Midnight in London

Midnight in London. An hour before our upload window. My CTO just fried all seven of my encoders.

I was the video encoding engineer at Seminar Source in the early streaming days. They hired me because I designed and built the field encoders and video flypacks myself. We were running a live event for the American Bar Association. We'd already beaten one power problem just to keep the live show up. Now we had to push the recordings to Equinix so people back in the States could catch the delayed feed. The internet connection for that leg was ISDN. It was rough even on a good night.

While I was still staging gear, my CTO got impatient. Plugged my encoders straight into a 210V wall outlet, no inverters, didn't flip a single switch to check. Pop. Every power supply, dead, all seven at once.

I was furious. But fury doesn't upload video.

So I tore the supplies open and found it: just the fuses had blown. Where do you find fuses for seven encoders at midnight in a city that isn't yours? You improvise. I borrowed a few from some powered-down gear in the rack nearby, and quietly put every one back when I was done.

Everything powered up. Everything uploaded. The client never knew how close it came. The show went on.

Three things I carried out of that night. Every plan needs a backup plan, and your backup plan better have a backup plan of its own. From then on I traveled with spare power supplies and spare fuses, and it went straight into how I trained anyone who worked broadcast under me. Ask the real question: if everything that can go wrong does go wrong, how do you still get the job done? It won't always be pretty. Stay operational anyway. And don't be afraid to stand up to a senior exec. After that night, my CTO learned to keep his hands off my gear, and I learned that protecting the work sometimes means protecting it from the people above you. When you own the outcome, you own the room.

That mindset is also why I started River Communications when Seminar Source folded. I'd rather build the system right than watch someone break the part they don't understand.

300 shows across my career. 100% success rate. Zero lost. And that's not even counting the TV and broadcast years before it.