Live, from a hotel room… it’s Tuesday afternoon!

With Boise State’s football team traveling to San Diego for a bowl showdown with TCU, we looked for a way to combine our interactive capability with video – and capture the mid-day traffic spike. The solution was a live video web chat for two days leading up to the game at 12:15pm – featuring three of our sports talent. KTVB Assistant News Director Xanti Alcelay and I devised a system to “broadcast” live from San Diego – and pair the video with a Pluck comment interface. The result was nearly 200 questions during our two shows – and several thousand video views.

We loaded Xanti’s plain-Jane PC laptop with Windows Media Encoder, and hooked up a USB video/audio capture card. We brought along three lavaliere microphones and a Mackay mixer. The mics went into the mixer and out to the capture card. Instead of a Beta SX cam (which we tested), we settled on Xanti’s pro-sumer digital video camera. The entire webcast-in-a-box fit within a backpack – key for the trip from Boise to San Diego. We did hook up the sat. truck’s HMI light – but could have done without it if we had too.

Once we arrived, we set up in an area by the pool on day one, and inside our hotel room on day two (the hotel tried to charge us $500 for Internet access, which necessitated the move to the hotel room… which ended up being a better shot anyway).

We put the whole thing together in less than an hour and we were able to engage our audience in a slightly different way – and put together a lively discussion show with viewers asking questions about the game. We promoted on the air of course (using the “spend your lunch hour with us” approach), and also spread the word on Boise State message boards and via Twitter. The entire production didn’t cost us anything, and since Xanti was running the sat. truck and I was field producing, we already had the key staff in place.

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