TV Studio

A few years back I lead an effort to upgrade and modernize our in house internet tv studio. After an office relocation we had an opportunity to upgrade and add new capabilities.

We went from a pair of consumer grade Sony cameras, a couple of Mackie mixing boards and a basic video controller to a new setup. We added a green screen, more cameras and upgraded our video processing.

We were recording in house, editing and sharing content via our WordPress sites, we had ~200k subscribers and hosted some call in q&a events using Skype and a combination of hardware.

Our upgrade moved us from 2 cameras to 4, we added a pair of Ursa Minor 4k cameras. We used a few pc’s to act as Skype workstations, these were tied into the video switcher as sources, in studio talent could speak to the Skype users and all video and audio was combined, modified and streamed live to the website. A Tricaster video switcher allowed us to modify the production and adjust the output for our format live.

The content was fed to the site by streaming through JW Player and served by the AWS CDN.

For my part, as IT Director, I worked with the video department and we selected the Ursa cameras and Tricaster, streaming solutions and I presented the overall plan to the executive team for approval. I was hands on, selecting installing configuring and operating most of the equipment aside from the cameras.

My development team was responsible for the WordPress programming and CDN management while I supervised the operation. We had budget challenges, we had to make sure we managed the AWS expenses so we created a monitoring system and used built in tags and Amazon features to identify and associate efforts to specific marketing campaigns.

Overall the solution was a success with some events generating mote than a million dollars each.