EP372: Navigating The Pitfalls: Common Mistakes In Livestreaming Hybrid Events With Howard Zales

Stacy Jones: Welcome to marking mistakes and how to avoid them. I’m Stacey Jones, and I’m so happy to be here with you all today, and I want to give a very warm welcome to Howie Zales.

Stacy Jones: Howie is the president of validity entertainment services where they specialize in delivering professional standard live streams and remote productions for a wide range of clients with over years of experience as a camera operator, Howie has worked on some of the most iconic sports, events and high pressure productions, including super bowls, Olympic games, and wrestlemania.

Stacy Jones: Howie has been at the forefront of delivering broadcast quality, live streams or remote recording, creating seamless and engaging experiences for audiences worldwide. His expertise and dedication have even earned him a prestigious recognition of an Emmy Award

Stacy Jones: Howie’s passion for mentoring the next generation of television sports Freelancers is equally impressive. He’s created the broadcast sports Quote.

Stacy Jones: He has created the broadcast sports course, a proprietary training and mentorship program that helps aspiring technicians kick start successful freelance careers in the industry.

Stacy Jones: Today. Howie and I are going to be chatting about challenges faced when live, streaming, hybrid events. We’ll learn what works from Howie’s perspective, what should be avoided and how some businesses miss the mark. Howie, welcome, so happy to have you here today.

Howie Zales: Hi, Stacey, I’m thrilled to be here. Thank you.

Stacy Jones: of course. Well, I love starting off always with this conversation of what got you here today? Obviously you have a very storied past of a lot of sports broadcasting. But is that what you wanted to do from the time of when you were a little boy?

Howie Zales: I wanted to play professional baseball and I did everything possible to try to

Howie Zales: get to Yankee stadium as a baseball player. I went to, you know, Bucky, dense baseball school in Florida. I went to hitting clinics every Friday in Sunday night in my hometown. I just, you know, baseball. I love baseball.

and then in eleventh grade I needed one more class. So I needed an elective. And the class was one of the choices was a TV production class. In the description

Howie Zales: was a trip to Nbc. Studios and Rockefeller Center and a tour of Nbc studios, and to watch a TV show being taped.

Howie Zales: I’m like, well, how bad could that be? Right? That’s an easy a. And I ended up falling in love with television production.

Stacy Jones: That’s awesome. That’s a nice story.

Stacy Jones: And so you went to college, did you decide to major in television? So I only you know, targeted colleges that had TV production programs.

Howie Zales: I went to a school in upstate New York City, Plattsburgh and the opportunities were endless because I was able to produce direct shoot. Ha! All different sporting events. We produce corporate videos for local clients. That was a class. So I was able to have a wide range of experiences. But I always still knew that sports.

Howie Zales: I wanted to be a sports camera operator was what I wanted to do. I just didn’t know how to get into it.

Stacy Jones: So you’ve been in your industry for about as long as I have both of us a quarter century, and it goes by fast. Has it changed a lot since the days when you got involved, or is it pretty much still the same and just technologies different.

Howie Zales: It’s pretty much the same.

Howie Zales: You know, when I started, it was standard definition. Now, it’s high high definition, and we kind of tested for D. That lasted maybe years K is, you know the new thing, but nothing’s broadcasted in K. And

Howie Zales: you know, in the sports world we really don’t use it too much cause it eats up so much bandwidth.

So yeah, it’s pretty much still the same.

Stacy Jones: And so when you are going and approaching a new event to work with, and you’re putting a plan together. What are the first things that you try to figure out so that you can make sure it’s going to be successful.

Howie Zales: One, we would. The first thing we try to figure out is when we’re putting an event together for a client.

We wanna know what

Howie Zales: what is the Internet like that is our number one challenge in any and every location is, what is the Internet like? What is the Internet like at the time of day that we’re going to be doing the production because it could be different all different times we have to make sure that we have a dedicated pipeline for our show that no one that we’re not going to be sharing with anyone else.

Howie Zales: So that’s our number one fear concern whatever you want to call it that we deal with on every production

Stacy Jones: because the show does not go on. If you can’t actually get eyes on it.

Howie Zales: Correct?

Stacy Jones: So obviously, that’s incredibly important to do. And is that more so? Is so. That’s literally one of the first conversations you’re going to have with whomever is hiring you, or that you’re coming into?

Howie Zales: Yeah. Who’s responsible for? Is it us? Is it? Use the venue? What is the backup? Do we need to provide the backup because there’s always we always push for some sort of Internet backup.

Howie Zales: we produce all of our shows from the cloud. So we’ll produce it locally, we’ll ship it to the cloud and then live, stream it from there.

