Photo courtesy of Kineda.com"One of the best streams I've ever seen."
- PeterTheBohemian

"[…] The new benchmark in professional tournament streams."
- LuLu SmacKs

“Absolutely godlike.”
- Hoonyo

“Stream is a fucking joke.”
- Splash

After months of planning and a few grey hairs or two later, the iPlayWinner broadcast of the 2009 NorCal Regionals had come and gone in a 72 hour blur of sleepless nights, crazy hype and too much fast food. By the end of the weekend, a little over 20,000 unique visitors watched the likes of John Choi, Ricky Ortiz and Alex Valle do battle with some of the best in the business at the biggest games in our scene, totaling up to 843 days worth of viewing hours. Not too shabby for a couple of kids with some USB cameras.

What was accomplished by the stream team at NCR was two-parts careful planning, one-part creative thinking and just a smidge of dumb luck. The setbacks we encountered were considered trivial compared to the end result and while some can easily be rectified the next time around, some were – much like the internet itself – due to the inherent chaos of doing a live broadcast.

As the technical organizer for the live stream, the one question I’ve gotten more than anything else is, “How did you do it?” First, make no mistakes about it; this was most definitely a community production and by no means a one-man show. If it weren’t for Haunts and his work on iPlayWinner, the audience simply wouldn’t have existed in this capacity. If it weren’t for thxyoutoo and the equipment he brought to the table (not to mention his vibrant, on-air personality), we couldn’t have had such a dynamic broadcast. And if it weren’t for unsung heroes like Crackfiend and PieGuy doing an incredible job of scrambling all around NCR, running the brackets and bringing the matches to our station, we wouldn’t have had anything to stream, either. Also, the fantastic work of our friends at GYT News by supplying us with videos to push live onto the stream went a long way into making the broadcast feel so much more professional, as well as a community effort larger than us all.

Unless you’re a working professional with a dedicated staff and lots of cash to burn on equipment, the act of live streaming a gaming tournament at the level we aimed for becomes all about what makes the fighting game scene so amazing: the community. Without a strong community backbone – players of common interest pulling resources, using their collective knowledge of the scene to make an interesting broadcast – you can only go so far before people see right through you.

Organizing a live stream, however, isn’t actually as complicated as one may think, though making it solid won’t happen overnight. With the launch of Street Fighter IV, I began hosting the San Francisco chapter of the community, affectionately known as Keystone Light. The first live streams we did were as simple (see also: ghetto) as it could possibly get: just a DV cam pointed at a TV, straight to uStream. No titles, no graphics, no nothing. Over the course of roughly two months, this evolved with simple titles, then multiple cameras, followed by the adorable intro and outro videos (as you saw on the NCR broadcast with the sleeping Blanka) created by Miss Shelby until finally, I got Keystone Light up and running with direct-feed footage, multiple camera angles, a commentary booth ala professional sports, the whole nine. None of that, however, would have been made possible without some much-appreciated hardware donations from both friends and respected community members. As you can see, it always comes back to the incredible fighting game community.

Since then, events such as Devastation, West Coast Warzone and of course, EVO 2009, have turned the concept of the live stream from an added bonus to a necessity. If you’re not broadcasting online, you’re not legit in the eyes of the greater community. With this in mind, Haunts and I began planning the NCR broadcast, taking everything we’ve learned from my time running Keystone Light and fusing it with everything we like, and dislike about the modern day fighting game stream. Here are some of the key concepts we had in mind at all times when creating the playbook for our broadcast-

- It wouldn’t be perfect: No matter what you do or how hard you try, we knew our stream would not be perfect and we had to accept that whenever possible. You can never anticipate live events, especially when you’re fully dependent on uncontrollable, yet vital resources like say, bandwith. Also, no matter how well your stream performs, a small chunk of your audience will always claim it’s the worst thing ever and completely unwatchable, even if the majority is claiming that it’s nice and smooth.

- No dead air: The only thing worse than watching laggy Street Fighter is not watching Street Fighter at all. We knew that we weren’t going to be able to have constant, nonstop match footage all weekend, so we made plans to ensure that we always had interviews or videos ready to be pushed live. Fortunately, the awesome folks at GYTNews took this responsibility over for us and knocked it out of the park. Overall, I can recall maybe 10 minutes in over 12 hours worth of streaming where there was dead air, most of which was due to technical difficulties (for example, when Ricky’s controller malfunctioned).

- Commentary is key: Not every tournament can be so fortunate to have Seth Killian ready in the wings and while he’s great for anything Street Fighter, not so much for say, Tekken. For finals, we knew we wanted to line-up actual pros to commentate their respective games. Magus1234 did an absolutely incredible job on the mic throughout the weekend and I think you’ll be hearing a lot more from him in the future. Commentary is of the utmost importance because without these guys keeping it interesting, you might as well be watching replays.

- Be as pro as possible: We didn’t have a lot of money, if any at all to spend, but how could we maintain the illusion of professionalism at all time? This was what I was tasked with and I believe you saw the fruits of this labor in the multiple camera shots, clean overlays and of course, the video work. Truthfully, this is the stuff that I think took the least amount of time but the return on investment was huge in terms of excitement.

All things considered, most everything ran smoothly and according to plan, aside from an early morning crash or two. Even our frantic, late Friday night trip to Frys was according to plan, even if it was down to the wire in terms of timing. The one thing that we could not predict and that no one else could believe once they found out was the hotel bandwith. The most important aspect of our pre-NCR test streams (which were widely advertised both here and on Twitter) was – and I’m sure he’s tired of me harping on this – Haunts’ positively horrific internet connection at home. With a whopping 0.4 mb/s upload, all our tests were performed in what I would consider the worst possible conditions for a live stream. I remember joking that we should opt for a challenge and live stream the NorCal Regionals on a tethered iPhone running on AT&T’s Edge network, but I think we were challenged well enough.

Showing up to the venue, we discovered that not only was our upload to be capped at roughly 1.7 mb/s (and this was after an hour of arguing to get upgraded from 0.7 mb/s), but we were regulated to only wireless internet. While you may get nearly the exact same speeds when operating on wireless compared to an ethernet connection, the wireless signal is always fluctuating and is inconsistent at best, making it very difficult to judge exactly how much bandwith is safe to use. After a Friday night test, we determined what quality would be acceptable and it all worked out, but this was easily the biggest hurdle we had to overcome.

So what did we learn from NorCal Regionals? I think the most obvious lesson learned is to understand your limits. While I felt we were being fairly conservative with what we could realistically pull off, we still found ourselves scaling back at the venue, which explains why we broadcasted only Street Fighter IV on Saturday, despite planning for and setting up all the other games. Also, a confirmed work-flow would be hugely beneficial the next time around, as it became frustrating when important news would slip through the cracks such as how to spell someone’s goofy screen name.

What began as a rinky-dink webcast out of my apartment to dozens of insanely detailed technical flowcharts and finally, a broadcast with an audience 20,000 strong, it’s difficult to feel anything but overwhelming excitement over the final results. A huge thanks goes out to everyone involved (Haunts, thxyoutoo, Crackfiend, Pieguy, NegroNinja, Magus1234 and all of our other commentators), those who helped us out along the way (Kara Leung, Kelly Bracha and all of GYTNews) and of course, the fantastic NorCal Regionals management (John Choi, Joey Cuellar, Albert Carmona, Joe Flores, Terry Ng, Jimmy Nguyen and everyone else). Everything we accomplished could not have been made possible without this incredible group of people, pulling together for the greater good of the community. That’s the most important lesson that could ever be passed on to anyone who wishes to do the same.