We knew this year, with enough planning time and an equipment budget, we could take QuakeCon coverage to the highest level ever. I think we delivered, and I'm extremely proud of what the QLTV crew put together.

Months of planning went on within the QLTV group. We examined last year's problems and figured out ways to sidestep them.

Obviously, HD capture cards and HDMI output would replace the crappy S-video video capture from 2010. That would fix the horrible visual quality issues.

Slava also worked out a way to offload the vision mixing of the production and the video encoding/streaming portion to two machines so that one computer wouldn't have to struggle to do both of these intensive tasks. This would ensure our framerate stayed solid throughout as last year's machines were maxed out on the CPU and FPS is the first thing to choke in those cases.

Last year, we had to factor VOD recording into our lineup after learning on-site the streaming service didn't include this option. This year, we got to have a say in the streaming provider, which ensured server-side VODs would be made throughout the event.

We heard from id/Bethesda that AT&T was going to be supplying a huge pipe of bandwidth for the event and we wouldn't have to worry about the hotel's network interfering with our stream. We also knew in advance that Quake Live would be purely LAN at QuakeCon, so the likelihood of running into last year's tournament network woes was minimal.

And finally, we worked out a communication pipeline with the tournament admins so that we would know and be able to announce in advance on stream, over twitter and elsewhere when matches were going to happen and could therefore avoid the infamous "spinning logo."

These fixes addressed the main complaints we heard from last year.

The People Behind the Scenes