Streaming Live With Scott Guthrie, Jeff Atwood and Twitter

Once again for Mix, my team worked on what we call the live experience. Since PDC 2003, we’ve been working on ways for the folks at home and those attending in person can make a connection to the event.

With this work we’ve streamed the keynotes live, published breakout sessions for on demand viewing, filmed behind the scenes videos for Channel 9 along with some humorous ones and even overlaid Tweets tagged #MIX09 on top of the live keynote player on the web site and on the big screens in the keynote halll via our Flotzam screen saver.

At each event from Mix to PDC we’ve refined this experience and inch by inch it improves. Turns out some people are starting to notice too as Oliver Marks at ZDNet wrote a nice piece on the all up Mix Online experience.

We’re always trying to do new things too, one example is that this year we added a segment called #ASKTheGu where I moderated a live interview Scott Guthrie and Jeff Atwood with questions coming in live via Twitter tagged with #ASKTheGu.

We cleared out the keynote hall for this and opened up just for those watching on the Internet stream. We wanted to do something just for the home audience and try and bring the hallway conversations which we all find so valuable to those at watching online.

I’ve done a fair amount of interviews and videos over the years, but this was a nerve racking experience and my heart raced both leading up to and during the segment.

What if no one asks questions?
Will anyone tune in?
Can we keep up with the flow?
What if I lose my Internet connection on stage?

To see how it turned, you can watch the on demand video. (permanent page coming soon). We ended up having no shortage of questions, the Internet connection survived and I am not sure it showed how nervous I truly was.

Thanks Tim Harris, Thomas Lewis and Tiffany Leinassar for the work to make this real and of course Scott and Jeff for taking a chance on this experiment.

We will do this again and hopefully won’t wait until PDC to do so. Thanks everyone who attended Mix Online and in Vegas too.