Hi everyone,

I'm 29 years old and based in New York City. For the past 10 years I've worked in the production industry as a producer, director, cinematographer, and editor. My background includes documentaries, branded content, live events, sports, and commercial productions. I also have a Bachelor's degree in Communications and I'm bilingual in English and Spanish.

Lately, I've become really interested in the technical side of broadcasting. I want to transition into Broadcast Engineering, IP video, live production systems, and technologies like SMPTE ST 2110, NDI, Dante, routing, networking, and control room operations.

I'm not looking for the fastest shortcut—I'm looking for the right path. Whether that's an apprenticeship, trainee program, entry-level engineering position, or a structured training program, I'm ready to put in the work and start from the ground up.

Since I already have a strong production background, I'm hoping to combine my creative experience with technical engineering skills and build a long-term career in live broadcast.

If anyone here works in the industry, I'd really appreciate your advice:

• What would you do if you were starting today?
• Are there any apprenticeship or trainee programs in or around NYC you'd recommend?
• Are there companies that hire people with production experience who want to move into engineering?
• Any certifications or organizations that are truly worth the investment?

Thanks in advance. I really appreciate any guidance or connections you can share. I'm excited to learn and build a career in this field.

Hey folks 👋 I put together a lightweight tool for the "is the stream slipping, and where?" question without deploying anything – https://pulse.beon.live . Paste a live URL and it reads live-edge latency, rebuffering risk and ladder integrity, and can play it in-browser to show what a viewer actually gets.

Free, no signup. It's still rough in spots and I'm actively working on it, so I'd really value input from people running live plants — what metrics or alarms actually matter to you day-to-day, and where this would fall short. Thanks for any thoughts 🙏

Heya there everyone,
I am planning a very low-power, micro-FM setup for a hyper-local solo project. My absolute top priority is maintaining 100% compliance with FCC Part 15 regulations for intentional radiators in the broadcast band (strictly staying within the 250 microvolts/meter at 3 meters limit).
Because I want to completely avoid any accidental "pirate" territory or interference with licensed broadcasters, I am looking for advice on the engineering side of things:

1. Measurement Tools: What is the most reliable, budget-friendly way to measure field strength or signal drop-off at the 3-meter mark to verify compliance? Would a basic SDR (Software Defined Radio) setup suffice for relative measurements, or do I absolutely need a calibrated field strength meter?

2. Harmonics & Filtering: For tiny, low-power dongles/transmitters, what kind of basic low-pass filtering should I look into to ensure I'm not throwing off spurious emissions or harmonics into adjacent bands?

3. Antenna Setup: What are the best practices for keeping the signal strictly contained within a small indoor radius?
I want to make sure my engineering is sound and entirely legal before anything is plugged in.

Any advice on the technical measurement side to guarantee compliance would be very greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

Yesterday I used NxFrame as the second backup feed for a live production. The encoder ran continuously for 5½ hours.

Test setup
Input: 1080i50 SDI
Video: H.264 High 4:2:2 10-bit @ 24.5 Mbps
Audio: 4 AAC channels @ 192 kbps each
Transport: SRT over WAN
Receiver: MediaKind RX1
MPEG-TS: Constant 30 Mbps muxrate with null packet stuffing enabled
The video and audio quality remained excellent throughout the test, with no issues observed.

SRT statistics
Duration: 5½ hours
Data transmitted: ~69.6 GB
SRT packets sent: 52,859,316
Retransmitted packets: 129,362 (0.245%)
Lost packets: 0
Dropped packets: 0
This is a major milestone for the project, as it successfully interoperated with a professional broadcast IRD.
The next step is testing with Haivision Makito and Ateme receivers.

GitHub: https://github.com/Michalis-Michael/nxframe

Feedback, testing, and contributions are always welcome.

Full disclosure: I write about this on my own newsletter (in Italian, so the link below is more of a bonus than the point) — but I think the underlying question holds up on its own.

Bayerischer Rundfunk just finished rebuilding their radio OB van (Ü5) around a fully software-defined, SMPTE ST 2110 architecture: Lawo mc²56 MkIII console, but the DSP itself now runs on a standard CPU server via the HOME mc² DSP App instead of dedicated processing hardware. IP stageboxes, MADI/Dante with sample-rate conversion, up to 192 channels of recording.

Planning started in 2022. It only entered service this year — about four years for a truck refit, which is a strange amount of time if you buy the "software-defined = fast and agile" pitch. And they didn't debut it on live sport: chamber music first, then an opera where the actual mix stayed in the house's fixed control room and the truck just handled transmission, only later moving into sports coverage.

