STARKVILLE — Today, soldiers deployed overseas and Starkville natives living across the country can experience a little piece of home.
The 2011 Starkville Christmas parade, annually recorded by WOBV and aired throughout December, will be streamed live on the Internet for the first time.
First United Methodist Church, which owns and operates WOBV, started streaming their traditional and contemporary church services about a year ago after significant equipment and studio upgrades. In line with the church’s mission of community service, the WOBV crew decided to make the parade a global experience.
“It helps with individuals who don’t live here anymore and still want to see family members and experience home around the holidays,” said Stefan Tribble, head of production at WOBV. “This is our biggest production of the year and a great event for Starkville.”
The parade begins at 6 p.m. and will last about an hour. The parade has more than 85 entries — 20 more than last year — and will be capped by the official lighting of the Starkville Christmas tree in front of the Oktibbeha County courthouse on Main Street.
The parade was previously held on the first Saturday in December, but Starkville Main Street Association — organizers of the event — moved it to Monday so student groups and bands from Mississippi State University could participate.
With more entries and elements in this year’s parade, WOBV has added challenges to its maiden live show.
WOBV has 30 crew members — mostly volunteers — who will work Monday. WOBV has five cameras, including a jib camera crane that will hover overtop the parade. The production also includes parade hosts and a remote production facility at First United on Lampkin Street.
“We’re going to have eight people to run recording and about five people setting up graphics,” said Caryn Dampier, station manager and co-executive producer of the parade. “It’s going to get a little hectic at times.”
Tribble, a 20-year-old broadcasting major at MSU, said the size of the production could create web site issues at the streaming site, parade.wobv5.com. The site usually has 50-60 viewers for church services.
“With the parade being so long and trying to send it out at a higher quality than our church service, it’ll definitely put a strain on the streaming encoder,” Tribble said. “It’ll require more network feed, and hopefully the number of people won’t crash the site or cause the stream to stall. It’s definitely kind of a test this year to see how it will work in the future. We’ll have an engineer here to make sure there are no errors.”
WOBV, known more for replaying Board of Aldermen meetings and church services, took a major step forward two years ago when it installed a dedicated fiber optic line from the station to cable provider Metrocast Communications. The line significantly upgraded WOBV’s picture quality and opened the door for future community-oriented productions. WOBV upgraded its in-house set and and purchased a new automation system that allow for more fluid transition between ads and content. WOBV also hopes to record and broadcast Starkville High School and Starkville Academy sports games in the future.
“A couple of years ago, this kind of production — the quality and live-streaming aspect of it — was inconceivable,” said Dampier. “We keep trying to tell businesses that this is a great opportunity for them because all of this will go on TV and on the internet.
“We had this local channel for a long time but didn’t realize what we had going. We’re starting to realize our potential.”
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