Why do most corporate live streams look bad? It's not usually the camera or the crew. It's the lighting. Your CEO can be on a great camera and still look dull and grainy in a dim room. Put good light on them and even a basic camera looks clean and professional. There are different levels, from a full crew with a grip truck down to just some basic lights on stands. But even a little makes a huge difference. Here's me with some of my lights, the Nova panels, the same type they use on Hollywood movies. @StreamVirtual_

Sony Time #sony #ptz @StreamVirtual_

X Card! @XMoney

NOVA, Nat Geo, and the science documentaries we all watched growing up. explained protein folding, gene editing, the origin of life. On a public television budget. And you still remember it thirty years later. Not one of them ever cut to a PowerPoint slide. Seventy years. Not one. Not for spacetime, not for the genome, not for the hardest thing anyone’s ever had to explain. They rolled footage. Animation. CGI. Anything that moved. Your livestream isn’t a meeting. It’s TV on the internet. Use video, not eye charts. Your next one doesn’t have to look like the right screen. Let’s talk. Stream Virtual Productions. #InternalComms #EventProfs #LiveProduction #teamsevents

Yo dawg I heard you liked vMix so I put vMix in your vMix so you can vMix while you vMix.

The coolest part of this job is working on projects you’ve actually heard of, with audiences all over the world. One show, studios in three cities, presenters on three continents, feeds all meeting in the cloud and cut together live as one seamless broadcast. Multisite production isn’t the future. It’s now. 📺

Good checklist. Everything on it is true. But none of it is what breaks a show. Virtual events are new. Live is not. The things that take down a webinar are the same things that took down live TV: a bad feed, a cue nobody owned, a presenter nobody checked. What we check before every show: Tech check every presenter solo, on the exact machine and exact network they’ll use day the show. A group call three weeks out at different locations proves nothing. Hardwired internet, then kill the WiFi radio so the machine can’t hop mid session. A run of show is not an agenda. It’s every cue, every roll, every graphic, and the name of the person calling it. Rehearse in the real platform with the real assets. If it stutters in rehearsal, it stutters live. Record iso at the source. The platform recording is a backup, never your master. One human on chat and escalation. That person does not also run video. At @StreamVirtual_ we don’t stream your event. We produce your show.

Working in high-end live streaming has been such a fun ride. Getting to work on productions for some of the biggest creators out there has brought so many amazing opportunities, challenges, and lessons. Super thankful for the teams I get to work with and everything I’m learning along the way. 🎥

There's a lot of examples out there of bad live streams, but very few of good ones let alone great ones. As far as corporate livestream go, I'd have to say this is pretty top-tier high production values, online audience focused, and incredible design and art. Bravo.

What are the odds… Yesterday I posted about accidentally working with TBPN on the Ramp “Brian’s Office” activation last October and said it would be amazing to work with them directly someday. I had never mentioned them publicly before. One hour later, a friend called saying he had a client who needed camera calibration help. I got on the call expecting a normal job… It was TBPN. I couldn’t believe it. They use the exact same production equipment I have — Sony FR7 cinema cameras, vMix switchers, and Electro Voice microphones, all the same gear. The biggest streaming show on the internet runs on the identical setup as @StreamVirtual_ Productions. It’s wild how things can line up like that.

30 years of broadcasting. I got my first real job in this business at 16, back in 1996. The comm tech program at Howard High School vo-tech landed me an internship at the local cable station, Channel 2 and 28, cutting my teeth on the news and local baseball games. Then they hired me on to the leased access side, where everything clicked. I worked those shows completely solo. Directing, TD, graphics, audio, playback, every job at once and all in real time. And this was analog. No undo, no safety net, a show that had to go right the first time. Those are the exact skills I lean on every day now in live streaming. But the thing I loved most was a show we built ourselves. A video game TV show, YouTube before YouTube existed, something fun and weird and ours. That was the spark. The first taste of building something of my own. Then came 6abc WPVI. The biggest station in the Philly market, owned by Disney. The mouse. For a kid who started on local cable, walking into that building was surreal. And now I am building something finally my own with @StreamVirtual_ , producing broadcasts that reach tens of millions. My own studio, my own room, chasing that exact magic from the game show days. That dream never changed. Thank you to Stephen Shaw, Frank Vanderslice, and James Gittens for handing me this craft. I have never once put it down. Thirty years in and I am 46 with more fire than I had at 16. The best show I produce has not aired yet. Here is to the next thirty.

I worked with TBPN and didn’t even know it. Last October I directed the livestream for Ramp’s “Brian’s Office” activation in Flatiron. They put Brian Baumgartner, Kevin from The Office, in a glass box in the middle of the plaza as Ramp’s CFO for the day. We stayed up all night building the set, then I ran vMix and called cameras for eight hours of live broadcast straight. Mid-show I had to bring two remote guests in live, and they turned out to be the TBPN guys, so to make it work I had to match the look of their broadcast on the fly. Never seen it before, no reference, seconds to air. I built their whole look from scratch. Three boxes, ticker, lower thirds, the full package. It came out dead on. That’s the thing about doing this every day. When the pressure hits and there’s no time to think, the high-end result is just what your hands do. 85M+ views across platforms, and the moment I’m proudest of is the one nobody planned. This is the kind of work we do at @StreamVirtual_ Productions. We don’t stream your event, we produce your show. Grateful to Jimmy Steadman and Steady Streams for bringing me in on this one.