Howie Zales: So

Howie Zales: if something should happen locally

Howie Zales: or some of our people are working remotely. That’s the reason why we do things in in the cloud. So we can keep a lot of our team working remote

Howie Zales: in those sorts of situations.

Stacy Jones: right? Versus having to have an entire camera room and a crew room where people are on site.

Howie Zales: Yeah, we can literally have our producer, director, main audio person.

all working from home, our teleprompter operator, our green room operator depending on who you know what the client wants. We can keep just about all those people working from their home.

Stacy Jones: And so that means you just need to have your cameraman and someone who’s potentially a host or who’s engaging and interacting. Yeah?

Stacy Jones: And what are some of the other issues that come up sometimes?

Howie Zales: Yeah, some of the other E issues are, you know? What is the lighting like? Do we need to bring in external lighting?

Howie Zales: It all depends on what does the client want for the in person experience to look like, do we need to bring in projections, TV screens

Howie Zales: the led walls? is there enough power in the room to handle all all sorts of those.

Howie Zales: you know, all of those sorts of requests. What’s the graphics like is the client gonna provide us? So the graphics do we have to create the graphics based on the clients color scheme and

Howie Zales: codes? So those are all questions asked. And hopefully, you know the client provides those such things.

Stacy Jones: I bet you have some remarkable stories of things going awry on air, and how you all have had to cover.

Howie Zales: Yes, definitely we during Covid, we’re doing a live stream with Charles Barkley. Magic Johnson

Howie Zales: Jim Nance from Cbs. And all of a sudden Charles Barkley just froze on the air because he accidentally kicked out the Ethernet cable

I saw all of a sudden, there’s Charles Barkley just

Howie Zales: frozen solid, and we’re we’re all looking at the screen from our houses like, why isn’t he moving? Why isn’t he moving? Oh, my God! He’s frozen! So we like took him off the air as quick, quick, quick as possible.

Stacy Jones: Well, hopefully, he wasn’t like me, because all through Covid, my team members

Stacy Jones: got a lot of joy out of capturing me and all of my frozen moments on screen, actually with my mouth open and my face completely askance.

Howie Zales: Yeah, we managed to make make a phone call that to someone that was in the room. And you know we got them back relatively quickly. But it was a it was a panic.

Stacy Jones: That’s awesome. So what are some of the ways that you work with clients besides making sure Internet’s going to be there got the graphics dialed in everyone’s

Stacy Jones: on the same page. What are some of the things that go right or wrong at the event? Beyond that?

Howie Zales: Yeah. W. What can go? Right or wrong we may. We want to make sure that we, you know, we use a very

Howie Zales: complicated production software. And we want our clients to understand the software and what they’re seeing and how it’s working.

So they’re not confused. We break it down as easily as possible. We have an intercom system where we can. The clients can talk to each other. They can talk to us. Our technical team can talk to just each other without the clients. So when they’re not hearing everything we’re saying. So we take them through the entire process of what the production looks like from our standpoint. So they understand they really understand what’s going on. And the most important thing to us

Howie Zales: when we’re doing an event is the rehearsal.

Howie Zales: When, when the client says No to the rehearsal that puts up a big red flag to us, that one they might not care what the production looks like, or you know, it’s just not a priority. But for us the rehearsal

Howie Zales: can possibly save the quality of the production cause. What we

Howie Zales: try to do or what we tell the clients is this is gonna look like a hot mess, like we have no idea what we’re doing. But what we are trying to do is create every possible scenario that can go wrong. So we know how to avoid those situations.

Stacy Jones: and I get it. I’m sure that a lot of your clients like I have , things to do. The last thing I want is this, or it’s an extra expense. They’re not thinking about the fact that

Stacy Jones: run throughs are something that every

Stacy Jones: professional scripted series and a lot of non-scripted actually do themselves

Howie Zales: well. And and here’s a good story about client not wanting to rehearse. We did the live stream announcement of live golf, which is the new Golf League which Greg Norman’s name is associated with, and he was

Howie Zales: therefore the announcement, and he was the one that was kind of leading the charge of the live stream.

Howie Zales: And we we have a clicker that we provide all of the talent that are in our shows that have Powerpoint presentations. And there’s a button on the clicker that tell when they push it. It reflects a light to us that basically says, Advance the slide.

and we begged and begged

Howie Zales: to do a rehearsal with Greg Norman. And the client said, No. Greg said no, the morning of the shoot, so what did he do during the show

Howie Zales: kept clicking this because he was nervous. We were advancing the slide. His person kept coming over to us. They were lost on the script because they didn’t know where that he was. It was a disaster.

Howie Zales: And you know that’s what you get when you don’t rehearse, because if he just would have went through it one time. we want to solve that you know situation

Stacy Jones: right? And then you guys don’t look good. His team doesn’t look good, and he looks horrible.

