Last night saw the first of seven weekly transmissions from the TCC Snooker Pro-am. An event that has been running for 10 years at the Tredegar Cons. Club in Newport, Wales.
This years event has attracted Shaun Murphy, Mark Williams, Matthew Stevens and Ryan Day plus a host of other professionals and top level amateurs.
For us it was our second move into live snooker streaming, and obviously it is key with the move to subscriptions imminent, that we provide a good show. From my own point of view I think yesterday went well, the number of live viewers was small but this was due in part to the event being advertised as a paid event. I think the viewers that did watch probably would have paid anyway.
The key ingredient to the success was the mounting of a ceiling camera to give the typical full table shot we see on the BBC and Eurosport. This was quite comical really, we had brackets designed specifically for the job, however, the camera then would not tilt so all we could see was the light rig – a nice light rig, but not quite what people wanted to see.
Rather than actually start drilling into the ceiling of the TCC we made use of the suspended ceiling and using a plank borrowed from my son’s old bed set about creating a mount for the camera, it paid off and gave us the desired result. Although I was sweating it a bit with the camera precariously over the second table, secure though I must add!
The club is quite small and with 80 spectators crammed in we didn’t think there was going to be space for two cameras, but we did manage to add a second angle through the use of a tripod. The natural lighting in the club was perfect and a great nights entertainment was had.
Streaming at 450kbps is a first for us as we are normally stuck with small standard connections but the stream was smooth with no buffering and very little delay thanks to Virgin Media for that one!
Anyway you can watch the videos for yourself later on this weekend over at Cuesport TV and feel free to make a comment or two.
We will be providing live coverage again next week as well so stay tuned.
