I don’t want to name the event, or the organization or the people involved - partly because I’m a huge fucking pussy, but mostly because I want to be hired to replace these goobers next year, and naming and shaming people you want to give you money is generally counter-productive.
But I have to vent.
There is a music festival happening, and this organization is handling a tiny portion of it. A company was hired to webcast a portion of the festival. Not a huge portion, but just the part this organization is producing.
And it has been, without a doubt and in every way possible, a gigantic cluster-fuck. Wait, I take that back. I’ve seen cluster-fucks, and they looked a lot more enjoyable for both the participants and the observers.
In this scenario, here are the players:
[ol]
[li]The company[/li][li]The social media promotion people[/li][li]The webcasters[/li][/ol]
The company looks, from everything I’ve seen, to be producing the actual event well. The still photos look fine, and the company representatives have been interviewed and came across reasonably well when interviewed.
The social media promotion people looks like they have done a decent job with the graphics and the promotional part. But that is the least important part of a webcast. They are doing a great job of promoting a mess.
The webcasters really screwed the pooch, and are the ones who deserve the biggest share of my scorn.
First off, the camera is not just another fucking piece of gear, the camera is the heart of the operation! If you don’t have good cameras and good camera work, you don’t have anything to webcast! If you’re just going to set up the camera and do a talking heads style interview, turn off the damn autofocus! During one of the interminable interviews, the camera kept jumping out of focus.
Oh yeah, the interviews. A handful of the interviews were reasonably entertaining, but this was a music festival. There was almost no music. OK, wait, there was some music but none from the festival! The only music was provided by some of the social media promotion companies other clients - who were an entirely different genre. It was like tuning in to see Ozzy and getting the Osmonds.
Why was there no music from the Festival? Two possibilities:
[ol]
[li]They were using Google+[/li][li]They are utter incompetents[/li][li]Both[/li][/ol]
OK, with #1 - I’ve webcast a few concerts in my day. And the one thing I’ve found is that Google+/YouTube Hangouts on Air use the same Content ID system. I usually use UStream, but one concert, I tried to use Hangouts on Air. As soon as the Content ID system recognized a song, it did exactly what it says it will do in their Terms of Service, carefully spelled out in their FAQ:
Content ID scans all live streams and Hangouts on Air for third party content. When Content ID identifies third party content, it may terminate your live broadcast. Live streams and Hangouts on Air can also be terminated if they receive a copyright strike or a Community Guidelines strike.
What this means is, as soon as it is able to identify a song it cuts your ass off. YouTube sends an e-mail to the account. You can restart it, but as soon as it gets to another song it recognizes, it drops you again. On the third strike, your channel is banned:
Before your live broadcast is terminated, you will be warned to stop broadcasting the third-party content our system has identified. If you comply with this warning, your broadcast will be allowed to continue. If you do not, it will be terminated and you may lose access to this feature.
If Content ID terminates three of your live broadcasts within a six-month period, you will lose access to live streaming and Hangouts on Air for six months. You can check the number of live broadcasts blocked by Content ID in your Live Events.
“Content”, in this case, is any song that has been submitted to YouTube by a record company. Now if you have uploaded a song to YouTube, it IDs the owner of the copyrighted song, allows you to click a button that says “Yes, dumbass, I know it’s a copyrighted song. That’s why I covered it.” YouTube puts an ad for the original song next to your cover so someone can purchase it from the Google Play store, everybody happy (unless the copyright owner is Led Zeppelin or Prince). It is possible that they weren’t cut off by the Content ID system, but it rather famously can identify songs playing on the radio in the background of a parents cell phone video of their toddler dancing around. Or even the White House, who got cut off during their first Hangout on Air.
#2 - Incompetence. The webcasting company apparently was trying to use the festival wifi! Yeah, that will work, right up to the point when anyone else tries to use it. Google it’s self wasn’t able to provide decent wi-fi at their recent developer conference! If you can’t afford to get your own damn data line brought in, you rent a bonded cellular system! They link multiple cell phones, from different companies, into one data link.
So the webcast, which one might assume would have, you know, music, instead featured nothing but talking heads. And they couldn’t even pull that off! When they did have an interview, it was like the damn camera was mounted on a stick and had no pan head. The heads of people being interviewed were all in the bottom third of the screen with nothing but an excellent view of the rest of the empty room! I just watched their last interview. It featured three people and two microphones. Two of them were with the organization. But the third? This pinhead claims to be someone who teaches “communication” at some benighted college. She never noticed that she was holding one of the two microphones during the entire interview and never passed it over to the third person! I sure wouldn’t want to be learning how to communicate from her. To make it more annoying, she was wearing Google Glass! A Glasshole who isn’t even monitoring her Google+ comments live? I need to check Rate My Teacher to see what her students think of her.