That sequencing is the part that stuck with me. On an analog board, a blown channel is a local failure — you route around it. On an architecture like this, if the fault lands in the wrong spot, the whole signal path can go down at once, not just one input. So the real question isn't hardware vs. software, it's whether your redundancy plan actually matches how much you've concentrated onto one box.

Curious how people running IP-based OB trucks handle redundancy in practice — dual servers, hot standby DSP, something else? Article (Italian) here if useful:

[Bayerischer Rundfunk: la regia mobile senza console dedicata]

(https://open.substack.com/pub/grazianomelzi/p/bayerischer-rundfunk-ue5-software-defined)

Hey guys,
I‘m curious how other OB truck companies, live production companies and freelancers generate new work these days.
I’m not selling anything—just interested in learning how the industry is changing.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on a few questions:

Where do most of your jobs come from today?

What makes a client choose one broadcast supplier over another?

Has your website or social media ever generated real business?

What’s the biggest marketing mistake you see broadcast companies make?

If you could give one piece of advice to a small broadcast company looking to grow, what would it be?

If you’re responsible for hiring an OB truck or live production company…
What are the top three things that make you choose one supplier over another?

Thanks! I’d really appreciate hearing about your experiences, whether you’re a freelancer, engineer, production manager or run a company

Y’all are working hard tonight.

Taking two weeks off and I just simply refuse to write "I am currently out of office with limited access to email." Hell, if the place burns, it burns.

This ronin is currently stuck between "Signal lost" and "This is the dead air you were warned about. Normal transmission resumes on August 3."

Any of you got some epic automatic replies to share?
Preferably one that can also confuse someone in management, if that's not too much to ask.

I was right in the middle of a passion project when my Sony DXC M3a died on me....I am struggling trying to find someone that could repair it. I also have a Sony edc 50 that needs some love. Any leads would be so deeply appreciated. Thank you!

I'm a developer and I've worked on diagramming tools that ended up used in the broadcast and AV integration space. Recently I built a small AV schematic editor and we open-sourced it, so I figured I'd share it here in case someone finds it convenient.

It's a simple browser tool: a device library you drag from, devices with typed ports, cables you connect and route by hand (orthogonal routing with draggable bends), and PNG and DXF export. Under the hood the schematic is a data model rather than a picture, so devices, ports and connections are structured data in the file, not just lines. No validation or anything sophisticated on top of that yet, but it makes the file easy to build on.

It's free, MIT licensed, no signup. If you're a developer, the whole source is there to fork and adapt to your own workflow.

If you try it on one of your layouts, I'd like to hear whether it's usable for real work and what's missing.

Disclosure: I'm a developer at the company that builds ngDiagram, the open source library this runs on.

Demo: https://www.ngdiagram.dev/templates/av/
Code: https://github.com/synergycodes/ng-diagram-av-schematic

Does anyone know of a manufacturer that makes a SDI keyer card that would go in an OpenGear frame that supports animation? i.e. a bug that would flip every 30 seconds vs a static bug. So far everything I'm finding is static keys only. I don't really want to dedicate a graphics engine just for a bug on a streaming encoder. Thanks!

I am attempting to run three microphones into this Soundcraft Mini Stagebox 32, controlling it through this Tascam Sonicview 24 mixer. I am receiving zero output. No bounce on the mixer whatsoever. Everything is powered. I just used these cables elsewhere this morning and everything was golden. On the Soundcraft input I tried both rows A and C. I'm new to this and at a loss on where else I should or can troubleshoot.

Ideally the mics should be outputting through the speakers in the truck, but if I can just get levels in the board I'll consider that a win today. Are Soundcraft and Tascamn Sonicview incompatible? We replaced our previous Soundcraft board with the Sonicview. This is the first time running the two together. Couldn't find clear answers online.

Ive been out of the business for nearly 30 years. All of my archives are held on 3/4-Inch, Beta, Beta SP, M2 and D2. Not including a few VHS tapes.

I'm sure this question has been asked a hundred times but can anyone point me into the direction of a company that does transfers?

P.S. I feel like one of the guys who came to me to transfer news film and 1 inch tape. I'm an Old Man now, I guess.

I have some niche live stream gear I'm trying to sell. I've had no luck on Ebay, and many of the notable used gear websites don't have it listed in their dropdown menus for items they sell. B&H gave me an absolute lowball offer.

Any recommended Reddit subreddits that allow sales where I could more easily communicate with potential buyers?

Make your favorite TD happy. Check it out here.