Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign Ladies and gentlemen, I'm Jeff Segpiel, CTO with Geek Code Media. And we're here to talk about live production and some real stories in all manner of different ways that live production gets done. Let's go through introductions first. Ben, let's start with you.
[00:00:22] Speaker B: All right. I'm Ben Ramsey. I actually work for Megan at Pierce county tv.
I help support the technical side of our station. We have six different cities in Pierce county itself that I get to help support. We have production systems in each one of those locations. We also have editing facilities at our main location and live streaming. So it's my job to make sure all those systems are working the way they're supposed to and help support all my editors and shooters so that they can do their jobs.
[00:00:55] Speaker A: Awesome. Eric next with you, everybody.
[00:00:59] Speaker C: I'm Eric Vaughn. I work for the Seattle Kraken, part of the game presentation team. We oversee entertainment experience and promotions. That's a mouthful. So we just call it Team Skeep. And I'm sure everyone who's between like 38 and 40 has a song running through their head right now. Ah, Skip. Skeep. Skeep.
So we see we oversee game Prez along with my coworker Alex. We kind of run the control room and operations. And then I also oversee digital asset management and then broadcast logistics, getting trucks in and out and making sure that our shows and our building all work together so those cogs all run smoothly. So kind of a little all over the place.
[00:01:35] Speaker A: Awesome sauce.
Jim?
[00:01:39] Speaker D: Yes. I'm Jim Demond. I manage Clark Vancouver Television down in Vancouver, Washington. We do work for the city of Vancouver as well as Clark County. We cover their city council meetings, county council meetings, we cover parades. We do work for the port down there, the transit agency. So really kind of down in Southwest Washington you get all Oregon news. So we try to be kind of the, you know, provide some Washington news. And we also stream Cairo down there on our channel. So that way we get some at least Washington based programming to our cable customers down there.
[00:02:17] Speaker A: Perfect. And then everybody loves this facility, don't they?
Brian, introduce yourself and tell us about what's going on here.
[00:02:24] Speaker E: I am Brian Barnett. I am the VP and Technical Operations Manager here at Fremont Studios. First, I'd like to thank Keycode for allowing us to host this really cool event.
And I'm very happy to share this facility with everybody today. It's a really great place for us to create in every single day. It's a lot of fun here.
We do everything from corporate broadcasts to Live stream galas. And then we also do commercial production work and film work.
[00:02:59] Speaker A: Perfect. All right, let's dive into it. Workflow shifting.
What parts of the workflow or workflows have you had to rethink recently and what's made the biggest impact on how you work? Brian, let's start with you and just go down the line.
[00:03:14] Speaker E: Okay, great.
The biggest shift that we've had to do recently, I would say was last fall. We had two large E gaming events here, big streams, international streaming events for two very big E game tournaments.
That really was a good stress test for us. Um, it really stressed everything for us to, to see what we were, how capable we were to handle such big events like that. And we did really well. We did really well on the camera side and the engineering side and the audio side. But we did see some places that we needed to kind of beef up. And I think the biggest one, and I think probably everybody can, can relate to this now, is networking. That was the biggest issue that I saw that we had and our ability to keep up with, especially something that is such a large stream in so many sources.
So what we've done since then is we've made a plan. This summer we're going to be really beefing up our network, the infrastructure of our network. And we've also just made a deal with a new ISP to increase our bandwidth. We are a one gig up and down facility, but we're increasing to two with a third on demand to meet demands where we have another big E gaming style tournament or a big production in this facility allows us to do transmission for those shows from this location and still do our daily operations at a very high level.
[00:05:06] Speaker A: So it gets that network pressure down a little bit and blood pressure down a little bit, which is always good. That's a good thing, Eric.
[00:05:14] Speaker C: Yeah. I think with the Kraken only being just wrapping up our fourth season, I think we have a shorter list of things we haven't rethought or rebuilt or redesigned or reprocessed.
