Live Streaming a Restaurant Tech Setup Case Study – Split Rail Tavern

This week the StreamGeeks will be helping a local restaurant live stream in the food services industry. The StreamGeeks have teamed up with a local marketing company called Bad Rhino to help their client Split Rail Tavern with a live broadcast to their Facebook page. Split Rail Tavern is a relatively new bar & restaurant in downtown West Chester, Pennsylvania with an active social media presence.

The Tavern has over 1,500 facebook likes and hopes to grow it’s online presence with a live broadcast. The broadcast will review the latest beer and food pairings in an engaging live event. “The fact that restaurants fail at an alarmingly high rate, as 90 to 95 percent in the first year, is actually wrong.” says Paul Richards, Chief Streaming Officer at StreamGeeks. “According to recent studies done by Professor Dr. HG Parsa, 59% of hospitality facilities fail in the period of 3 years.”

The StreamGeeks are leveraging their membership with the West Chester Chamber of Commerce and West Chester Business Improvement District (BID). Both organizations are dedicated to promoting local business success and have expressed interest in live streaming as a viable option to increase business exposure. The West Chester BID has a main goal of increasing business opportunities for the local downtown area with a strategy called Destination Marketing. Live Streaming is an ideal way to get the word out about unique attractions in the downtown area.

As you can see our two camera setup allows us to capture wide angles along with close up angles of the restaurant during the live stream. We were able to broadcast with three cameras, one showing the wide shot, one for closeups showing the mixed drinks and another for beer pouring closeups. We use Broadcast LED panel lights with warm color temperatures to create the ideal setting for the bar.

The PTZOptics cameras used in this broadcast are 3G-SDI and were set to 1080p 30fps. We use these broadcast cameras because they have pan, tilt and zoom capabilities. We used a HuddleCamHD Joystick controller and connected all of the cameras to the PTZOptics Producer Plus Kit. The PTZOptics Producer Plus kit includes a four camera switching and live streaming capability.

Working with small businesses in the restaurant industry can be difficult for multiple reasons. First of all, you can rarely rely on the network being available for IP based video production. For this live stream we actually unable to even get an Ethernet cable connected for direct internet. Luckily, the WiFi available on site was able to give us enough bandwidth to stream a 720p 30fps RTMP signal to our cloud based distribution stream. We used a service called EasyLive to distribute our video from EasyLive to multiple YouTube and Facebook accounts. This allowed us to use a single 720p stream to EasyLive and conserve the available bandwidth to optimize delivery.