The club has a very talented Digital Media man, Matt, who had secured all the necessary equipment to enable us to broadcast both live video and commentary on Facebook live last night but it didn’t happen for two reasons, wise ones I feel.
Firstly, the club had to check the protocols needed to allow us to firstly gain access and then broadcast. They were keen but needed to check what we and they needed to do. There were three areas of the ground last night, colour coded, red, amber and green. Amber was the Wright and Lord above ground, Green the changing rooms and refs room and kit room etc, red was the Berlin Wall. Access was allowed after a temperature test, questionnaire and wristband issued. This allowed us access to one area, amber.
If we were to broadcast live video and comms we would have had to do so from the red area, which meant going into two areas, which wasn’t allowed. Swids was commentating as well as his normal job, stadium announcer, which is a health and safety prerequisite despite no fans being allowed in, so we couldn’t be in two areas anyway as the press deck is where the announcers booth is. Hence we didn’t do video.
Secondly, Facebook live is on the net, the Berlin Wall only has club wi-fi which is notoriously unreliable, so wisely the board decided after trialling, that broadcasting this game on Facebook live and risking it dropping out, buffering and generally ruining it for us all would quite likely put people off from subscribing to IFollow when the season starts.
This despite IFollow having professional cameramen who feed back the action to a studio in London who then feed it to the clubs IFollow account for fans to watch on their devices. So you can see the risks involved and why we didn’t go live other than comms.
A few asked why we didn’t turn the iPad round and let you see, again, we were asked not to do so, mainly as I couldn’t hold it up all game, it doesn’t fit on a tripod, no way of zooming in and out and there is no way of knowing what you are pointing it at, so it would have been as amateurish as our commentary!!
Hope this makes sense, we will be live from Blundell Park for our Carabao Cup game, I think that’s an all pay as it’s a cup game, hope you can all get together in bubbles and watch, text in and enjoy our start to the season?