The process we're in right now is documenting a lot of what we have finally solidified. Year one was like, just survive, get on air. I don't know how we're doing this. Year two and three, we're kind of figuring out what's going well, what's not going well, lean into our strengths, identify our weaknesses and fix them. And now year four, we think we've kind of done that and we're starting to document those processes. So when we have a new replay Operator come in. Who hasn't worked for us or hasn't worked for us in a long time. We can say, hey, this is what it means to be an operator for the Seattle crack. And this is what we expect of you, of actual things that we're changing and evolving. You know, we use Eclipse player for all our pre produced media and we just weren't recalling that as fast as we wanted to. And so utilizing ROS dashboard we built, basically we turned it into click effects instead of it. Its native interface kind of looks like Excel and it's a little clunky, but we built through their dashboard, which you can do anything with. It's pretty incredible. Everything has icons now. It actually takes over our switcher to clear all keyers. So we go up to that graphic clean. It triggers our Daktronics ribbon board. So with one click, everything goes synced in time. And it solved a lot of our kind of speed and recall issues that we're struggling with. And something similar with our projection systems as well. We kind of worked with that vendor and reconfigured how it all works. It used to be three separate servers that all triggered independently and now they all run off one primary and there's like no timing issues and it goes through. So identifying where our weaknesses are and just leaning into turning those into strengths and making them better is really a lot of our workflow changes that we've worked on.
[00:07:03] Speaker A: Perfect. And our friends from Ross are in the main gallery, so if you need to have a chat with them, please do so.
Jim?
[00:07:12] Speaker D: Yeah. Well, probably the biggest change for us recently we were a broadcast pick switcher house. So we had broadcast pick switchers, analog audio. And recently we've been changing with Vizert TC1 switchers as well as Yamaha Dante audio connections. And so that's been a big shift for us and with. I didn't want to get in this, but NDI connections with your video. So now with ndi, basically you can do, you can connect your camera, a single camera with a data cable and get video control and power through that cable. So it simplifies anything, everything. And it's 4k getting to your switcher. So it's really made our life different. And just trying to train everyone with the different procedures on the different switchers has been difficult. We have two full time producers, but a lot of temporary and part time staff. So you try to make it as simple as possible. So when they come for a council meeting coverage, you know those four or five steps to get you on air, make it as simple as possible. So that's kind of been the things we've been going through lately.
[00:08:33] Speaker A: Yep. Always a little bit of pressure there with video over the network. And, Ben.
[00:08:40] Speaker B: Well, you're going to hear a similar theme throughout today. Jim and I, we didn't talk about it beforehand, but we ended up getting almost the same equipment at Pierce County TV that he did. So we replaced our broadcast pick switchers with Vizrt TC1 pros and also stream decks with macros so that it can kind of simplify the workflow for our operators. So we went from broadcast picks to tricasters last year.
[00:09:11] Speaker A: Awesome. And that was with Tom from our team.
[00:09:14] Speaker B: Yep. Tom Arenz.
[00:09:15] Speaker A: Awesome. All right, let's get into deliverables and audiences. How are expectations around the content and deliverables changing for your team and for your clients?
Let's put you on the spot again. Ben, let's start with you.
[00:09:30] Speaker B: Okay. Deliverables, I think streaming and being able to put our programming out to the most eyeballs possible. We really work with Inventus quite a bit to be able to send one stream from our Live View over to them, and then they're able to distribute those streams out to different social media platforms like YouTube, Facebook.
A lot of the cities in different jurisdictions want their own stream on their pages. So we're actually able to use Inventus as a distributor for us for our stream. So that's made it a lot simpler than having to have individual encoders for all the different streams. So I would say live streaming is where our distribution has really changed a lot over the last few years.
[00:10:14] Speaker A: Perfect.
Jim, what's changed for you?
[00:10:19] Speaker D: Well, Ben and I are pretty identical.
We utilize Inventus as well. Yes, live streaming has been the thing. The other thing we've recently done is with Live View, which is a vendor here, start streaming live from various locations throughout the city and county, which has been great because we can go live with an election forum where before we were reliant on a cable fiber connection. So we've gotten away from that. So that's helped a lot.
