I’ve broadcast most of these community lava meetings live from Pahoa via Ustream and our website at http://www.hawaii247.com/live/
It’s a juggling act of equipment and resources to do this live broadcast. The main problem is getting an Internet connection to send out a live video stream. The school’s network is no-good as it’s firewalled preventing video from going out. Cellphone signals in the cafeteria are terrible. AT&T barely works, Verizon can be spotty and T-Mobile is impossible to send data out.
If you zoom in to 100 percent on the photo and look to the left of the presentation screen you’ll see my Hotspot hanging on the window. It has a medium strength signal and I can’t roam far from it or the WiFi signal will be too weak. Anyway, that’s the Internet connection.
As for the camera rig, an iPhone or iPodTouch in a BeastGrip mount, Rode VideoMic with TRS to TRRS for audio, a battery pack to give the device full power and a video tripod for smooth pans/tilts.
Again, it’s a mess of gear but it’s the simplest I could make things to assure success for the broadcast. I have to laugh at folks who claim they can do better as they have no idea what it takes and what parameters I have to work in. Yeah, you can do live broadcasts from there like how the Oahu TV stations do it. Just buy a videocamera with SDI out, a $60K LiveView backpack and server and enough cable to leave the backpack outside to gather the cell signals while being indoors shooting. Then feed the server’s video to your streaming server.
Not the highest quality video but good enough, especially when nobody else is doing it. You can view the meeting here: http://www.hawaii247.com/?p=100621