(This article originally appeared in the November 1, 2007 edition of the AR&D Media 2.0 Intel newsletter.)
In 2004, I had the honor of doing live reports on TV from the Red Sox World Series victory parade.
In 2007, I went live from a Sox victory parade again – this time, from my laptop.
On Tuesday, I webcast the Red Sox victory parade from downtown Boston with nothing more than a handheld video camera, my Mac laptop and a remarkable website called Mogulus. Working with my client NECN, I was positioned on a media platform in Copley Square – right in downtown Boston along the parade route.
I plugged my camera into my laptop, logged on to a channel I had set up through Mogulus and started webcasting. NECN.com embedded the Mogulus player, so the webcast was transparent to its audience.
For the two hours leading up to the parade, I simply spoke, turned the camera on the crowd, and often let the camera “do the talking.” Because it’s the web, I didn’t feel the need to narrate every second. Occasionally I would pipe in to let people know what they were watching. It was different than what they could see on TV. It wasn’t as polished. It was one position from one camera. But if they were stuck at work, it was a webcam on a parade they weren’t going to see otherwise.
I set up an email account just for the day and asked people to send me their thoughts and questions. So what if I had to duck out of the camera to check my email?
I’d like to be able to report the result was a brilliant, polished and flawless webcast. It was not. This was an experiment after all. I like to get my hands dirty with new toys before I recommend them to clients. I was using a Verizon Wireless EVDO card instead of a WiFi or hard-wired Internet connection. Mogulus really, really recommends a better connection than the one I was using. So the occasionally jerky picture was the fault of my only choice of web connection – not theirs.
Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling holds the World Series trophy over his head in this framegrab from our webcast
The biggest problem came from the crowd. Although we were on a media stage, once the parade started the crowd essentially rushed the stage. There was no crowd control and in the onslaught, someone knocked out my connection. I had to reboot, but it couldn’t have come at a worse time. Fortunately, I was rolling on the parade in my camera, so once I re-established the webcast, I simply explained to the audience what happened, and then played the part they missed directly out of my camera. (All those years of being a TV producer paid off at least a little.)
For all the small problems I had – and that one big problem – I consider this to be a breakthrough. The quality is only going to get better. Last year I wouldn’t have been able to do as much as I did today. Mogulus tells me they are working on improvements that will make for better pictures from connections like the one I have, and even from mobile phones.
I didn’t replace any newscasts on Tuesday. I was strictly an amateur show. But I was also hearing from viewers around the country who were happy to have a window onto a parade they were missing. Some of them even liked the messy, clunky, DIY charm of my setup. Yeah, I did a “This is the worst webcast I’ve ever seen” email. But when you try something new, expect to hear from the cranks. We had a breakthrough day, my laptop and I. And while covering the 2004 parade with a crew was an honor, covering the 2007 parade solo was out-of-the-ballpark fun.