And while I make fun, I do totally agree with your “simplicity first” approach. I think too often we think about all the technology complexities first (and not without reason; it’s easy to get burned if you haven’t thought things through) and it can paralyze us into non-action. Better to just give it a whirl, see how it goes, and make small improvements as you go than to worry about perfection out of the gate.

First off, LOVE the Bull Durham reference!

I really appreciate this post. As you know all to well, while I preach the simplicity, it takes a more integrated approach to really make the live event pop. I so deeply appreciate you taking this on and venturing into a space far to many just dismiss because it’s not in their job description.

You’re doing a great thing by working to connect your global community with campus-based content. I applaud it. That said, keep blogging! Call me out when you think I gloss over a key struggle point, help pull me down from my idealistic cloud and back to the reality that yes this can be done, but it’s not exactly a walk in the park.

And remember, you’ll never make it to the bigs with fungus on your shower shoes.

Since the CDN we use allows me to set up “keys”, I can load the settings into Flash Media Encoder before the event. I’ve had a lot of success with that because I can say to one of our student workers, “Boot the laptop, run the application, check your video source and audio source, then hit Start” without really having to get into the details of how to set everything else up. It’s definitely not ready for someone to come and pick up, but it only takes about 10 minutes to get students trained on how to getting it working- which might be your next step depending on how you proceed.

I work for Brown and took them from 0 to hero with live streaming. I’m still evolving it (and it will continue to evolve for years after I’m gone – whenever that is). They started off similarly (macbook, firewire, single camera). In fact, that setup still gets used in one scenario, albiet with better audio.

Because it’s a part of the media production division there are a lot more resources to work with as far as cameras, mics, and general equipment. All our equipment is now SD so the most recent goal for me has been to replace the 1 laptop 1 camera setup with something HD and a bit more robust (yet just as portable). I picked a Dell laptop running Windows 7 that has an Expresscard 34/54 slot and a Matrox MXO2 LE. That matrox gives the laptop the ability to take a single HD SDI (from our professional cameras or camera switcher), Component, Composite, or HDMI and stream it using Flash Live Media Encoder (We use a live streaming CDN called Edgecast and a JWPlayer embed on our livestreaming page rather than something like Livestream so we don’t have any ads).

For important events where we can’t risk the stream going down, we have a more beastly rig. It consists of a Tricaster TCXD300 “production studio in a box” with built in switching/streaming. It can also capture the presentation off any laptop that is on the same network and has the tricaster network video plugin installed on it.

My suggestion would be to focus on audio quality first. I prefer using the Sennheiser EW-G3 product line since it always seems to work well. The key is pinning mics on everyone or buying a wireless boundary mic to stick near the panel. After that, I’d focus on video quality.

Iowa gets crap like the “Iowa Straw Poll” and “Iowa Caucus”, which are both meaningless gladhanding events that ultimately have no real bearing on the general election, and it gets national coverage because people really love self-delusion.

There is a somewhat believable lie we can tell ourselves re: the general election actually mattering while the electoral college still exists — but the Caucus? Straw Poll? Really?

Iowa is a ton of corn. And white people. And republicans. SFW? Why all the media frenzy? (Not to hate on Iowa as a state — I’m sure the Iowans are very nice and pleasant people, it just seems completely ridiculous and arbitrary that Iowa would get picked over some other state)

I must say, its worth it! My link, http://blog.ap.teacup.com/beata11/,thanks haha…

I share your view that people can have better sense then even a sophisticated algorithm much of the time, and I would even say that at the head of this project it would be of great value to have some librarians focusing the project. I admit I know little about the computational aspect of this and how you could program a very sophisticated automated search that had sufficient precision. I believe it is likely possible, but I iterate is it in the best economic interest of search engines to allow for this precise search tool free of charge?