Red Carpet Interview: Philip Nelson, NewTek

Learning Curve for Live Delivery

Steve: With Streaming Media Producer, we're really focused on the production side of streaming video. We have a lot of people out there who have been producing video for a while, and they've got the production side down, but they really want to be able to do live streaming for their clients. It's a new upsell for some of them. With the TriCaster 40, how quickly can you kind of get that in their hands and make that possible? 

Philip: When we designed TriCaster, there were three things we were trying to do. We wanted to make live TV portable, affordable, and easy to do. That's the hardest one. I have four kids ranging from 3 to 14. They are all television experts. They don't know what makes it look like real TV, but they've all watched it their entire lives so they know what TV looks like. And so, that was actually the challenge and that's why TriCaster has done so well and so many people are using it is, because we allow them to take all those bells and whistles that they see on broadcast television, but have made it easier enough to learn that fifth graders in Vegas can do a daily newscast with the same technology that the NBA is streaming and broadcasting NBA Development League games.

Here's a story I love to share about how easy and how quickly it is you can learn this: When the NBA Development League decided to start streaming their games--it's minor league basketball, so it's not like they have a broadcast team--I was going down to Austin to the Austin Toros and we were working with their PR department. They were going to own the webcast and I said, "Who's going to be your TriCaster operator?" They said, "Jennifer, come over here." Jennifer's handing out t-shirts at the door. She's a marketing intern, never made TV in her life. I spent 30 minutes training her on the TriCaster. She watched me switch the first quarter of the game and then she did the rest of the game--multi-camera switching, rolling in graphics, identifying players, rolling in commercials from sponsors--full production with 30 minutes of training. 

Steve: That's great because I love being able to tell production guys that you can just hit the ground running.

Philip: That was the hardest part because it's easy to make an interface that has a million buttons and a million submenus. But taking a complicated workflow like live TV and simplifying it to an interface that a single person can run and be successful with is a pretty amazing feat.