MCA-I Orange County Chapter Webcasts Grow & Change

The LA/Orange County chapter of MCAI continues to experiment with webcasting. “We’re looking for the most efficient and low cost way to webcast our meetings and each month we’re trying something different,” says Grace McKay of Electric Pictures. Grace is the chapter’s webmaster and has been the driving force behind webcasting.

However, the goal is not ‘down and dirty’ production. OC is searching for an easy-to-duplicate, high quality format they can afford. Grace and other members want to have as much production value as possible in every webcast to reflect well on themselves and the organization. Of course, they are taking into consideration that, as an all-volunteer effort with virtually no budget, available equipment and personnel will vary from month to month. For instance, one webcast was done with only one camera live and extremely minimal lighting. A second camera was locked on a wide shot recording on tape then edited into the replays. Another more recent webcast had two live cameras and much better lighting, partly due to the available light in the room.

This will be the fourth consecutive monthly webcast for OC and their most ambitious yet. The meeting on April 15 will stream live on www.mogulus.com/mcaioc as well as be embedded in the chapter’s homepage, www.mcai-oc.org Two of the previous meetings have been constantly streaming on Mogulus but will soon be stored on Amazon S3 for VOD playback through the chapter’s website.

Mogulus is one of the elements that OC has settled on for regular use. They use the basic streaming service which is free and gives you a dedicated ‘channel’ that afterwards will continually replay your content. Mogulus’ enhanced service is about $350 a month. S3, Amazon’s moniker for Simple Storage Service, http://aws.amazon.com/s3/ is a dirt-cheap on-line storage solution that McKay and others highly recommend.

The quest for upgraded production value and more sources to roll into the monthly ‘show’ has taken them to purchase Telestream’s Wirecast software, http://www.telestream.net/wire-cast/overview.htm The chapter will use Wirecast for the first time in April. The Wirecast bundle works with streaming services Mogulus and Ustream and provides a virtual desktop ‘switcher (with graphics) for multiple inputs. For April, OC will have three cameras, a web feed and more, utilizing an Express card or PC card to add more firewire inputs to the laptop. The investment in the WireCast program was about $500.

While production value is important and picking the right combination of tools can make a big difference, it’s still all about the content—and distribution. As with many other MCAI chapters, the LA/Orange County chapter regularly produces interesting meetings with great expert speakers. They recognized that in our new, web-centric world they needed to take the meetings to the audience. Multiple distribution platforms (live streaming, VOD and YouTube) will all be served.

Editorially, the OC chapter is going to produce the upcoming meeting differently as well. So far they’ve been happy to get the continuous 90 minute presentations recorded and playing back regularly. But, in order to put clips on YouTube etc, they need to manage the speakers and their content into modules each 10 minute or less. This means more post production than they’ve done before. But just two or three good clips may drive a good number of interested parties to their site.

Now, as they perfect their webcasting efforts, more interested people will be exposed to the LA/Orange County chapter. And whether new viewers are inclined to attend or not, they can easily see the value in membership.

John Coleman

Twin Oaks Communications

www.twinoaks.tv