Kent Crawford
Bill Webb wears many hats in the Southlake community: business owner, father, president of the Carroll Athletic Booster Club. But this fall, Bill will take on another responsibility for Dragon Football — livestreamer. After UIL gave schools permission to livestream Friday night games for the 2020-2021 school year, the CABC got to work on setting up an immersive fall football experience. While it may not be the same as sitting on the sidelines, Bill and his team have worked hard to bring the stadium to fans digitally.
THREE YEARS AGO… the CABC moved its website and app to a company called Mascot Media. They have the capability to develop a custom-based livestreaming app for us. I have video experience and the equipment we need to produce the videos at the quality we expect. The idea was if we ever had the opportunity to livestream football, we wouldn’t need to make many changes.
I TRIED EXPERIMENTING WITH A LITTLE BIT OF LIVESTREAMING… during 2019 at a couple of basketball and baseball games where we livestreamed Chuck Kelly’s radio broadcasts over the CABC app. We really cut our chops when we went and played baseball for four days in California. That was our first exposure to livestreaming on a new campus, and we didn’t know if everything would work. We had a couple of technical glitches, but the signal worked, and we wound up being able to carry all of the games through Chuck that year.
AFTER COVID-19 HAPPENED... we knew that there was a very good chance that attendance would be limited if we were going to have football. UIL temporarily suspended the restrictions against livestreaming Friday night football games, but we don’t know whether UIL will bring back that restriction next year. For now, it’s a temporary fix to an inconvenient problem.
THERE ARE TWO PARTS... to livestreaming — the production side of it and the streaming platform. We’ve already handled the streaming platform with Mascot Media. Now all we had to do was set up the equipment. The streaming has gotten so smooth to the point where you just have to get a good signal on-site. If the signal is terrible, then the video is terrible, and you’re not going to have a good stream.
WE’LL BE... in or near the press box in all of the locations. We’ll have two cameras. One camera will be set wide and stay static looking at the field, while another camera will be zoomed in tighter following all of the action. I’ll be sitting in the press box from my laptop operating both cameras, switching back and forth between those two different views. We’re also going to lay Chuck Kelly’s radio broadcast over the video and send that out live.
IT’S A... little bit of a juggling act. I’m basically doing all of this as a one-man crew. Ten years ago, you’d have to have a production truck to do everything we’re doing. Today, you can literally do it on your laptop with video capture devices.
WE’RE USING… Sony NX100 cameras. It allows us to film everything in 4K, which is the highest level for this type of broadcast. With our mixing, we can do slow motion. We can do graphics. We can overlay more video. We can do anything that a commercial broadcaster can do.
THE MOST CRUCIAL ELEMENT TO LIVESTREAMING... is Wi-Fi. Most people are going to be watching the livestream from their mobile devices, so you have to have a strong Wi-Fi signal to have a strong stream. That was a challenge we had with baseball in the past, not having a good signal at the baseball stadium. We’ll be using the school’s stadium Wi-Fi for all of the games, but we do have the ability to go off of Wi-Fi and use our own hotspot as a backup if we need to. Even if the video doesn’t work, you can still tune in to listen to Chuck’s audio and get a good picture of the game.
THE NO. 1 THING I’M EXCITED ABOUT… is that we’re actually going to be playing football. Two months ago, we didn’t know if we were going to play football, or any other sport for that matter. The fact that our kids are on the field and competing against their peers is most exciting to me.
IF LIVESTREAMING FOOTBALL GOES WELL… we’re going to try to livestream other sports. We’re going to try to do some volleyball games, some basketball, baseball, track, cross country, tennis. Once we have the technology in place, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t at least try to do other sports. It’s taken a lot of time and effort to get to this point, but we’re eager to get started.