Let's return, now, to the "no finals on the main stage" issue. What our tech guys learned on the morning of Day 3 regarding the finals and the proposed solution to pipe a feed to the ballroom was that no one had a clue how this was going to be done and no one had prepared for it to be done. It fell to us to figure something out.

More specifically, it fell to Alex "Scimech" Kennedy, our tech guru # 2, or as I like to refer to him, “the guy who saved QuakeCon 2010.” Imagine being tasked with a way to get our stream and the two projected "player POV" feeds from the tournament stage to a ballroom across the hotel. Imagine doing so with little-to-no extra equipment. Now imagine being asked to do this in about 3 hours. Yeah... exactly.

His solution was impressive and relied on a lot of moving parts to fall into place perfectly. Because of this enormous issue and our unanimous agreement that QuakeCon MUST have the finals available to the every attendee at the finals party, every staff member who wasn't immediately tasked with broadcasting was pulled from doing other things to assist. Again, our "supplemental" content got the shaft, but there would be Quake, god damn it! Amazingly, the only missing pieces a few hours later were a DV cable and a live network drop between our streaming setup and the ballroom. Keep in mind, we had no way to test this “solution”... it was all theory being dumped into practice.

We eventually got the line connecting the two places, but due to the “loop” problem still plaguing the network, it ultimately wasn’t usable. As a last-ditch effort, we scrounged an Internet connection from the ballroom itself and we literally just tuned into the HQ version of the stream from there. It was hardly ideal, but the attendees got their Quake.

Bring Your Own.. 'Casting Setup?