.

While I’m busy with the video requirements.  The other teams are busy building the last minute slide deck changes, testing sound, and all other requirements for the live performance.

This was the first Ignite were we fed audio/video to the backstage bar.  This provided a place for overflow crowds and also for people to attend in a setting where they can tune in or out while talking with friends.  We ended up feeding a projector and all the bar TV’s.

We were live from 6:30 pm to 9:30 pm.  The live stream had 285 unique viewers with a constant audience of 110 people.  The online community switched between chat and twitter streams to connect with each other and the event as a whole.

By 11:30 pm we were packed up, tired, and ready to head home.

Day After

The master video file was edited into separate talks, encoded into a web format, and uploaded to Youtube.

About the Conference

Open Source Bridge is a new conference for developers working with open source technologies and for people interested in learning the open source way. It’s not a typical technical conference.

Here’s what makes it different:

• It’s entirely volunteer-run, by developers, for developers. This is the conference you’ve always wanted to attend.
• Session tracks are technology agnostic, based instead around shared community experiences and focused on similarities between projects, not differences.
• The geekery doesn’t end when the sessions do. There will also be a 24-hour hacker lounge for code sprints, bug bashes, session deep dives, bouncing ideas, starting new projects or just mingling and taking in the vibe.

Live Keynote Video

People are busy, but want to participate

Each morning started with a keynote session. These sessions included Ward Cunningham, Mayor Sam Adams, Amber Case, and Kurt von Finck. The keynote was streamed live and audience members tweeted the address to friends and co-workers. Our keynote audience peaked at 96 viewers. The online discussions were lively and full of praise from folks who could not make the event. One office even placed a projector in a conference room so that co-workers could watch together.

Recorded Sessions

In addition to the live streamed keynote sessions, Blaze Streaming Media recorded all the sessions taking place in the keynote room. 10 diverse sessions will be released online over the next year; building interest in next year’s event. The sessions released will fill up email boxes, blogs, and twitter streams long after the event is over.

Value to the conference and community

Live streaming video is a struggle for many event organizers to embrace. Their is a natural belief that if the content is available online, it will take attendees away from the event. This just has not been true in my experience. Conferences struggle in a competitive environment to be events that the community rallies around. A conference typically reaches a very small percentage of a huge market. The people involved are those who will make the investment in travel, time, and energy to physically attend. The conference attendee is rewarded with the best experience due to being away from the office, meeting new people, and networking to name a few. But… What to do with the 98.9% of people in your community that did not attend your event? (made up statistic)

Live streaming presents opportunities to reach a new audience. This audience can rally around your conference and recognize it to be the industry event they missed. They can participate via a paid, sponsored, or advertisement supported model. They can chat, twitter, network, and contribute to online event session notes. Online attendees add energy to an event and raise the status as industry inclusive. A live stream provides easy fodder for twitter, blogs, and industry web sites to promote your conference.

photo credit: Igal Koshevoy

Open Source Bridge included topics on projects that have a world wide following and use. The community for open source software is large but spread out geographically. Providing a live stream and recorded content shines a light on the conference as the source of community.

It has been a pleasure to work with the volunteer run conference and I appreciate their vision in embracing new tools and technology.

Objective

The Oregon Chapter of the American Society of Interior Designers serves a membership base that is spread out over 98,000 square miles. Members often drive 300 miles one way to attend the annual conference and vendor fair. Travel time and cost has been a barrier to some of the membership that would like to attend.

A solution was needed for providing members who cannot travel and would like to attend the meeting online. Ideally the online attendees would be able to view the presenter, powerpoint slides, and also be able to chat with one another.

Solution

Blaze Streaming Media was able to deliver an experience that engaged online attendees without impacting the schedule or energy at the event. “Interior Designers are very visual and I was worried about using a traditional camera and operator placed in the middle of the room” says Joe Christensen of Blaze Streaming Media. “Instead of camera platforms manned by cameramen I brought in broadcast quality robotic cameras that were able to be mounted discreetly. This allowed us to provide a great multi-camera experience for the online attendees without changing the look or energy in the venue.”

Below you will find Lesli Ann Cone’s presentation on “The CEO of Me”. This is a copy of the live footage without post editing. Enjoy.

Wow. Is how I would sum up CyborgCamp. A flurry of meeting new people, hearing mind popping discussions, and fine tuning my work flow for live event production.

Live Streaming: I think everyone would consider the live stream a success. We had online attendees from London, Germany, Japan, UCLA, and everywhere in between. The interaction between online audience and live event started to grow as physical attendees started to interact in the chat room. I was excited to see my fellow cyborgs start to chip in with repeating questions to the chat audience and feeding questions to the presenter.

We pushed 19,000 viewer minutes. We averaged 40 to 60 viewing the stream at any given time and broadcast for 8+ hours.

Screenshot of live stream

Video on Demand: My workflow testing has been so focused on the critical nature of the live event that my post event tasks were not solid. I expected to encode in mp4 and upload to blip.tv. No go. Youtube, no go as well. I was stuck with the task of starting over with the encoding tasks on Monday. On Demand files are capable of higher quality. This will change after I figure out all the encoding tricks.

Summary: I continue to believe in the vision of offering live webcasting that has a production level and price point that allows smaller events to engage an online audience. I have quite a few posts rattling in my head, so I look forward to continuing the conversation.

Thank you: A big thanks to Amber Case (@ambercase) for including me in the event right after we met at FromSideProjectToStartUP. Also to Doc Normal (@DrNormal) for being my partner with the audio gear, setup, and shared vision.

Hello Portland Tech, make room for one more.