Stacy Jones: What else happens? Treat them like? What other stories do you have?

Howie Zales: Yeah, just you know anything and everything can possibly go wrong. We always travel with a battery backup unit, because one time we’re in the middle of a show and and someone

Howie Zales: kick the extension cable to our live stream server out of the wall. And that’s like

Howie Zales: losing comp power completely. So we travel with battery backups. Everything’s plugged into the battery backup, and we have min to plug everything back in. So you know just all these different things. We try to anticipate what can go wrong. And we have backups to backups to backups.

Stacy Jones: And yet still people do kick things out like Charles Barkley.

Howie Zales: Right?

Stacy Jones: That’s awesome. And so when? What else is there anything else that happens and goes wrong that you’ve seen?

Howie Zales: No, we we, you know we we try to make sure that you know nothing as much as can go doesn’t go wrong, can go wrong because we try to rehearse as much as possible. We try to come in set up as much as possible.

Howie Zales: In terms of that, we have a lot of meetings prior to the event. I’ll always go and do a site survey of the event space. So when we get there the day of the day before. We always like to do a setup day so when we get there on the setup day we’ll already know where the cameras are going, where all of our tech equipment is going so I always have a plan in place before we get to the location. We don’t have to just start to figure things out.

Stacy Jones: I’m assuming that having an outdoor event that you’re filming is even more complicated than indoors, too.

Howie Zales: Yeah, always because of the weather and the sun. The sun is the

Howie Zales: hardest.

Howie Zales: you know. Thing to predict. Clouds are television persons. Best friend having the clouds protect the sun. Always make life a lot easier for lighting

Stacy Jones: until those clouds bring forth rain.

Howie Zales: Hopefully not. But if you ask any photographer, they they always rather have a cloudy day than a sunny day, except for when the sun is like, you know, the ‘clock magic? Yeah.

Stacy Jones: that makes sense. And so are there any other tips or tricks that at home people should know

Stacy Jones: before they’re engaging. You know, someone to actually produce this event that’s live stream for them.

Howie Zales: Yeah, you. Wanna you know.

Howie Zales: when you do a live stream or a hybrid event of any sort, there’s a lot of technology that’s involved. You want a company or people that do this for a living, to be able that you can rely on to take control of

Howie Zales: all of the tech side of things, so you can rely on, maybe producing the content side of things. And and that’s what we do at verity is we take care of all of the tech that’s associated with producing any type of event.

Stacy Jones: And you asked me this earlier to ask you, and I didn’t even think until just now, when you said it. How did virginity come up? What? What does the name mean?

Howie Zales: Oh, so as as a business owner, I go to Masterminds and I went to a mastermind event, and one of the icebreaker conversations that they had was.

Howie Zales: they said, when you in business and in life react very negatively, very quickly if something goes wrong, right? That’s called being in the Red Zone.

Howie Zales: Conversely, if you act you know, you get super excited when you have a great sale or something goes really, really well, and you quickly act very positively. That’s called being in the blue.

Howie Zales: But if you’re kind of like even keeled, and no matter what the situation is that’s called being in the green, and that kinda that’s my personality. I’m kind of just middle of the road and go with the flow. And so I came home. From that I talked to my wife, and I said, Jen, we need to come up with, you know

Howie Zales: a word that means green, but that it’s not associated with money, because that’s obnoxious. And so we looked through the Sars and we came up. We saw this word viridity. And then I said, well, the es really entertainment services, that kind of flows. And that’s how it kind of came up.

Stacy Jones: Sounds awesome. That’s a creative way to come up with a company name.

Stacy Jones: So one of the things I mentioned as well earlier, and I’d love to dive in more. So you’re actually, you’re very passionate about mentoring other television sports freelancers. And you’ve come up with your own course. So how did you go about doing that. And and

Stacy Jones: for those who are listening who are like, huh! I’d like to come up with a course. There’s a lot to it. It’s not just figuring out what you’re gonna say. It’s been marketing it. It’s actually it’s recording it. Obviously, it’s packaging it. And it’s making sure people see it.

Stacy Jones: So how did it have you approached this?

Howie Zales: Yeah, so. And I made a mistake with with the course by not recording it. And I should have spent the extra money, and had it recorded because that I couldn’t. I could be selling it now.

Howie Zales: and that’s the one thing I did not do. But how I came up with. It is my first business hst productions. We hire sports and entertainment crew

Howie Zales: nationwide for all different sporting sporting shows and concerts and things like that. The age of freelancers is getting older.

Howie Zales: and I saw the need to kinda hire a younger group of people, and I knew that I was mentored as a young person, and even to the day of stop shooting always looked up to people that were older. Because if you stop learning on the job. Then you’re not growing right.

