What's Ahead for Streaming Producers

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Corey Behnke: I think that we have an incredible opportunity because people are being forced to innovate. I've spent my entire life saying, "Hey, you're going to put that on a stream" to television broadcasters, and they literally looked at me--back in 2004--like, "Kid, get out of here!" And so it's been really fascinating to see this ramp up--this year especially. As much as 2020 sucks, forced innovation is the only way to talk about it. I say to operators, "Throw away the playbook, throw away everything you knew before and think about those things. Like, that's so great to have a chef watch a sommelier and have this interaction between different people and come up with content that's never been done before." And so that's incredibly exciting to me. And that can pay the bills too, by the way, because at some point you could come up with a content genre or a content idea that could blow up.

If you're starting out, start cheap, start with OBS, start with the things that you have in front of you. There are plenty of free things out there. And the greatest thing that I did not have in my twenties is YouTube. You can do anything. You could be an astronaut watching YouTube videos at this point. It's ridiculous. Small plug--we have a YouTube channel where we unbox a lot of videos and we talk through our stuff. But those are my recommendations. I know they may be a little bit cheesy, but that's kind of our go-to. Start with vMix, and then look at what's out there, and look at what we have to provide for what the clients want.

Jef Kethley: If you're not already looking at the cloud, as far as for production resources, start now. If you haven't been doing that for the last five months, if you've been sitting at home, as some of us have, or not working on a regular basis, then start now and use those YouTube resources, use all the resources out there so that you can learn about the basics of it. If you need to bring in somebody like me or Corey that is a system integrator that knows and understands the cloud, it can help you get started and give you a kickstart. But the main thing is: Be looking at the cloud as the future of production. If you're not in the cloud, you're going to be left behind. There's no way I could ever say that any cleaner than that. If you're not in the cloud now, that is where everything in production is going to be. It may not happen in a year, but it's happening at light speed--faster than anybody ever expected it to.

Jonathan Healey: Patience and education. And the reason I say that is, from our specific use case, in the music business, you have box office people, merch people, bartenders, marketing people, general managers--they're all production people. Now our entire business has shifted to streaming. So what we have done is, we have taken people who were not in this space at all that knew nothing about live streaming, video production, or sound, and they're all becoming experts in it. And we've had to really educate our teams about it and do a ton of training to maintain a staff and then have a staff that can implement all this stuff. I have people who are remoting in to live-switching software that have never had production experience at all. And they're taking cues. They're on com with a director; they're punching in graphics. Maybe they're building Facebook Live events; maybe they're building YouTube live events.

It's really amazing to watch. It's fascinating, because I think all of us have been in the space for a very long time, but at least in my business, the entire business is in the space. So I think utilizing your staff and spending the time on training, because if we hadn't done that, we wouldn't be where we are. We're doing so many streams, we need a lot of manpower to do it. And because we've spent the time to educate our staff, train them, and get them into a really comfortable space. And the nice thing is they enjoy it. We're lucky we deal with the music. People are very passionate about music. So when a marketing or a box office person comes to a production shoot for music, they're there for the music. And so they're inspired by that and they're doing great work.