What "Going Live" Used to Cost

Today you walk into almost any venue, find the fiber jack, and you're live in ten minutes. Let me tell you what going live used to cost.

Back in the early streaming days, the video was the size of a postage stamp and the internet was dial-up. DSL wasn't even mainstream yet. So if you wanted to push live video out of a building, the connection itself was the job. Not the cameras. Not the encoder. The pipe.

We'd order ADSL and bond multiple lines together just to scrape together enough upstream bandwidth. If we were lucky, we'd land a T-1. We usually weren't lucky.

Conditioning those ADSL lines was its own special hell. You'd drop into UNIX and run commands by hand to coax the circuit into behaving before it would pass clean video.

Then my favorite part. You'd reserve the T-1 or ADSL weeks in advance, show up on site, and find the provider had lit the line early, with the venue already running their own operations over your circuit. On your dime. So before the doors even opened, we'd be politely kicking people off the line we were paying for.

I've told you before about the hell that was working in London. Same war, different country.

Through all of it, my crew still shot broadcast quality and posted the bigger file for video on demand, progressive download, back before streaming as you know it today actually existed.

Here's what I carried out of broadcast engineering into every job after: when the easy path doesn't exist, you build one. If an event needed a satellite uplink or a remote truck to go live, I rented it. Meanwhile the competition would scratch their heads, give up, and just hit record. The audience at home got nothing.

The tools got easy over the years. The mindset is still the whole game.