Keepingitreel.tv · Field Runbook 02
Ten checks, one minute each, starting ten minutes before you go live. From a guy who spent 15 years keeping live sports on the air.
Most stream failures don't happen during the stream. They happen before it, quietly, while nobody's looking. This page is how you look.
Everything on wall power, nothing running on a battery you didn't check. Then the wiggle test: gently push each connector at the camera, the switcher, the encoder. A cable that fails the wiggle test at T-10 is a blessing. The same cable failing during the sermon or the game is Fix A.
Run a speed test from the streaming computer. Your upload should be at least double your bitrate. Under that, lower your bitrate now, on purpose, instead of letting the internet lower it for you mid-stream.
Phone charged, hotspot toggled on once to prove it works, then off and standing by. Doing this at T-8 turns the worst failure into a 60-second fix. Skipping it turns the same failure into your worst day.
Every camera showing a picture where it should. Quick look at focus and exposure. Frame the shot you'll actually open on.
Put on headphones and listen to program audio, the actual output, not just the meters. Meters lie; a meter can bounce while the wrong mic is live. People forgive rough video for minutes. They forgive bad audio for about ten seconds.
Right destination, right stream key, and here's the silent killer: the right event. Streaming perfectly to last week's leftover scheduled event is the most common invisible failure there is. Then turn on local recording, so whatever happens to the internet, you still have the file.
Dashboard open in its own tab. Confirm your event has the right title, right time, and it's set to public, not unlisted, not members-only. Every operator finds out about that one from an angry text.
"We know, we're on it" slide loaded and one click away. Stream-Down Runbook taped where you can see it. One person assigned as the talker if things go wrong. Deciding this now costs nothing. Deciding it live costs the room's trust.
Start the stream two minutes before the event starts. Then pull out your phone, turn off the wifi, and watch your own stream over cellular. That phone is the only thing on your desk telling you the truth: it sees what your audience sees. Wrong audio, frozen frame, wrong event, it catches all of it while there's still time to fix quietly.
Eyes on the bitrate, headphones half-on, shoulders down. You've checked everything that breaks. Now you're not hoping, you're operating.
Thirty seconds, write down anything weird, even if it fixed itself. Weird things that fixed themselves are next month's failures introducing themselves politely.
Print this. Run it out loud with your volunteers until it's boring. Boring is the goal, boring is what "reliable" feels like from the inside.
This is Field Runbook 02. If your stream ever does go down anyway, Runbook 01 covers the first 90 seconds: The Stream-Down Runbook.
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