The City of Long Beach Mayor’s office presents an Annual State of the City address. It has traditionally been broadcast on the local cable channel after the event, however a technically savvy mayor wanted to make it available as a live web stream.
Working with the venue and city staff, we were able to provide a high quality and remarkably stable web stream of the event to a large audience across the globe.
The City of Long Beach has been a leader in using technology to better reach out and serve its residents. We were thrilled when we were allowed the opportunity to work with them to apply that same goal to their annual State of the City address.
Web Streaming reliably from a remote location always comes with special challenges. We worked closely with the staff of the venue to ensure that a reliable temporary internet connection was arranged and tested ahead of time.
A run-through was scheduled the day prior to the event to check that all of the equipment, lighting and network connections were working perfectly. A test web stream was also run which allowed city staff from all of the different departments to feel confident that things would run smoothly the next day.
Instead of building a complete branded web page with a video player on it, we created an embeddable video player for the event. That allowed us to distribute that “embed code” to the website staff of the different website partners that needed to display the live stream. They could then place that code in ways that worked best for each of them. We were also able to build in optimization that would allow for users on mobile devices to have a seamless viewing experience regardless which website they were using to view the event.
All of the video streaming services were built using a highly scalable backbone that would allow us to provide both an affordable streaming solution as well as one that could grow to meet the needs of the audience no matter how large it grew.
Tracking tools were also built in to provide real-time viewing number that refreshed every 10 minutes. That allowed us to provide audience numbers to the mayor’s staff while the event was ongoing, look for potential drops in viewership that might indicate technical problems as well as provide a complete report on the audience numbers soon after the event ended.
The end result was an event that streamed live without a hitch! Before we left, we were able to provide the city with an HD digital recording that could easily be uploaded to their own streaming platforms as well as be broadcast on the city cable channel.
