So doing the streaming for a Plone Conference is quite a stressy task at times. You mostly run around trying to get the right people, you are searching for a possibility to plug into a sound source and you are trying to get a good network connection. Sound was working in the end after I check the mixer myself and managed to get a long enough cable (wireless mic would be nice but is expensive). And instead of having a dedicated line I had to share the wifi connection. But in the end it worked better than expected and I had 2 streams running, one to ustream.tv for the website and one to StreamGuys.com for Quicktime to use it in Second Life.

So should you plan to stream a conference or any other event live, make sure you

1. arrive early, 3 days in advance might not be too little time. Make sure, the technical staff is around, too.
2. bring enough long cables with you (or buy some in the area).
3. have a power connection. Make sure you have power adapters should you be in foreign countries.
4. check in front if there really is a dedicated line for you (not sure how good a 3G connection might work but it can be better than nothing and especially not shared)
5. setup a Second Life venue far before the event
6. prepare a streaming website (basically showing a ustream.tv widget) also ahead of the conference. This should be announced early and should also contain up-to-date information. A CMS like Plone is of course quite useful for managing such things.
7. announce the life streaming early on as many channels as possible. Prepare a text and send it out to your blogs, to news sites, as group announcements etc. (create a group ahead of time or use existing ones)
8. have a good enough Quicktime Streaming Server. You might want to look out for a sponsor which should be easy to find for interesting events. If there is a budget it is even easier of course. As for our sponsor, StreamGuys, I can only say that it worked like a charm.
9. don’t forget to hit the Record button on ustream.tv also. This way you directly have an archived version of the video you can link to.
10. you link to the agenda of the conference and eventually convert it to Second Life times (something which I hadn’t time to do yet).

Of course I knew some of these things before but you forget quickly Especially doing the website before leaving is a very good idea as you probably will have enough stress already on location.

So if you want to join today’s streaming of the conference (starting in about 1 hour), join us via web or Second Life.

(photo by Aaron van der Lip)

Tags: secondlife, virtualworlds, ploneconf2007, taotakashi, plone