North Metro Television Takes LiveShot To The Game

Community access is all about local engagement, and North Metro Television in Blaine, Minnesota is no exception. With two stations – one for covering local news, events and sports, and one for airing locally produced content – North Metro is a dedicated stream to what’s fresh and exciting in Blaine and the surrounding areas. But how can a station engage an audience with delayed programming?

That’s exactly the challenge that Matt Waldron, North Metro’s sports production director, faced.

North Metro covers local high school sports games, which are popular with the community and draw a large audience. However, due to equipment restraints, Waldron and his team were limited to recording sports games and playing them after the fact, sometimes up to two or three hours later. Potential audiences frequently already knew scores and game outcomes by the time North Metro could air the footage.

“We knew we needed to provide our audience with live coverage,” Waldron said. “With sports, especially, if you already know what happens, there’s no reason to watch.”

“We needed a solution that would allow us to stream live from any location we needed it to, while providing consistently high picture quality at a very low delay.”

Waldron knew he wanted to invest in bonded cellular technology. But it took him a year of searching and testing bonded cellular products before he settled on LiveShot. “I was initially impressed by the high quality visuals,” he said, “but the low delay impressed me the most as we continued to use the product – over an AT&T network, using an antenna, we can usually expect about a half second of delay.”

“That’s as live as it gets,” said Waldron.

In addition to being able to broadcast sports games live, North Metro Television has also been able to plan programming that they had never before thought possible. “We used it for our November 2014 election coverage,” said Waldron, and instead of recording their coverage and playing it back a few hours later with a tape delay, North Metro’s news team was able to get out into the field live for the first time.

“The built-in IFB was very useful for that [event],” said Waldron. “I could communicate from the studio directly with the cameraman and the talent in the field, without a cellphone or any other additional hardware.”

This summer, North Metro Television is planning to introduce new live programming to their schedule. “We’re going to broadcast important local events that we’ve never been able to cover before,” said Waldron. “Local parades, which are very important to our community and happen often during the summer, are now something we can cover live – this is really exciting for members of our community who can’t necessarily be there to see the event. We’re going to be able to bring the parade to them, in real time.”

“Aside from going HD, being able to put our channel on the air from any location is probably the biggest thing to happen here in quite a while.”

For more information about North Metro Television, visit their website at http://northmetrotv.com/.

To learn more about LiveShot, visit our website or contact us here.