The Music City Strongman Classic 2020 represented another Zoom milestone for our brand. I was extremely nervous about doing a livestream where we weren’t going to actually be on site to cover it, relying instead on a Zoom connection with the event promoter, Blake Harris, to get footage of the event.
So Many Things Could Have Gone Wrong
From Zoom crashing and the infamous Zoom lag that makes everyone’s voice sound like robots, to a simple Wifi crash, we were completely at the mercy of modern technology. I also wasn’t thrilled about putting the camera set up in the hands of someone who was going to already have his hands full the next day running the event. Here’s a quick rundown of the challenges we faced:
- We had to use event promoter, Blake Harris’s phone as the camera which meant that if something went wrong, I’d have no way to reach him to tell him that we lost video or that the phone was pointing at the ground for some reason.
- Blake isn’t a media guy so we had to work out where to set up the camera (Android phone) during a Zoom call the night before the event.
- My color commentator of the day, Masters competitor, Brian Pankey, lives in Tennessee, about 100 plus miles away from where I live in Georgia. Normally, we’d just meet up at the event, but on this occasion, he would be joining us on Zoom as well.
- We would be streaming the Zoom feed through OBS to YouTube thereby creating another potential opportunity for technology to break down on us.
So yeah, I was nervous.
But we had little choice. In fact, because of a clamp down of crowd size restrictions for the venue, we weren’t sure until the very last minute whether or not the event was going to happen at all. Blake Harris did a tremendous job of putting this event on and finding a way to make it work. After a call late on Wednesday of last week, he and I decided to give Zoom a test run with him doing a Zoom interview to pre record the Rules Briefing which would let us test our connection and let the two of us set up the camera angle by trial and error. I did another Zoom test with Brian, to not only make sure that he had good reception at his house, but also so he could record some tips for certain events which we could play in the event we had signal interruptions with him.
The Music City Strongman Classic 2020 Was a Success!
None of my fears materialized. We had enough clips to cover up the lulls in the action that are a part of any competitive event and we still used the clips we shot with Brian and just had him expand on his advice to make the color commentary flow. At the last minute, I decided to reach out to David Waters, the promoter for the Mammoth Strength V ProAm, and we shot a 15 minute promo for his event that worked out well to close out the live stream and hopefully build interest in the Mammoth which will happen on Saturday, January 23. Also in our favor was that the event was interesting to watch and flowed well with a mix of events from MAS Wrestling to a 1006lb yoke carry exhibition by middleweight Sammy Pape.
Getting good feedback from everyone who watched the event either live or later after I added in time stamps to enhance the viewer experience. And we now have a bit more confidence in our ability to stream events if we end up having more lockdowns in 2021. Watch the live stream replay below: