Streaming live events with uStream
We’re not doing lifecasting like Brad, but this Spring we streamed all our home men’s and women’s basketball games here at Allegheny. Now that the season is over, it’s a good time to reflect on what worked, what didn’t, and what we can improve on for next year.
In December, our SID came to me and said he was interested in streaming our games. It was a great idea though at first I worried about how to do it easily and most importantly, very cheaply, as our budget for this process was exactly zero.
There were three important pieces I needed to figure out before we could start streaming video. The first was the video itself, the second was the networking setup and the third was how to send the stream to the world.
The first solved itself pretty easily. Our basketball coaches have a student with a consumer level DV camera tape each game. That video feed is also fed to a VCR deck where the game is taped for the opposing team’s coach. It was a no-brainer to use that camera feed as it’s always there and is operated by a student who handles following the action as it moves up and down the court.
The second was networking. Our camera post was above the seats and away from press-row. Luckily, there was a network drop right near our area for the Athletics staff to do stats (and live stats) and to print out stat sheets, so the addition of a networking switch was incidental. Connectivity solved.
Finally – how do we send out the video?
After looking at several options, including some pay-options, I settled on using uStream to handle the load.
First, it’s free. Second, they offered many great features including the ability to customize a page on their end to host the games (though embedding is available), a multiuser chat room, the ability to stream live as well as record games for repeat viewing, and an easy to use web-based streaming interface.
In fact, here’s a video of a women’s basketball game. As you can see, the video quality is pretty good.
Our setup was pretty simple—we ran a firewire cable from the camera to our Macbook. We’d log into uStream and since everything is browser based, setup was a snap and we were up and running quickly and easily. This ease-of-use is also important as I couldn’t be at every game. With an easy system like uStream, Athletics staff and their student assistants could get the stream online and going without me, which is great. Here’s a photo of our setup. Clicking on it will take you to a page at Flickr with some notes.
We did a few games as a test, and only advertised it on the Athletics home page. For our first few games, we had sustained crowds of 30-40. With some success under our belt, we did a mass email to basketball alumni as well as included news about the stream on our online alumni community. For the rest of the season, we often had stream visitors in the 150-200 person range. They were vocal supporters in the chatroom, asking questions of each other and commenting on the game action.
I too was in the chatroom, constantly updating the score of the game in real time as well as the time left on the clock. We never found a good way to do graphics on the screen, as Chris Pirillo does for example.
My goal for the fall sports is to do add in play-by-play audio. Our local radio station broadcasts the football and men’s basketball games, and it’d be nice to add that audio the mix. I’d also like to look into adding graphics to the feed.
Overall, the technology worked very well and we’re looking at live streaming other events on campus. If you’re looking to stream not only sporting events, but other campus happenings, I’d highly recommend uStream.
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quite ingenious mike. This is the first time I’ve read of a campus doing anything this major with ustream. We had a groundbreaking ceremony/speech for a new building on our campus, and I floated the idea of streaming it live on ustream, but everybody looked at me funny when I tried to tell them that, for free, we could broadcast it live and hundreds of people could watch it. And I just got funny stares and blank reactions, because they were all convinced that such a thing could not be done for free.