Resources for planning a live event
The questions we ask a venue before we quote a room, the tools we use to size a connection, and what we have learned getting it wrong. None of it is gated.
Start with these
The deepest explanations on this site live inside the capability pages, where they sit next to the service itself.
- What broadcast engineering actually is · why a signal plan on paper is the difference between a broadcast and a gamble.
- Remote production, explained · how your venue gets a full control room without the truck.
- Why streams fail, and how ours don't · bonded connectivity and redundancy in plain English.
- Live streaming, done properly · what separates a professional stream from a webcam on a tripod.
- How we work · our standards, our process, and the people behind them.
- Running a PPV fight card · the broadcast side of pay-per-view, produced properly.
What to ask the venue
This is the real list. We work off it before we price anything, and the single most useful item is the second one, because almost every venue quotes a peak speed test rather than what the circuit sustains with four hundred people in the room.
Connectivity
- Is there a hardwired ethernet drop in the room we are broadcasting from, or does the cable run from somewhere else in the building?
- What is the sustained upload speed on that drop, measured on a weekday at the hour our event runs, not a peak on an idle Sunday?
- Is that circuit shared with guest wifi, point of sale, badge scanners or the building's backups?
- Can we have a dedicated VLAN or a separate circuit, and can you put that in writing?
- Does the building have cellular coverage inside the room, on more than one carrier?
Power
- How many separate 20 amp circuits can we get at the production position?
- Are those circuits on the same breaker as the stage lighting or the kitchen?
- Is there house power conditioning, or do we bring our own?
- Where is the nearest panel, and who has keys to it during the event?
The room
- What is the ceiling height, and are there rigging points we are allowed to use?
- Is there a house sound system, and can we take a clean feed from the mixer rather than miking the speakers?
- Who runs house audio, and are they there for the whole event or only setup?
- What time can we load in, and is the loading dock available then?
- Is there a room we can use as a control position that is not in the back of the ballroom?
The parts people forget
- Is there another event in the building that day sharing the same uplink?
- Does the venue require union labour for load-in, and which trades?
- Is there a house AV vendor with an exclusivity agreement?
- What is the policy on recording, and does the venue claim any rights to the footage?
- Who is the on-site contact at 6am, and what is their mobile number?
Copy it, put it in your own RFP, send it to a competitor. We would rather the industry stopped losing events to a shared uplink than keep this to ourselves.
Tools
From the truck
The venue said they had fibre. That tells you nothing.
Why a venue speed test does not predict whether your livestream holds, the four questions that actually separate venues, and what to do when the answer is bad.
What a corporate livestream actually costs, and what it returns
A straight breakdown of what drives the price of a corporate event livestream, what the cheap version costs you later, and how to work out whether it pays.
The six things that break a corporate livestream
Bandwidth, audio, the venue's promises, remote presenters, redundancy, and the run of show. What actually goes wrong on event day and how to plan around it.
Common questions
- What should I ask a venue before booking an event livestream?
- Start with the uplink: whether there is a hardwired drop in the actual broadcast room, its sustained upload speed measured during business hours, and whether that circuit is shared with guest wifi and point of sale. Then power, specifically how many separate 20 amp circuits reach the production position and whether they share a breaker with stage lighting. Then whether a house AV vendor holds an exclusivity agreement, because that one can end the conversation.
- Do I need to hire an AV company, or can the venue handle it?
- It depends on what the venue's in-house team actually does. Many hotel AV departments are excellent at projectors and microphones and have never run a multi-camera broadcast. Ask them directly how many livestreams they ran last year and what encoder they use. If the answer is vague, they are reselling it to someone else anyway.
- How far in advance should I book a livestream crew?
- For a corporate event, the earlier the better, and the constraint is rarely the crew. It is the site survey. Booking with enough runway to go and measure the room before the event is what separates a plan from a hope. Memorial services work differently, because nobody plans a funeral weeks out, and any company that streams them has to be set up to move faster than its normal process.
Planning something specific
Tell us the venue and the date. If we have worked the room we will tell you what to watch for, and if we have not we will go and look.
Talk to us about your event