Remote Production
When lockdowns hit in December of 2020 just before Christmas Eve I had a meeting with the pastors of Inspiration 9 Church regarding LIVE remote online broadcasts of Sunday and Special services. Their goal was to LIVE broadcast from multiple locations from across Windsor and Essex County to our congregation and our first broadcast would be just days away on Christmas Eve 2020.
I was itching to put into practice what I learned from how the 2020 NFL Draft did their remote production and interviews with drafted players. Each player was given two devices (phones / tablets), in which one device ran an app called Larix Broadcaster which turned the device into a broadcast camera to stream SRT (Secure Reliable Transport) protocol over public internet to the broadcast facility where the producers, directors and switchers would receive the feed and take the feed into their LIVE NFL Draft broadcast. The second device was setup as a interview device using WebRTC to conduct a video interview with the drafted player, very much like Zoom or MS Teams. This second device also doubled as comms. The interview was conducted over WebRTC while the first device was capturing the visual of the drafted player along with the mic’d audio for the broadcast.
To put this into practice, I had each of the pastors download the Larix Broadcaster app to their phones and find a way to stabilize their phones on a tripod or other method. On a second device, (laptop or tablet) we used Discord as our comms. so that each of the locations could hear what the LIVE location was saying in the broadcast. Each location used earbuds connected to Discord.
From a remote production point of view, in order to make this broadcast work, I had to have a general knowledge of networking and port forwarding to point incoming callers (remote feeds) to route to the IP Address of the Tricaster I was using at home. I also had to provide the remote broadcasters with my public IP Address and port number so that the Tricaster could connect to the incoming feeds.
Here is that first LIVE broadcast. Note: this is a completely live broadcast other than the prerecorded skit at around the 26 minute mark. Only direction we had was a rundown on the order of segments.
Please click the “Watch on YouTube” link in the frame below.
The success of that broadcast was very encouraging and we continued the remote broadcasts all throughout lockdown. We even decided to produce our Monday night Lighthouse Prayer streams in the same manor, at times inviting guests from across Canada and at one point from Africa as one of our pastors was on a missions trip. We still do these LIVE prayer broadcasts every Monday night and livestream it to Facebook, YouTube and Rumble simultaneously. To see any of these broadcasts, look up Inspiration 9 Church on any of those platforms.
Here is our latest Lighthouse Prayer broadcast.
This is the Remote Production setup at my home.
