From Thursday March 10 – Sunday March 13th we lived at the Olds Sportsplex arena while live streaming the Hockey Alberta Midget A Female Provincial Championships. The combined live stream viewership from both arenas totaled at 1,933. Add to that the number of views of the replays on Ustream.tv and YouTube the coverage of the event enjoyed a fair amount of reach. One of the biggest challenges was in covering both arenas within the budget allocated. Running fixed and operator managed cameras was part of our mix in setting up the crews.

The tournament opener . . . Game #1 – Olds Grizzlys vs Calgary Chaos with audio play by play from CKFM 96.5 radio’s Galen Hartviksen & Jeff Dyck…

We used the same basic setup we do for the AJHL’s Olds Grizzlys for the opener and the gold medal game on Sunday. Three cameras – two with operators, and full graphics. The action, including replays was sent to the big screen in the arena.

The in-between games were covered using a single camera with an operator and a fixed camera covering the scoreboard.

Live streaming was via a channel on Ustream.tv. Since we broadcast from both the main and the auxiliary arenas, we setup two separate channels. This way viewers could tune into which ever game they wanted to watch based on the published schedule.

We used an fixed camera from the auxiliary arena and broke a number one rule for streaming and connected to the O-NET broadband network via a WiFi connection. Thanks to the folks from O-NET who gave us unlimited bandwidth from this particular node. Typically a WiFi connection such as DSL doesn’t have sufficient bandwidth to handle video but we pulled it off this time by making use of the fibre based/Gigabit network provided by O-NET, the community owned broadband network in Olds.

We placed two cameras down on the glass at the ice surface and were able to capture the action end to end.

Here’s the action from this setup . . .

It was non-stop hockey for the four days we worked on this project and it didn’t end at the Gold Medal Game on Sunday. That evening the AJHL Junior A Olds Grizzlys were finishing out their playoff series with a game against the Camrose Kodiaks. The Kodiaks won the game and took the series in three games straight. There is always next season and we have already been in talks to cover the 2016-17 Olds Grizzlys games for local TV and FastHockey.

BTW: Running up and down those stairs gave me as much exercise as my week in San Francisco. Not near as warm though.