Keepingitreel.tv · Field Runbook 01
What to do in the first 90 seconds, from a guy who spent 15 years keeping live sports on the air.
Print this. Tape it next to your encoder. You won't remember any of it mid-panic, and with this page you don't have to.
Random rebooting destroys the clues and usually makes the outage longer. Find where it broke first. The fix takes 30 seconds once you know which link failed.
Your stream is a chain: camera → encoder → your internet → the platform → viewers. It always breaks at one link. Walk the chain in order:
Cut to anything else: another camera, a slide, a wide shot. Keep the audio up no matter what.
People forgive frozen video for minutes. They forgive silence for about ten seconds. Reseat the cable during a lull, not during the prayer or the game-winning play.
Restart the encoder only. Nothing else.
If you're back within a few minutes, most platforms resume the same stream instead of starting a new one.
Switch to the backup uplink you set up before today, usually a phone hotspot.
No backup? Cut your bitrate in half and reconnect, then set up the hotspot on Monday. This is the most common failure there is, and the cheapest one to have a backup for.
It happens, even to YouTube. Post one message where your people already are: "Platform's down on their end, recording will be up after."
Then breathe. This one was never your fault.
Whoever isn't hands-on tells the room or the chat one sentence: "We know, we're on it, hang tight." Make that slide before you ever need it.
What time, what symptom, what fixed it. Do that three failures in a row and your "random" outages turn into a pattern you can kill for good.
Let's be real, most of the failures I saw in 15 years of live TV were preventable in the ten minutes before the stream started. That pre-flight checklist is what I'm building next. Want it when it's ready? Grab this page and the updates at keepingitreel.tv.
And when this runbook saves your Sunday or your Saturday game, tell me. Those stories are the whole reason I do this.