Reno Broadcast Archive Now Available

[Jeff Lee]

The archive of the first-ever live (video) Internet Broadcast is now available at www.LiveAirShowTV.com If you subscribed for the Sunday live event, use your same log-in and you'll be able to watch again and again. It seems to work best on Internet Explorer. You have the ability to jump forward and pause and watch what you'd like.

I'm getting my first look at it myself, so I'm very interested to see what you folks were watching, and see what happened after it went through me as the director. I know there were some audio issues, and it may pain me to watch it, but you can be assured that we will take steps to make it better on the next show.

There's obviously a reason that no one has ever tried this before, and we experienced virtually every obstacle you can imagine. With the extremely limited resources, and almost no budget, we were able to provide this live feed for those who couldn't make it. That was indeed our main goal, followed very closely by learning all the "lessons" we could for an even bigger production next time.

Technical issues prevented us from taking in the in-cockpit cameras we'd planned. We're sorry that didn't work out, as we've done that at other air shows, and it's really great!

We celebrated the "official" 1st birthday of LiveAirShowTV on Monday, and I'd say we've had a pretty good year, especially during these challenging economic times. You've got to start somewhere, and we've taken some pretty bold steps. As we build on those, things will only look and sound better next season.

Thanks again for all your support, and understanding. We will fully automate the ordering/log-in system next time which should eliminate about 98% of the issues everyone experienced.

Let us know what you'd like to see added to the broadcast. Please be constructive in your criticism understanding how we were able to do this.

Thanks,

Jeff Lee
President
LiveAirShowTV

[Low-n-Slow]

Re: Reno Broadcast Archive Now Available

hi Jeff.

First off, congrats on pulling this off so well. I work in the tech/geeky world of endeavour so appreciate fully how Murphy's Law is applicable to first time attempts. To not miss any of the races in the the noise, fury and confusion of real time broadcasting was a major accompishment.

A minor but still significant part of the experience that could use a different configuration is the text chat area of the display. The functionality was problematic for a number of reasons:
(1)The area was quite small, so that only a few lines were visible at a time.
(2) the scroll bar was pretty laggy, so finding a previous message that had scrolled off the display was difficult.
(3) the screen jumped up to the top of the display every time a new message was entered, so even if you managed to find a previous message, it was almost always immediately lost again.

All the above meant that messages were scrolling off the screen faster than they could be read. This was particularly annoying anytime a few seconds buffering occurred, as there would be an immediate burst of dozens of idiotic "it's dead", "I can't see anything", "I want my money back" messages, rendering any intelligent comments going on unreadable.

So improvements would include: a larger text area, a pause function (or just not have the display jump to the top of the buffer when new enties come in), a smoother scroll bar, and a squelch function (so a user could have the option of not seeing submissions from selected individuals who, through either genetic or alcohol induced lack of wit, don't know when to put a sock in it).

cheers
Scott

[AirDOGGe]

Re: Reno Broadcast Archive Now Available

(3) the screen jumped up to the top of the display every time a new message was entered, so even if you managed to find a previous message, it was almost always immediately lost again.

All the above meant that messages were scrolling off the screen faster than they could be read. This was particularly annoying anytime a few seconds buffering occurred, as there would be an immediate burst of dozens of idiotic "it's dead", "I can't see anything", "I want my money back" messages, rendering any intelligent comments going on unreadable.

Item 3 seems to be common for such real-time chats.

I followed a similar chat room while watching the last shuttle launch at spaceflightnow.com/. So many people started posting at one time that messages appears only briefly, and the moderators kept pleading with users to just post text directly related to the event (of which many did not).


I'm not sure anything can be done with that, short of limiting how many users are allowed to post messages.

[Dave65882]

Re: Reno Broadcast Archive Now Available

Sure a lot of us who were there would be more than happy to watch it and give you ideas.......any chance on getting the show without having to log on?

[jhall@jetav.com]

Re: Reno Broadcast Archive Now Available

Jeff -

Is this Sunday only, or is there footage from throughout the week?

Thanks.

[ebutner]

Re: Reno Broadcast Archive Now Available

Sure a lot of us who were there would be more than happy to watch it and give you ideas.......any chance on getting the show without having to log on?

I'll buy a copy if you make it available.

[jhall@jetav.com]

Re: Reno Broadcast Archive Now Available

I'll buy a copy if you make it available.

Me too.

[Strega Fan]

Re: Reno Broadcast Archive Now Available

Me Too!

[Jeff Lee]

Re: Reno Broadcast Archive Now Available

The archive is from Sunday only.

While we'd love to provide a disc-based product, we cannot infringe on the DVD sales that RARA has already contracted for with another company. We are even sensitive to our archive being available, but that's the arrangement we've already made.

We are keeping the archive exclusive to the Live subscribers at this point. You may still purchase it at that price. We will open it up after 30 days for a greatly reduced price.

The chat is a completely different subject. I've been a big fan of it, but my enthusiasm is waning. There simply must be a better way to control and track the posts. There were people who's fingers typed faster than their mind's could think. I don't want to turn if off completely, but that is becoming an option. We do hope the chat didn't offend anyone.

We are now very aware of some of the technical issues we were having. Some we knew about, while others were not evident to us in the control room, and only occurred in transmission. I am looking into ways to fix those things for the archive, but it will take a little time.

I was looking at some of the show this morning, and thought about how there were so many other things we wanted to add to it, from a production standpoint, but the fact that many of you were sitting around the world, including a few VERY special soldiers in Afghanistan watching it LIVE, really brought home what we did. We do deserve some of the criticism that we've gotten, but on the other hand, we tried something that on one else has even gotten close to doing. Let's put things into perspective. We will take what we learned from this, and build on it for a full season in 2010.

Thanks for the support and continued interest. I'll take the suggestions and we'll decide what parts of the production we'll keep and what parts we'll toss out. We still call this a success both for us and for the Reno Air Races.

Jeff Lee
President
LiveAirShowTV