Dave Ramsey's Town Hall For Hope

Just a couple weeks ago, LifeChurch.tv had an amazing opportunity.  Dave Ramsey, a national speaker on personal finances, put on a National "Town Hall for Hope" event - a chance to speak to the nation and bring hope in these uncertain times.  A couple months ago, Dave put together a sermon series and spoke/recorded that message from the LifeChurch.tv OKC Campus.  He liked the venue so much he wanted to do the Town Hall from there.  Cool, huh?

The entire event went down in just a few short weeks - about 6-7 weeks from "idea/concept" to execution.  The event was on Thursday evening, April 23rd and it was a WILD success!  In fact, it was the largest syndicated webcast/simulcast event EVER.  Yes, E-V-E-R.  What an honor and privilege to be able to play a part.  It was an amazing partnership between the Dave Ramsey, LifeChurch.tv, FOX Business, and Multicast Media teams.  Another unexpected partner in the event was AT&T.  They gave us a FREE 7-day upgrade from our existing 30meg DIA to 100meg for the event.  They knew of the event, and to help make sure bandwidth wasn't an issue, they bumped us to 100meg just for fun.  How cool is that?

Here are a few pictures from the event.  I got a lot of these from Sunny Thomas.  You also need to check out Evan Hamilton's Flickr stream of the THFH event too.

 

Here's the SAT Truck for the event.  This is what Fox Business used to do their national TV broadcast of the event.

 

This is inside the SAT Truck.  I don't know what half of this stuff does but it looks cool.

 

This was very interesting - we used an LED wall for the stage - this is a picture as it was being built.

 

If you WATCHED the event - you'll know there were a couple microphone issues.  As Sunny said, this pic is when Dave went "Office Space" on the mics.  How funny!

 

This is a pic of the LifeChurch.tv Video Suite.  This is where we broadcast from every week - so most of this is "normal" for us.  You can read more about our HD Upgrade - including parts-list and As-built drawings - on the LC.tv Leaderhip Swerve blog. However, on the shelf just above the guy with his hand raised (Is that you Kirk?) you'll see three streaming boxes from Multicast.  The event itself was streamed via WME - Windows Media Encoder.  There were four streams - 500k, 750k, 1.2M and 2.5M.  There also was a Flash H.264 encoder for some "backup" streams incase there were any issues along the way.

 

This was pretty cool.  This was the interactive setup where the THFH audience submitted questions via text message, twitter, youtube, Facebook, etc.  Big props to the Apple Worship Market Team for seeding us a setup of Macbook Airs for the event.  Don't those look sweet?!?!

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to travel back to OKC for the event.  My wife is due with Baby 3.0 anytime now - in fact - as of this writing - BH3 (Baby Hunter 3) is 5 days late.  Flying back to the office was OUT of the question.  So, I spent much of my late-March trip prepping some network stuff.  Then, for the event itself, I was at home playing "Oz" and pulling any levers necessary. I know you're jealous of the heater/laptop stand below :)

 

If you know me, you know that my role with LifeChurch.tv is unique. I am the Senior IT Architect which is a fancy title.  I work to provide a stable, fully integrated voice, video and data network for our multi-state network.  From late 2003 until mid 2006, I worked at the LifeChurch.tv Central Offices in Edmond, Oklahoma as the IT Director.  I left for a couple years, and then re-joined the team last summer (August, 2008).  I live in Kentucky and work out of my home.  My home office, above, is where the magic happens - network engineering, requirements engineering, and researching/implementation of new strategies for storage and virtualization.

 

This is just a fun traffic graph showing the steady event stream (about 10-12megs), then the West Coast Delay upload (from about 2035-2050 Central) and then some testing after that (from about 2100-2120 Central).

Anyway, I have wanted to blog about this for a couple weeks now, but have been proccupied an anxious with the arrival of Baby Hunter 3.0 - and since he/she is being stubborn, I decided to finally take the time to finish it.

What are some cool projects you've worked on recently?  Tell us about them...

Comments

[Kendra Golden]

I really just skimmed through the tech-y stuff to get the baby update! The event was so great to see. Praying for you guys! Really glad we have you on our team.

[DWHunter]

You're funny! Thanks for the prayers. Hopefully BH3 decides to come out and play soon.