Hugo Night

[kevin_standlee]

An amazingly busy evening and night around the Hugo Awards. I really don't have the time or energy to write the full story. I'm pleased at how well the CoverItLive coverage of the ceremony went — over 200 people were in there — but I'm disappointed at how difficult the video live-streaming was. The problem was that we didn't really have any way that I know of to stress-test a broadcast where more than 100 people wanted to watch, as opposed to the 3 or 4 people watching our "test" broadcasts of the Business Meetings. There was no apparent problem with the signal here at the convention centre, which was consistently strong, but every time we got beyond about 40 people watching, the software started complaining and eventually the server would stop responding. I don't know if this is a function of a not-particularly-whiz-bang computer driving the video or what.

While despairing over how the live video would come and go, I could at least look forward to being able to put out the separate recording of the ceremony. Except that somewhere along the line, the Sony shut off recording. I think there must be something about that camera that inists on stopping after a while. I'm probably going to need to deliberately introduce a brief stop-and-start at least once an hour to be safe.

But I'm told I shouldn't be too hard on myself. The ceremony itself went quite smoothly, and I'm very happy with the results. Congratulations to everyone who won, especially Cheryl, who collects her third Hugo Award, this time as one of the editors of Clarkesworld. And I'm also quite happy that Phil & Kaja Foglio were here to collect their Hugo Award for Girl Genius.

Comments

[vixyish.livejournal.com]

Honestly, we were thrilled just to be getting live info from there at *all*! Sitting here in Seattle, it felt like living in the future, chatting with people in California and the East coast and England and being able to find out what was happening in Australia. :)

And the video did work well enough that I got to see that it was really real, I got to see my friend actually up on the stage, and I got to hear her voice actually making an acceptance speech! <3 <3 <3

So, at least in my corner of the world, we're all terribly grateful for everything that you and the other folks did to bring us close to the event. Thank you!

Is there any chance you'll be posting the video that you *do* have, up to the point where it stopped? I'm sure people would be grateful to see what there is. (I know I would be!)

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

I will eventually post the ceremony video to Vimeo. Fortunately, I only ended up losing about a minute or two, but that minute was the announcement of the result of Best Novel. There's a gap between Kim Stanley Robinson reading the nominees and China Miéville giving his acceptance speech.