And really, yes, you got to stream everywhere but for these city and council meetings, county council meetings. Not only you have to worry about streaming to outside clients, you also have to make sure these virtual hybrid meetings that people can listen and participate in the hearing as well live. And you can. You have to caption everything. And now we're talking about maybe some descriptive audio coming up in 2026. So all those challenges, you know, audiences want it live. They want it to Whatever device they have and they want it to be great quality. And, you know, it's a challenge.
[00:11:30] Speaker B: We use Live View too, so it's all pretty much the same stuff.
[00:11:34] Speaker A: And Live View is here. Chat with them if you're looking. They also do really great when other avenues of transmission fail. So you've got a. Yeah.
[00:11:46] Speaker B: We had a shoot from the top of Mount Rainier at Crystal Mountain last night. We had wi fi for a while and then it disappeared for some reason. But the cellular just kicked right in and there was no dropout. So it was really impressive what it could do last night.
[00:11:58] Speaker A: The whole industry is always about no dropouts. Eric, what's going on with stuff delivering inside?
[00:12:05] Speaker C: Yeah. In Climate Pledge arena, our deliveries, you know, it's just. We're just pin 16 by 9 out to our screens, so that's not too tricky at all. It's pretty standard. Our production team has seen a lot of changes where they're editing and producing. As we brought the Kraken Hockey Network online and started owning our own broadcast rights. That just became another client they have to distribute to. So outside of social media game pres, anyone else in the Kraken organization they're creating for, they're dealing with. With captions, without captions, with embedded captions. 16 by 9, 9 by 16 square. So I don't know how they keep their heads on or figure out what the heck they're exporting to. Especially if it's like a player feature that everybody wants and now they got to kick out six different versions of it.
So that's, you know, more post production side. Our live stuff is pretty simple. You know, we're not doing anything crazy like you guys.
[00:12:56] Speaker A: Awesome. And Brian.
[00:12:59] Speaker E: Yeah, Well, I think I kind of see it. There's a bit of a paradox happening right now where there's the YouTube effect, where the acceptability of kind of DIY video production is happening and yet the tools are becoming more accessible for people. So it's also getting more sophisticated at the same time and for more people. For what we do here is we want to provide a product and what we deliver and what our clients expect is a very sophisticated product. So we always try to kind of push the limits and kind of give them the best professional product however that.
However that looks towards our client. Right. So I mean, I think that one of the big things that we have done since before the pandemic was was invest in the large format Super 35 cameras. So our entire fleet, our eight cameras that you see set up all over here they're all Varicam LT cameras, Super 35 with majority of them with Fuji Cabrio PL lenses. So that is giving a very high quality image which we can easily switch between a broadcast look and a cinema look. And for us as well is, you know, delivering in a stream as well. We do see that quite a bit and our clients are expecting that, so we have to manage that side as well. But for the most part, what we, regardless of how we're handing it off, we're trying to give them a very polished product.
[00:14:38] Speaker A: Does that give you a multi camera cinematic workflow as well?
[00:14:41] Speaker E: Absolutely perfect.
[00:14:44] Speaker A: All right, technology adoption. So what tools or systems have made the biggest difference in your production process? Think about those things you have now, but you didn't have three years ago and you just can't live without now. And then how do you get to decide what's worth adopting in terms of tech?
Eric, let's start with you.
[00:15:06] Speaker C: Yeah. Again, being a young organization, we've adopted a lot rapidly.
One of the new things this year, if you come to a game that you would have seen, we added lasers, which for us adding new technology is all about how do we advance the story we're trying to tell. And the Kraken, we're a nautical brand. We like to bring people into the deep, which is what we've nicknamed the arena. And we kind of had this challenge that even through ice projection and lights and all these cool things, you never felt like you were underwater. You're always looking down at the water and, and we're man like it'd be so cool if we can make it. So you looked up and instead of seeing our really cool historic roof, it felt like you were underwater and talking to some people, they're like, oh, lasers might be able to do that. And then we just started wandering down this path and found a company that can do a liquid sky effect. And they're like, boom, there we go, we're underwater. And now we have a reason to invest in this technology because it's advancing our storytelling and figuring out how do we enhance the fan experience that way. On our digital asset management side, which is not really a storytelling side, adoption's a little different.
