In an email Charlie Stogner asked me to share my experiences putting together the live election returns for our lease access channels.
I had purchased an "old" tv studio about two years ago...most of the inventory ended up in the garbage. A keeper of the equipment was an Videonics MX1 and an audio mixing board.
First, I got with the local phone company, they were very receptive to the idea of placing an internet connection in the county courthouse. We ended up with a two T1 lines paired, which gave me 1.5mb up and 1.5mb down...dedicated. We needed all this so we could communicate with our "broadcast" equipment at the two cable headends. We did not use full screen video, we used 320X240 and centered it to the bottom of the screen and placed an advertising banner above the video screen for the phone company. (The phone company traded the ad space for the two T1 lines) We also sold the ad space on the right side of the screen and kept the left side of the screen for self promotion.
WE use Scala InfoChannel5 as our playback units at the headends. Scala picked up our internet feed without any real problems.
We also streamed the election return on our website. We used a hosting company for the streaming and they seemed to work very well. Although we did get one disconnect to the cable headeands. I'm not sure if it was the Scala Players or the hosting company. I'm leaning toward the players.
Anyway, we showed up at the court house about 4 hours ahead of broadcast for set up. We had the following equipment:
Videonics Video Mixer
Audio Mixing Board
2-laptop computers....one was for palyback of sponsorship commercials and the other was to monitor the scala players at the headends (this was very important).
3 cameras
Mics
router
Desktop computer for sending the Windows Media Encoder feed to the hosting company.
All in all it went pretty smooth. Our small community has never had anything like this done live before. We received loads of complements and 25 paying sponsors. We made the splash I wanted to make with this Live Election Returns on TV Camden.
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Chris, thanks for that. The idea of using a less than full screen image and displaying the sponsor or other advertisers is brilliant and something I've seen used by cable on LO channels where they've but video infomercials in windows bordered by static graphic/text display ads.
Being creative is what more of us need to be.
David Croyle has written our mailing group sharing how his site operates. I'm going to ask him to post that here as well.
The more we share our successes as well as our frustrations, the stronger we'll become as a group and this can help make it better for us at our individual sites.
Charlie Stogner
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