It’s just a hobby. It’s just a hobby. It’s just a hobby. It’s just a hobby.
This month, I have run three live streams. They were all for my daughter’s school, so there wasn’t all that much variety in the scenery, but I can’t say they went badly.
As per the tagline of this site, I’m just this guy, you know? I’m an IT guy. I work in with switches, routers, firewalls, servers, air conditioners, battery backups, automatic transfer switches, and generators. So, what business do I have running live streams? I use the word “business” in a figurative sense, of course, since I volunteered to do this. What the hell do I know about videography or live broadcasting? Honestly, not all that much.
I had a huge section of “what the heck is this guy rambling about” written out, but the short version is that, after converting some VHS tapes to digital, I didn’t want videos of my kids’ school sporting events to look terrible in the future, so I grabbed some used mirrorless DSLRs off eBay and B&H. Other families wanted copies of some of the sport videos I shot, so I guess I started being seen as someone who was mildly competent at that sort of thing.
My daughter’s school has its own Youtube channel specifically for live streaming, but it wasn’t really being used that often. Sure, some of the sports were being streamed using some Logitech Mevo stuff, but the guy running the streams was not going to be with the school anymore once his kid graduated. Because I was the guy who seemed to know camera stuff, live streaming was going to come to me. I’ve used OBS before, so one way or another, I was going to use that.
Some of the gear I’ve acquired includes a recording monitor, for which I’ve acquired a broadcast switcher add-on, which was much cheaper than buying a dedicated broadcast switcher. The first stream used three cameras directly connected to the recording monitor and it was … alright. The second stream, though, was probably the most fun one to do, as it used one directly-connected camera and two connected via wireless HDMI — which is actually a thing, and it works shockingly well. That one ran over 9 and a half hours. The stream dropped a single-digit number of frames over its duration, which is nuts. The last one was a single-camera one with text overlays and such.
Thing is, there are actual companies that do this. Anyone can rent a streaming setup and hire some folks to do this all for ’em, but here I am, sitting on a folding chair in front of a table, or on the top row of the bleachers, making it happen. I’m not complaining about it — far from it, as I just got done saying, it was fun. But this is quite literally just a hobby, something I don’t do professionally. There’s obviously a way to monetize it, but is that something I really want to do? My fear is that if I do, it’ll suck all the fun out of it, which leaves … what for fun, exactly? Games? There’s only so much of that I can handle.
So … it’s just a hobby. It’ll remain just a hobby.