We want to solve problems for our creators and figure out how do we make their day to day job a little bit easier. And so Ashley, who's our talented asset manager, manager of digital assets, the damager is what we like to call her in all the best ways, she does a fantastic job. She basically started talking with all our producers and figuring out what are your pain points with our current systems? What's slowing you down? And kind of basically weighing in between what's a paper cut and what's a bullet wound. And we can fix paper cuts, we can't fix bullet wounds. So as soon as bullet wounds were more than paper cuts, it's time to start looking at new systems. And in that process, we did the classic rfp, you know, sent it out for demos and we did proof of concepts and, you know, eventually resolved on a new system that we're currently in the process of standing up right now. She's very, very busy.
So, yeah, kind of two different ways that we adopt technology. One is to advance storytelling and one is to make things easier and better and smoother, which is what I think we all hope technology is going to do for us.
[00:17:07] Speaker A: It's still telling a story. It's just telling it for different people.
[00:17:09] Speaker C: It is. And it's who's using it right at the end of the day. Ones for our fans and the public and the ones for our back of house editors who eventually gets consumed by the public. But the faster that they can work, the more content can go out and that's how they can better support broadcast game press, hockey operations, ticket sales list goes on. Those poor people.
[00:17:31] Speaker A: Jim Technology adoption, getting back to the.
[00:17:35] Speaker D: Video switchers, you know, meeting coverage is definitely boring. It's, you know, you're having a council meeting, people talking PowerPoint presentations. That's what we're showing, a wide shot, people talking PowerPoint presentations. So just the ability, you know, to do a picture in picture with the PowerPoint and the person and be able to zoom in quickly and nicely. Looking to a PowerPoint presentation to change things up for the viewer has been great. So Vizert has things and yes, you can connect it to a stream deck, so then you can have macro buttons. So it's very simple for one or two people to do a production and switch things up.
The NDI audio with an Yamaha audio connection. I mean the, the room audio systems have gotten so much better. So you're not having to ride your audio streams all the time to make sure that level you, you're not hearing the hiss with a bad microphone cable that, you know, might, you have no idea where it could be nicked somewhere along the lines. So the Dante audio makes it much easier again, you're focused more on how can you make the product look better instead of I got to fix this audio, you know, this hiss or I hope they don't talk again because I don't want to hear this hiss. So those are some different things we also with for graphics, we also use new Blue Fusion and it's an NDI connection that then goes straight straight into your Vizard switcher. And so that was great with for us, we're using a lot of agenda items so we can easily import in Excel files, you know, click and paste from agenda item names and then make it easy for the operators to be able to pull up names and things. Also for election coverage, it was great. We were able to do links to the statewide election results, base it per county and have animated backgrounds as we're going with the election results. And it really worked out well. So those are some different things we've been doing recently.
[00:19:45] Speaker A: Very cool. Brian, what about you?
[00:19:50] Speaker E: One of the cool things that we've recently integrated into our system is adding in a VMIX machine.
So previously, you know, years ago if we wanted lower thirds graphics, we would have to bring in a Ros expression or if we wanted replay, we'd have to know bring in an EVS and the EVS operator. But now we can do all of that through a VMIX machine.
And we just over this past weekend we had a gala with a company called the Mountaineers and they built what they call the Tyrolean traverse that went from the front stage all the way to the back of the house. And they had three racers that got on the rig and went across the over the top of all the people that were having dinner at the gala and had a race and we had put POVs in the grid and at the finish line. And so when we, when the first racer got to the finish line, we were able to do a cool instant replay just by using VMIX and not having to have an actual EVS here, which was really great. And it's, I mean the, the cost of VMIX versus EVS is absolutely incredible.
[00:21:06] Speaker A: So you're able to have fun at a discount.
[00:21:08] Speaker E: Exactly.
[00:21:09] Speaker A: Perfect. And Ben, what do you see in tech adoption?
