BirdDog Mini and NDI® Help Jennifer Bukowsky, Esquire on Fire, Stream Live

BirdDog Mini and NDI® Help Jennifer Bukowsky, Esquire on Fire, Stream Live

By Adam Noyes 0 Comment September 13, 2019 birddog, mini, ndi

Jennifer Bukowsky is an highly accomplished constitutional and criminal defense attorney in Columbia, Mo. She serves on the Missouri Supreme Court’s task force on criminal justice, on the board of directors of the Show-Me Institute, and on the steering committee of the Federalist Society–Jefferson City Lawyers Chapter.

Recently Jennifer embarked on a new adventure, a live political commentary show called “The Jennifer Bukowsky Show,” which is streamed live to social media. To create the right setting for the show, Jennifer knew she needed a complete, multi-camera television studio. Likewise, she knew she needed the assistance of a systems integrator specializing in live streaming solutions.

Enter Stream Dudes.

John Basile & Kris Lang – Stream Dudes

Having over 10-years of streaming content experience, Stream Dudes designs workflows that are cost-effective and easy-to-use. Keeping the needs of the customer in mind, Stream Dudes turned to a NDI workflow for flexibility and future expansion.

Being a brand new studio build⁠—from the ground up—meant NDI was the only choice. NDI is a royalty-free software standard developed by NewTek to enable video-compatible products to communicate, deliver, and receive broadcast quality video in a high quality, low latency manner that is frame-accurate and suitable for switching in a live production environment. NDI® is the most widely adopted and used IP standard in the world, and presents compelling new opportunities for video within practically any workflow or environment.

Stream Dudes then created a complete, standalone gigabit network purely for the video workflow.

“We had the choice, of course, to go with traditional SDI gear but we chose NDI because IP video is the future; plus we saved the client a ton of money and gave them a much more flexible workflow,” said Kris Lang, CEO, Stream Dudes. “Once we chose NDI, the BirdDog Mini was the only way to go to bring the live camera feeds into the NDI ecosystem.”

In order to create the perfect workflow, three BirdDog Mini devices were teamed up with three JVC GY- HM180s, and fed into a Dude PC™ running vMix video streaming software. A second Dude PC, running NewBlue FX, is used to push live graphics into the main vMix machine over NDI, and drive content for the background monitors.

The tally system built into BirdDog Mini was driven automatically by vMix and saved the client from having to purchase an additional tally system.

“The choice to use BirdDog was simple. They led the way with NDI encoding and offered more features per dollar than the competition,” added John Basile, COO, Stream Dudes.

Since the installation, completed November 1, 2018, Ms. Bukowsky has live streamed over 50 hours from her new studio to Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, with some of her shows amassing over 10,000 views.

“I’ve been producing content for years and I’ve never had a more efficient or user-friendly setup than what Stream Dudes has provided,” stated “esquire on fire” herself, Jennifer Bukowsky. “No longer do we have to manage point-to-point connections, the NDI workflow and BirdDog equipment have given us the ability/flexibility to access our cameras & graphics anywhere across our network!”