Like a Mighty Stream: Webcasting Rock Shows with Ryan Bodie Films

Managing a High-Volume Webcast Production Business

One issue Bodie has dealt with in his business is volume. While his company currently does about 80 live shows a year, it used to do more—"taking every gig that comes to town"—and Bodie found that pace difficult to sustain because it didn't leave him time to market and promote the business, keep the new business flowing in, and keep the notion of streaming events foremost in his potential clients' minds. "You start doing that and all of a sudden you think, ‘Oh man, I haven't stayed up with my promotion contacts.' The next thing you know, they're not either using you or they're not broadcasting that event. They're thinking, ‘Oh well, he hasn't called and we'll just save some money this year."

In addition to maintaining the marketing side of the business, Bodie's role on-site also involves keeping one eye on the event at hand and one on the future. "This year, I've been at most of the events, not necessarily working the live switch, but testing the streaming options and testing cameras. I'll be there running the live stream and a separate one, trying out another company, trying out another streaming service, trying out another camera just to take advantage of the lighting and everything else that's on the music to see if I really like that camera or that service or that system."

And these are constantly changing and evolving elements of the live event webcasting business, Bodie says—it's in the nature of working so many different venues and types and doing streams for different audiences that the approach will vary. "The biggest hurdle is if they're doing it on a budget you are tied to your weakest link. And in this case, you'd be tied to your weakest viewer bandwidth. So you've got to determine that. Who are you expecting to watch? Who do you care that's watching? If you don't care that your 65-year-old grandmother with a dial-up connection is watching, then we don't have to worry about her. Most people nowadays have at least 1-1.5Mbps download. We've been able to do higher-quality streams over the last year or two because the weakest link is a lot stronger now."

Handling Webcast Bandwidth Issues

The second thing Bodie determines, he says, is, "What will our upload speed be? What are we working with? If I can only stream up 500Kbps," he sais, it doesn't matter what kind of bandwidth the audience's connections support. "The stream will be choppy because I'm not putting up a very high-quality stream. So we run a couple of speed tests and a ping test at the event location to determine how much information is lost on the way up. And once we run those, we say, ‘We can use your line or we can't use your line if we want to do what you want to do.' If they want to do an HD signal, we almost always bring our own line in. And if they're in a weak area, we have to bring our own line in, and that's pretty simple too. We just use whatever the local internet provider is. So we'll pay an installation fee of anywhere from $50 to $100. You can usually get it waved if you talk them out of it. And you just get it for a month. So for about $100 or $200 you have one month of service and you're the only one using that dedicated line, and you've gopt the highest-quality stream you want to get.

"And so at a lot of our events," he continues, "like the music and lecture series we do January through March at Holley Hall and the Player Theater, we run our own lines for those."

Selling a Webcast: An Upsell or a Given?

Bodie acknowledges that those events weren't always webcasts, but the tide has turned in recent years to where webcasting events have become the norm for his business, and producing for DVD has become an afterthought at best, and often out of the delivery equation entirely.

Until a year or two ago, he says, streaming was always "an upsell because there were just so many factors involved in it that were out of our control. Now we actually get requests for streaming, where before we'd say, ‘We're going to live stream. We'll give you a DVD when we're done and you'll walk away with a live-switched event and it's going to be great. But just so you know, if you want to monetize this we can add an extra feature and add a webcast to it and it would cost X.' Now, it's the opposite. People are saying, ‘Hey, can you live stream this?' and we'll say, ‘Yes, and would you like to upgrade and get the DVD archive when we're done too?' It means we bring less equipment because recording equipment takes up a ton of space the DVD actual stuff and the rack mounts and stuff. The DVD that I give them is just an archive that they'll keep forever at their offices. But they hire us for the web stream."