From the Home Office to 100,000 attendees. STREAMED LIVE. Pushing Virtual Event Capabilities!!!
How Argus leads in the Virtual Events Field.
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Pivoting our home office to a virtual studio that welcomed 100,000 viewers – LIVE!
The channels Argus manage have over 5 million subscribers!
COVID-19 has hit EVERYONE hard. The Google for Game’s team hired Argus HD Event & Video Productions to produce their A/V & Livestreaming in San Francisco for the annual Game Developers Conference. This usually brings together 30,000 happy and curious attendees.
In February, when it became clear that COVID-19 would require cautious thinking, the conference organizers wisely postponed their event and we pivoted to Plan B: pre-recorded and live content, live streamed from Google HQ. Easy enough. That idea was perfect until San Francisco announced the unprecedented Shelter-in-Place order in mid-March. Now —- Plan C. Except we didn’t have one!
I pitched my home office to our client. It seemed plausible. We own all our broadcast equipment. We have the highest trained engineers on our team. With an upgraded fiber connection, we have the FASTEST POSSIBLE consumer speeds available. A normal fast home connecting is 20Mbs down and up; here is what our speeds clocked in:
The Challenge:
So how do we stream the feed to three different Twitter channels? Each channel was to receive the event’s keynote, followed by its own unique content. To add an extra layer of complexity, this had to be timed perfectly with the content being simulcasted on YouTube.
Building the studio:
Once we had our mobile studio set up, we virtually brought in the producers and clients via a simple meeting link to communicate with us. This was critical as they had valuable information and feedback that we needed to receive in real time.
With Argus HD streaming to channels with a combined FIVE MILLION subscribers, there was a tremendous amount of pressure on the home office to succeed. Failure was not an option. We had both primary and backup equipment in place, routing for three separate shows, and stream encoders all running on battery back ups to ensure that the livestream would be successful. We had the smartest engineers driving the show both remotely and locally.
I’m happy say that the production was an overwhelming success both on Twitter and Youtube with well over 100,000 viewers tuning in LIVE!
If you would like any tips and tricks or have a question about how you can manage your own version of this, please feel free to ask!
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From his early days with the San Francisco Giants to working national conferences, Tim Kay’s passion in the event & production industry only grows stronger. He started Argus HD to bring together a dedicated & elite group of professionals that commit to evolving with the ever-changing landscape and utilizing this knowledge to deliver the WOW factor to our clients. This has never been more relevant than the rapidly changing landscape we’re all in today. For any questions please email our team: info@argushd.com