[00:21:12] Speaker B: Again? Just copying from Jim over here. I think we've had tricasters on and off for a long time, but we didn't use the extent of the abilities of it. So just doing more research into what it can do and adding more functionality. Like you said, doing two boxes with the zoom integration and just trying to make our graphics look more interesting and use more of the features on there besides just straight A and B cuts and basic graphics, but add more interest to our council meetings.
[00:21:41] Speaker A: Awesome. So when you do implement new change and new technology One of the things Kiko has always been a champion of this is education as well as training. How are you rolling this out to your folks and making sure that your team is trained and on board and ready to go?
Ben, let's jump back in with you.
[00:22:07] Speaker B: Vizard actually offers video training as part of the support packages. So we looked into that, into that and watched some of the training on there. Also I've created manuals for each one of the council chambers so that if we have a new operator, they can just kind of go page by page and know what to do. And then we also have training. When we onboard, people usually have them watch a show and then have, have them do it by themselves and have somebody go through it with them. Just kind of on the job training.
[00:22:38] Speaker A: Hands on it, it always works. Eric, what about you and getting your team up to staff? And I'm assuming you bring in a lot of contractors and freelancers as well?
[00:22:48] Speaker C: Yeah, in the control room we, we've probably got on a game day about 25 different freelancers. A lot of them are repeats. They come back over and over. And so we don't have to do a lot.
We're working on actually documenting our SOPs. Alex has been working hard on them all summer and all season to get those up to speed, just so people know what they're doing. But I mean, really our goal, like with the new asset management system, is that we're not rolling out changes that people don't know about. We're not surprising anybody with change. So we're identifying a problem and then as much as we can, we're bringing people along to come up with a solution to change it. So when we not getting them to adopt or change a workflow they don't want to change or that they don't understand, it's something that they helped identify an issue, they helped select what's going to replace or solve the issue. They've been involved in the implementation and the standing up of the new system. So when it actually ready to go on air, they've been there the whole time. And obviously we lean into any training facilities or solutions that are provided by the vendor. But we really want the operators to be with us on the journey all the way through from issue to implementation. And that way it's not like convincing someone to use this new system or convincing someone that this is going to make their life easier. And they're like, hey man, you just blew up two years worth of workflow renovation that I've been doing and now I Got to start over. Like, what the, you know, so hopefully it's a process where they're on the journey that they're like motivated to make the change. You don't have to convince them to buy in. They've been there the whole time. Yeah, and that's, to me it's, we couldn't do that with our first digital asset management system because no one was hired yet. We're literally. Our digital asset manager wasn't hired yet. She got the job. And we're like, this is the tool. And she's like, it is. Sorry, it's a three year contract. Hang on tight.
But this time it's been like night and day having our production crew and our asset manager with us, knowing our workflows and our processes and like it's full buy in. It's not convincing anybody to do anything and they just can't wait to, you know, for us to flip the switch and say go.
[00:24:50] Speaker A: They're invested in the journey 100%. And Jim?
[00:24:55] Speaker D: Yeah, a lot of, a lot of times. Well, first of all, when I, when I'm planning any kind of big purchase, I always try to include in key code's greater about this training, say, well, okay, I should get a couple of days of training out of this, you know, so I can prep staff. And then, so what I do is kind of focus on a core team of our regulars to get them trained on different procedures and yeah, so then we try to document things, do cheat sheets. So it's pretty simple. When we bring in a temporary worker, you know, this is what you do, you know, the different procedures, try to then have meetings, you know, bring them in at least so they, they go with someone at least once who knows what they're doing with a new procedure, can show them how. And then we kind of let them go off and running. But yeah, it's just trying to get that, trying to learn these new systems, new graphic systems, it takes a while to try to figure out. And then you're realizing you're only getting the, the, the tip of it, you know, you're not getting to all the things it can do, but you're just trying to make it as simple as you can so people can use it so you can cover your council meeting tonight, you know, so that's what you're kind of struggling through. And it takes time, sometimes frustrating. Right now we have someone who's very creative and is constantly looking at different ways to improve things, which is great to have someone on your team like that always looking out for new solutions.
