The National Piping Centre is the international centre of excellence for the Great Highland
Bagpipe and its music. The centre here in Glasgow exists to promote the study of the
music and history of the Highland Bagpipe. The National Piping Centre provides facilities
for pipers and piping fans of the highest quality, a museum of piping, a bagpipe shop,
a restaurant and hotel with conference facilities and an auditorium. There are pipers and piping
fans across Scotland but also across the globe and the team here were keen to think about how
digital developments could enhance the reach and the access and the scale and the legacy
of the work that they do here at the centre. Last year the National Piping Centre developed
online piping lessons which have been popular internationally. The success of that digital
development gave them the confidence and capability to think also about the digitisation of their
live events for a virtual audience. We've come along today to see how tonight's concert's going to
be live streamed over the internet. The National Piping Centre does an awful lot of activity overseas
especially in the North Americas and we know there is a large audience there of pipers, pipe
bands and solo pipers who are eager to see the kind of events that we have here in Scotland.
So through this live streaming of our music events we're able to showcase Scottish traditional music
on a worldwide scale and also able to monetise that and it will help us develop all of our
other activities throughout the centre. We're going to film and stream tonight's performance
from the National Piping Centre with three cameras and just two microphones. We're based in the
ivory room which overlooks the auditorium. The three performers are going to play in the middle
of the hall downstairs and we've got two mics which are on tall mic stands pointing down towards
fiddle, guitar and pipe players and that's then relayed up to here into this mixer. The three
cameras, two of them are in the hall, one of them's on the balcony and we've got three different
positions there and they're then cabled into this. This is an integrated audio and video
vision mixer with the monitors in the lid so we can see what's happening and here we can switch,
we can balance the audio and switch between the cameras and that's then fed into a box which
combines the audio and video into one signal then it goes into our hard disk recorder for backup
and then into a capture device that's attached to the computer where it streams through live streams
encoding software and then out to the world. The streaming crew includes experienced camera
operators who will work to capture the essence of the event for the live stream. As the musicians
warm up and the audience arrives there's just as much busy setup and preparing to go live for the
live streaming crew.
As the live concert gets underway there's simultaneously another production happening
a broadcast being created for the internet.
So I've just come downstairs.
So I've just come downstairs from the concert which is live upstairs. The live stream which I've
just logged into here online is probably running about 10 seconds slower but checking on my iPad
I can see that I'm watching it live with 94 other viewers around Scotland and the globe so
the National Piping Centre here really extending this live event through the digital development
of live streaming. The main benefit that we have using the internet to live stream the events is
that we have a reduced cost and we also have a reduced carbon footprint and we're able to increase
the economic impact and also increase the accessibility to Scottish music worldwide.
Being able to invest in the digital infrastructure and to take the time to experiment with live
streaming has been an opportunity the National Piping Centre's developed with support from
Ambition Scotland. There are a lot of things to think about but it's entirely possible to
stream an event from almost any location with the right resources and planning.