Howie Zales: So I decided that I wanted to come up with a course to teach younger people how to get into the business because it took me a long time to get into the business.

Howie Zales: Because it’s who are the clients. You don’t even know who the clients are and it’s hard to get into the unions. And how do I use the equipment? And there’s no training ground. That’s the biggest problem. There’s no training ground. So II, with the help of some friends and a professional writer, we designed a manual

Howie Zales: from the second, you park your car to the second, you get back into your car what your responsibilities are as a camera operator, as a utility and as an audio person, and we took it a step further as a camera operator. What your responsibilities are

Howie Zales: on, how to shoot baseball, basketball, soccer, hockey, boxing from every camera position in a pretty general sense. It’s all pretty much a formula. Every director may tell, or differently.

Howie Zales: but you know, as long as you have the general

Howie Zales: way to do it down. You’re in a good place.

Howie Zales: and then we we had people come in for day in person. Course, the first day was teaching. You know how how to speak to clients on the phone, how we gave out an email template, how to write an email.

Howie Zales: how to follow up. What’s your appropriate way to say, Thank you for the work.

Howie Zales: And then we. The next day we brought in the equipment that they would be using, and we would, wouldn’t let anyone leave until they were completely familiar with and knew how to use the equipment. So the first day on the job

Howie Zales: wasn’t the first time they were seeing that equipment.

Stacy Jones: That’s as well. And have you? Is this, of course, that you’ve gone ongoing, that you continue to teach, or is it

Howie Zales: we? We’ve done it one time we’re gonna do it again cause we had great success. We had or people in it, and I’ve actually

Howie Zales: hired of those people on an ongoing basis. So it’s been successful.

Stacy Jones: That’s awesome. And I bet the next time that you do it, you’re going to bring in your crew and record it.

Howie Zales: Yes, that was the big mistake.

For not recording it.

Stacy Jones: It happens, I mean, I think all of us do that right like we go in. And we think so much about the thing that we’re doing versus, how do we create tangible marketing assets? Or how do we create actually content? From whatever it was?

Howie Zales: Yeah, I was still concerned, like you said, about what to say. How was how I was. Gonna say, how was I gonna come off? I was so concerned with all that and all the handouts in the book and the equipment that it completely.

Howie Zales: Didn’t even think about recording.

Stacy Jones: Hmm, that’s easy to do. But in hindsight it’s like, I have all this awesome information, and I can share it, plus, you have the resources of actually knowing how to record this stuff.

Howie Zales: Right? Right?

Stacy Jones: So for our listeners at home right now.

Stacy Jones: If they were to move forward with. Wanting to produce a live event. What is their best? First step to do?

Howie Zales: Yeah, the best first steps would be, you know, one ha! Have have have your content contact a company like us to help you produce it. And we walk you through the steps, on, on, on how to do it.

Stacy Jones: Okay, that’s easy enough.

Stacy Jones: And how we if

Stacy Jones: I can’t honestly remember, if I said this or not, so we’ll edit it? If not. But did I ask you for your information of how people could find you?

Howie Zales: Not yet

Stacy Jones: good. So.

Stacy Jones: Angie, as you’re editing this and it out this hard.

Stacy Jones: just completely blipped on that like, oh, dear God! So, Howie! How can we find you for our list? How can our listeners find you if they want to learn more, if they want to engage or ask questions.

Howie Zales: Sure I’m on all social media. But Linkedin at Howie sales Howie Salescom. And then all of our company websites you can get from how we salescom

Howie Zales: and we offer % discount to any companies that do their first event. Live stream with us?

Stacy Jones: Awesome. And

Stacy Jones: any last yeah, on either side of you. And

Howie Zales: if you could put the camera as far as way from you as possible. So you get some depth that’ll help help you look your best.

Stacy Jones: So I think what you just said is incredibly important. It’s something I did not know either. So instead of having a ring like in front of you, you’re saying, put it on either side of you. So it’s washing your view with light.

Howie Zales: Yeah. So my lights are coming from the side

Howie Zales: it’s called cross lighting, and I have a light above me. So it’s lighting my head and my shoulders, which separates me from the background.

Stacy Jones: That is something that I think people fail to do on the regular.

Howie Zales: Yeah.

Stacy Jones: Well, I really appreciate you coming on today, chatting so much about all of the event and hybrids. What can go wrong? Congratulations on your program that you’re going to even more as well.

Howie Zales: Thank you so much.

Stacy Jones: of course, and to all of our listeners. Thank you for tuning into another episode of marking mistakes and how to avoid them. I look forward to chatting with you this next week, and until then, if you have any questions about how you can get your brand to become part of other people’s content through product placement and movies or TV shows or music videos or working with influencers or celebrities. Please reach out to my agency, and we will be happy to chat.

Stacy Jones: and until then have a great one!