But he's always coming with a better way to do it. And then you have to train everyone. Okay, here's a new procedure on this and here's a new procedure on that. So it's kind of a blessing but also kind of a hassle too. So anyway, double edged sword, a solution champion.
[00:26:40] Speaker A: And then they're really interested in getting everyone else on board too.
[00:26:44] Speaker D: Yes.
[00:26:45] Speaker A: And Brian, what happens when you have something new happen here?
[00:26:48] Speaker E: Well, we have a pretty small staff here at Fremont Studios and we're all pretty much gear nerds. So basically when we adopt a new product, we play it with it until we break it and figure out what we did and, and how to implement it. So really it comes down to just hands on.
And the, you know, how we decide what we're going to adopt is basically where we think that we can make some improvements or if we have a client that comes to us and says we want to do this and, and then we see, okay, how's, what's the best way we can do that and how can we do it? And we also just like, like I said, we're, we're, we're all a bunch of gear nerds here. We like cool things, we like to play with the toys. Right. So for us it's really just hands.
[00:27:41] Speaker A: On and knowing where it breaks.
[00:27:44] Speaker E: That's knowing where it breaks. And it turns out we're really good at that.
[00:27:47] Speaker A: Well, and that's a good thing when the client asks you something. Well, yeah, we can get you there. We know we've gone just past that and don't go past that.
So let's get into looking ahead. This is the crystal ball part of the, the part. And this is about the technology. Don't worry about the other stuff that's out there. What gives you hope or excitement for the future of live production and what advice would you give someone looking to enter the space? There's some fresher faces up front here. What would you tell them as they're getting started on the journey into this crazy bit of the industry?
Let's start with Ben.
[00:28:28] Speaker B: All right. If you're in the Tacoma Pierce county area, talk to Megan. We're always looking for meeting operators. So there's a possible job opportunity for you guys.
For technology wise. I know there are some systems that are able to switch between cameras and move them, but I kind of prefer still to have a person there on site to be able to switch between the cameras and dial them in. I feel like the, the product looks a lot better. Than these automated systems. But it seems to be going in that direction. If the cost of having a person operator isn't available, those are probably the main technology things.
Seeing the AI being able to look through all your footage and find that stuff, I think that would be very useful for our editors. Being able to use AI to find B roll and other assets that we have. We have thousands of hours of assets that we've shot on our servers and be able to find footage in there easier, I think would be really useful, but I'd say those are the main things.
[00:29:35] Speaker A: Awesome.
Ryan, let's go with you.
[00:29:39] Speaker E: I would say integrating the IP systems, I look forward to. I look forward to a time when I can shade cameras from. From my bedroom and the, you know, the hammers will be here in the studio and I'll be in my living room or, you know, someplace else.
[00:30:00] Speaker C: That.
[00:30:00] Speaker E: That's exciting. But, no, it's just interesting what's coming down the pike for that and for us, who we also do remote production, as you see our trailer here, we can go on the road, and that will open up a lot of possibilities where we could kind of keep our control room here and our cameras are elsewhere. So that's a really interesting bit of technology for us. For anybody that's, you know, coming into the business now, I would say my best advice would be is to find somebody to learn from and, you know, find somebody that's been. That's been in the business for a while, or if that's somebody that's somebody you work with. You know, it might be a boss, it might be a camera operator, but there's just find somebody that. That you want to learn from and, and pick their brain and be able to share kind of what you know with them as well. Because us old dogs can learn to.
[00:31:02] Speaker C: See which are old stuff.
[00:31:06] Speaker E: Older, not as young anymore.
[00:31:09] Speaker A: Yeah.
Cool. Jim, what do you think?
[00:31:14] Speaker D: Let's see. Advice for younger people.
Be curious, be playful, take chances.
It's great to talk to people, but, you know, YouTube can show you so much if you need to know. Well, how do you do this? You can look it up now where before that was never a possibility when I was going through it. So there's a lot more options and really, you know, focus. You know, watch films, see why something looks better, and figure out what that is and why does it work.
You know, focus on those things. Because if you get. If you know how to frame up a shot and. And you're, You're. You're. You're bright and you're willing to do stuff, we'd love to hire you because I mean, that's for us.
