Remote Broadcasting Lessons Learned

I though it would be great for SomaFM to do a lot of live coverage from SXSW this year- after all, it's one of the biggest music and media festivals in the world. So I had some grand plans, many which have failed so far.

Plan number one:

Live webcams looking at the Six Street club area, as well as looking at the convention center and Brush Square Park. We have the cameras; we secured places to locate them in the Courtyard hotel next to the convention center. Alas, we didn't expect a total failure of the hotel's ethernet network system. And our backup plan didn't expect the hotel's wireless system to become overloaded and crash multiple times a day.

In fact it's a good thing that I have a Sprint EVDO card to get wide area wireless access to the internet, or I'd have no internet connectivity at all. But even Sprint's EVDO network is getting overloaded during peak hours (e.g. 10am-midnight local time). Today, it took about 30 minutes to upload 30 photos, when it should have taken 2-3 minutes. Plan number two: Live "Austin Audio" from above Sixth Street. The street sounds here in Austin have to be heard to be believed. And I though it would be really cool to do a live broadcast of the sound of Austin from the hotel a block off Sixth street. So I brought a couple of portable streaming encoders with us, and some stereo microphones to mount on the balcony outside the hotel room. Except that there were no rooms at the hotel with a balcony, and worse yet, no opening windows in the room! So scratch that plan.

Plan number three:

Quickly edit the podcasts, interviews, and band recordings each night on the laptop and upload before morning. The problem here is that we normally use ProTools for doing all our editing and audio production, but since ProTools won't work on OSX 10.5, I couldn't run it on my laptop. (SomaFM has one dedicated "audio production" machine that runs ProTools and also has the master music library on it; but this machine has to run OSX 10.4.x for ProTools.) I ended up installing a copy of Logic, but since I haven't used it much, there has been a learning curve that I hoped would have been faster. Also, some of the audio processing plugins we use with ProTools weren't licensed for use on a laptop.

Plan number four:

Broadcast the Bay Area Takeover party on Thursday live. OK, this one might still happen but given the way things are going, I'm not expecting it to work. We are still going to try. I used to scoff at the NPR guys when they'd send a crew of 5 people to SXSW to report on it. There are 3 people from SomaFM here, but two of those people (Merin and Elise) are also here on behalf of their day jobs and have to give 2/3rds of their time to that. What we needed was an audio production person to do the first passes at editing all the material we're recording. Maybe next time we'll bring an intern. :-)

In retrospect, here's what I think would have made things work a lot better:

Get a couple EVDO to WiFi+Ethernet routers, so we don't have to rely on internet from the hotels or venues at all. And bring plenty of ethernet cabling, as you may not be able to rely on the wireless networks.

Bring at least one extra laptop for processing pictures and audio.

Bring extra batteries for the digital recorders!

Arrive a couple days early to test everything... arriving 24 hours before the event starts won't give you enough time to get everything ready.

Have one person who's job it to just provide production support - and who doesn't go to the panels and conference itself - someone whose only job is to get the stuff posted and edited.

I wonder how this list will change in the next few days... we're basically winging it at this point.