Streaming Media Events

Few notes for friends and other schools on our recent upgrades at media conferences. A steady stream of comments and complaints -- inside and outside -- were to continue to improve the audio of the media questions. We added a hand microphone at our recent football event, and several media members were uncomfortable with it.

The last two media events, we had run a second camera that was turned back on the media crowd to show our fans and followers the crowd. Still, the hand mike -- changing from shotguns or just riding the levels on the other ambient microphones -- got their attention. Among the comments:

Don't you need our permission to do this?

We don't want to be a part of your website.

I can't appear on anyone else's pay website.

Good questions, but I didn't pick the model out of thin air. The White House and other governments -- including our own Fayetteville City Council -- have turned the cameras around so everyone gets to see. As a public event, that the media themselves are taping and posting whole on their websites, I'm not sure about the appearance concerns.

We feed the audio for the questions into the mult-box for the media, who are also taping the event. So, for those who were already running the whole press conferences on their websites, these media members were appearing in audio form on competitor websites (unless they were actively editing out the questions).

My goal was to improve the quality, and to keep up with the media organizations. For some time, many of them were taking the audio or video from these events and playing it unedited on their broadcasts and websites. We have the advantage of a TriCaster that allows us to both create a nice quality encode and switch the second camera. Why not?

As a technical matter, the hand-offs were slow with the hand microphone, so we'll try to use two at future events, or we may spend the extra money to add more crowd mikes to pick up the audio without the hand microphone.

Still, this is the standard at the NCAA post games. We're not charging for fans (and other media, I might add) to watch the events. And again, news reporters and political beat reporters experience this every day, most visibly from WhiteHouse.gov.

What I would advise fellow schools is to give your media earlier notice if you plan to make a similar change. My mistake was assuming our media had noticed the additional cameras and shotgun microphones pointed at them the past couple of events.