What's great. And you show up and you can sit through a four hour hearing and not fall asleep.
We now have to get fidget. Fidget to keep people at least interested while they're doing it. So anyway, that's my advice. Yes, AI, I think could be great.
It's scary, but it also could be great.
They were talking about something stabilizing with a visit.
Someone's eyes or looking around to keep them on frame. If I could do something with AI to get someone to move a council member's microphone to in front of them, that would be a great thing. An automated. Yeah, or turn it on, unmute it, that would be a great thing for me.
[00:32:45] Speaker A: Testing a little bit of automation there and automation and strong coffee. That's what I'm hearing. Perfect. And Eric, what's, what's your advice to the folks coming up?
[00:32:55] Speaker C: Yeah, I think, you know, the thing that allowed me to get started and I think is going to help anybody get started is just know that no one's going to open a door for you. That you have to be the one that kicks the door down and you have to like get a hold of a phone number and call it and call it and call it. And then they'll eventually, when they're in a time of need, say, yeah, I need you now can you go get me coffee and bagels? And being willing to say, I got my degree in broadcast technology, I don't get coffee and bagels. Bullshit. Yeah you do. Yeah, your first job you do, you get coffee and bagels and you move on. And while you're getting coffee and bagels, you're talking to an old camera operator or someone who's been there before and you're figuring out, hey, what do you do that sets you apart? And then you pull as much information as you can. So the next time that that person's off doing the Winter Olympics or something and they need a backfill, they'll be like, hey, there's this kid who's really been curious and is learning a lot. And it's spending their lunch hour playing on my camera or learning the replay system like that's hands on, finding people to help you. And then you just got to bust the door down and like call someone until they tell you to stop. Over and over and over again.
[00:33:59] Speaker A: Break the door down with coffee. That's what I'm hearing.
Any quick questions from the crowd out there?
You in the green. I have a question for Aaron. You guys recently switched from broadcast on Roof Sports to all streaming on Amazon Prime. Can you talk a little bit about what that process was like and how it affected your operation? So I'll repeat that. Crossed over streaming to a streaming platform with Amazon Prime. How did that look like in the implementation?
[00:34:29] Speaker C: Yeah, so we as we moved away from Root Sports, we were never upset with the product that was being created. The broadcast talent, the operators, the directors, the producers. I mean we all felt that that was some of the best in the league and really just wanted to improve the distribution. We wanted to be inside more houses and between over the air, throw your antenna up, basic cable package, you can pick it up or streaming on Amazon prime, like you're not going to hit more people than that. And so our day to day operation really didn't change a lot. It was really just where are we feeding stuff and how are we balancing now that we're partnering with Tegna and we're going through all their different channels, like how's Master Control going to work when you have 15 different affiliates taking your feed? And you know, I wasn't necessarily closely tied to that part of it, but it was work through that. There's going to be one primary counting down the rest. And I think we only got bit once or twice where one of the affiliate smasher controls fell asleep at the wheel and was like roll. What the break When? Oh, 30 seconds ago. Well, we'll be late.
So it really wasn't a huge outside of, you know, finding. We had to find someone to do transmission to Amazon prime, we had to find ways to get the feeds to Tegna. But I mean those are not massive hurdles to get over. So it was actually a fairly seamless transition to get into like a thousand times more houses.
[00:35:50] Speaker A: And that's not the first time I've heard the story about someone falling asleep with Master Control. Again, strong coffee. I'm just hearing a recurring theme here. Is there another one other question is out there.
So the question you may be asking yourself is okay, how do I jump in with these sorts of workflows? You'll see some folks around wearing green suit jackets. Talk to them. That's sales team from Key Code Media and Tom. Tom wasn't wearing a green coat. He's really tall, kind of hard to miss. He's right there. Please check in and you'll also see in various spots we have a poster that says how do I get a quote for this? There's a QR code shoot that It'll tell you exactly how to get into the latest technology for live. And thanks to our panel for joining us today. It was great to hear from you all and wish you all the best.
