During unprecedented times, it can be easy to lose sight of the important matters at hand that still demand attention. Or, indeed, those that ought to be celebrated. BCC Live had the amazing opportunity last week to help Environment for the Americas, an organization aimed at connecting diverse people to birds and nature through education and conservation efforts.

The annual World Migratory Bird Day has existed since 1993 and coordinated by Environment for the Americas (EFTA) since 2007. Despite the ongoing human-based issue of COVID-19, the needs of migratory birds, and indeed all animals, still fly by in need of conservation through widespread celebration and education.

Although EFTA is a Boulder, CO-based, non-profit organization, their reach touches all corners of the earth through their efforts. This was made abundantly clear by this celebration event which lasted over the course of three full days from October 8th through October 10th. There were nearly 100 presentations or events (including a beautiful baile folklórico performance and a number of other art projects!), hosted by well over 100 different people speaking from all over the American continents. The majority of these presentations were originally done in Spanish with a few in English and Portuguese as well.

BCC Live was able to help this world-wide celebration come to life by creating a Virtual Festival for audiences anywhere in the world to attend. While presenters and moderators spoke in an online conference platform, we were able to take the feed of the conference and “simulcast” the broadcast live to a number of different pages and platforms simultaneously. This included their Facebook page, the Facebook pages of a number of different partners, and YouTube.

As an added bonus, many of the keynote presentations had demand from both Spanish and English audiences. We were able to send a feed of the live presentation to a professional translator (stationed in Mexico), who overdubbed translated audio in real-time to separate live stream events held on the same collection of multiple end-platforms.

The technology worked like a charm, especially given the fact that our team simultaneously broadcasted the week-long celebration series for the IRONMAN World Championship, generally held every year in Kailua-Kona, Hawai’i out of the same studio.

The event was a major success and was a blast to be a part of (not to mention a great practice opportunity for learning and listening to the Spanish language 😉). We learned lots about birds and made some new great friends in the process. We hope to be a part of the events in the future, so until then…

¡Hasta el próximo año!

#WeCanLiveStreamAnything #WMBD2020