It’s always fun getting to travel for things that don’t seem like work, and this past weekend was one of those trips. New York City and the Javits Center have been one of my favorite business destinations in the last few years, as I’ve traveled there four times in two years for gaming. This time around, the 2009 WCG USA Finals was held at the New York Anime Festival.
Smeagol was kind enough to call me when it was time for a stream technician, and we used uStream‘s technology to provide a low-cost streaming platform for their National Championship tournament. Together with union video and audio technicians, over 65,000 visitors got to watch the action over the weekend. Hit the jump for more pictures from the weekend!
Smeagol put it all together and I just showed up to run the stream this weekend. It was a whirlwind trip and I’m already back in LA rocking. Smeagol’s setup included a copy of VidBlaster running on a quad core machine with an Osprey capture card. We then tethered VidBlaster to Flash Media Encoder into a custom stream for uStream, where we dominated the front page of the network’s site for two days.
It’s never been so easy to provide high-level event streaming at an extremely low cost to the vendor. The benefit of uStream in this application was a pre-existing audience. uStream’s front page is quite active, and lots of new visitors who have never heard of competitive gaming were exposed to this wonderful event, often described as, “the Olympics of videogames.”