Business Member and Board Member Sinclair Anderson of Acumen Inc (a Los Angeles based premiere location service) recently live streamed this year’s AFCI Trade Show including the LMGA panel discussion. Sinclair shares his journey into live-streaming.
The webcasting business model for Acumen started not as a business venture at all but as a personal project that I was working on for a close friend of mine whose 10 year old daughter is fighting brain cancer for the 3rd time. She has an enormous following around the country due to her faith and her fight – beating the odds well beyond any medical explanation.
Shortly thereafter, however, there had been a few different live streaming opportunities that that popped up and since I had the gear, I produced them which got my gears moving a little bit. In light of our changing environment from a location filming standpoint, I’ve been seeking ways to diversify my business so that I didn’t have to rely fully on location filming as my sole source of revenue.
Just a few weeks before the 2015 AFCI Locations Show, I contacted AFCI to suggest that we stream their seminars as a way to get the content to AFCI members who could not attend the show. It would also give Acumen an opportunity to stretch our wings a little bit by running a live multi-camera production – meanwhile demonstrating our capabilities.
We webcasted one seminar on each of the three days of the AFCI show, one of which was the LMGA Awards Nominees panel. Each was a success, but our methodologies continue to improve with each webcast.
My primary camera is a Canon XA10 with a wide converter. AFCI also had a single Panasonic camera with a fixed position in another part of the room to feed to an overflow room. I connected to that camera as well to add a 3rd camera angle.
I currently used LiveStream as my outlet and also use much of their software and hardware. LiveStream Studio is a decent multi-camera live production switcher which will stream to other services (i.e. YouTube Live, etc.) should I choose to do so in the future.
I’m in talks with AFCI as well as several other organizations and companies about streaming various events (many entertainment industry related, but other industries as well) from around the globe.
