We often hear stories about how people have shifted their focus from TV to the internet. We can even see that live stream viewership rose by 99% in just a year.
Despite the popularity of this concept, agreeing that TV is not as popular as it was a decade ago would be a mistake.
Saying that television stations have become more inventive because of these trends would be more appropriate. People still watch TV for a variety of reasons.
For some, it is just a habit, but a majority still prefer TV over the internet. Even though we can now watch TV shows on services like Netflix or Hulu.
Still, many of them are not aware of how hard it is to broadcast a live event on TV. There are a plethora of factors that make this process work.
That’s why we would like to provide you with a guide on how broadcasting a live event on TV is done. Let’s see what the requirements are.
A Shooting Plan
As we’ve already said, shooting live concerts can be quite a challenge. Since you need complete control over the processes, the best way to handle things is to prepare appropriately. The more time you invest into preparation, the more efficient the process will be.
To achieve this, you should create a shooting plan. By doing that, you will know what you need to do at every moment. One of the major factors of making a shooting plan is to decide on camera coordination, especially when you have more than two of them.
Covering every aspect of the event is your priority. So, covering everything, from the artists on the stage to the audience, will provide viewers the atmosphere of the event. With a good preparation plan, chances of making a mistake that could ruin the experience will be at an absolute minimum.
High-Quality Equipment
Not every event you broadcast will go smoothly. Some will be as smooth as possible, while others will represent a challenge for you. To prevent this from happening, you should have high-quality equipment. Not only that, but it is a must to have spares of everything.
As you can presume, this is much easier said than done. If you don’t have the resources to buy all this equipment, you can rent it.
No matter how complex the concert for broadcasting is, we are sure that the Seven Production fleet of OB Units will prevent all the potential problems during the broadcast.
We are not talking just about lenses and cameras. It is also crucial to have spare batteries, cables, and pretty much every other gadget you need.
You will find these items inexpensive, and it is not uncommon to forget about them. So, have them in mind when buying additional items.
Reliable AV Staff
Having proper AV equipment without a capable staff is not enough. Having a reliable AV staff is an essential part of making this process successful.
Many times we can see that the broadcast has quality audio and low-quality audio. To prevent this inequity, you should have reliable collaborators.
Signal Acquisition
When you record the content, the next task is to transmit it to the location where it will be encoded. There are a couple of different approaches you can select. Still, the one you will choose should be dependent on the event you are trying to broadcast.
The first approach is doing it through a satellite. The second one is a phone bridge. The third one is the online transmission. Naturally, this is not the part of the work you should handle.
But you are responsible for preparing the content and send it through the method a television station decided on.
Content-Encoding
After capturing the signal through one of the ways we mentioned earlier, the next stage is content-encoding. To describe this process in the simplest possible way, we can say that this is a process where the content is converting into the format that will make it ready for distribution.
To perform this conversion, you will need an encoder. For those who don’t know, this is a piece of hardware that digitalizes the signal. But the trick is to choose the format you will convert it into. We are talking about the factor the process will not be possible without it.
The Distribution
After the video from the concert has gone through all the processes we mentioned, it is ready for distribution. We are talking that this process is known as delivery. Many people don’t understand that t
his is the heftiest part of the broadcasting process, considering this is important. For instance, there are many situations where TV stations pay for broadcasting the event, and they don’t even use the content for many reasons. In any case, the distribution is the final part of this process and the most significant one.
Summary
Understanding the complexity of broadcasting is not something that we can describe as easy. Here, you can look at the most significant factors in this process and how you should handle them. With this insight, you can eliminate every potential mistake that can occur in this process.