Nate Ritter

My wife and I are attending the Bellingham Bells baseball games for our 3rd season this year. At tonight’s game, while Teresa and I were discussing the Bells’ current marketing target demographic, I had a revelation. I’d like to try something old in a new (and very cheap and novel) way.

In addition to offering the Bells a live digital scoreboard on their website, I would like to put together a super (and I mean SUPER) cheap video production unit to stream the video (and if possible some audio) over the net. My original thought was just stream a live webcam on gameday, but because of the depth of field, it probably wouldn’t be that great of a feed. So, I called up my friend Kjell Nygren. He’s a guru with video stuff, so he and I discussed some options for uber-cheap production of this sort.

Our thoughts so far have a few options.

1. Scoop up some super old DV cameras on the cheap (or by donation, hint hint).
2. Grab some firewire cable
3. Use our own laptops as portable battery and ntsc->dv converters
4. Setup a wifi hotspot for IP to IP streaming
5. Push an administrator switched/selected stream to the actual web server using a switching method (not known yet) or control the feed using flash remoting of some sort (this part is a bit fuzzy on the tech possibilities still

- OR -

1. Grab a few stationary old cameras
2. Hook them via S-video or RCA up to a Radio Shack switch box
3. Output the switchbox S-video to our laptop
4. Feed the converted video to our server for streaming

The benefits for the first option should be relatively obvious in that we could have a mobile unit (or two or three) that could feed to a central system which would push a selected feed to the web server. Mobile units would be cool if we can do it on the cheap. But, the limitation is the quailty of feed we can push over wifi. We’re not sure of that yet. Nor are we sure of how the switching of the feed in that option would work.

Enter Matt Bergsma. This Macromedia Flash master will probably be able to help us out on figuring if there are possibilities of creating a server/client control switch for live video feeds. If possible, this route would be a fantastic way of building a UI (User Interface) for a “Producer” as well as controlling multiple feeds. I’ll be probing Matt’s brain tomorrow afternoon with some of these questions to see what he can come up with. In the meantime, Kjell is going to work on the video feed issues, and I’ll see what I can work up with the back-end streaming and server tech.

If anyone would like to give some feedback, suggestions, ideas, etc., or donations for video equipment which may help us reach our goal, that would be fantastic! Our goal is to make this one of the cheapest (hopefully mobile) video production units ever. As a side-note, we’d also like to do it with all Mac technology (just for the promotion). But, if there are generous PC fans out there who want to chime in, I’m not against the ideas at all. We’re looking for cheap more than we are sticking to a standard. So, if you want to help, we’d be grateful.