Lights. Camera.
Broadcast.

Fiber-Capable Booth Kits

We carry 3 fiber-capable booth kits and multiple lengths of fiber cable in the trailer. Cameras and audio can be deployed thousands of feet from the production truck — if we have to park a quarter mile away, the show still goes on.

Remote Production

Talent doesn’t have to be on-site. We’ve run broadcasts with color commentary coming live from a hotel room in another state and our statistician calling in live from Atlanta — fully integrated, broadcast-quality, seamless to the viewer. If they have an internet connection, we can make it work.

Self-Contained Power

Dual Honda generators with 50-amp service mean we don’t need the venue’s electrical infrastructure. Climate-controlled interior keeps crew and equipment operating in Florida heat without compromise.

TigerVision started it all

2012 — Before It Had a Name

The Palmetto High School Booster Club had been paying to put football games on AM radio — around $5,000 a season for airtime on a dying medium. They wanted out. The idea was simple: move it online, cut the cost, and see what happened.

Jordan happened to be looking at buying an ad banner around the football field at the time. Someone on the booster board remembered him being “a bit techy” and figured they’d just ask if he knew how to get the broadcasts off the radio and onto the internet. He wasn’t certain — but he knew who to ask.

Nobody on the team had any prior livestreaming experience. The early thinking was simple: pull off the equivalent of an online phone call. Good enough for audio. Then someone said “what if we hooked up a webcam so you could kind of see the action?” That was all it took.

A little more research and the plan evolved: a $100 Sony Handycam, a Blackmagic Intensity Shuttle over USB3, a laptop, two wired mics, a small soundboard, an aircard for internet, and a basic USTREAM subscription. The whole ask came in around two grand — still less than half what the Boosters had been spending on AM radio. At minimum, it was going to be an audio upgrade.

2012 — We Are Live

We were fortunate enough to retain the original broadcasters, Tim Knopf and Rick Wells. The first broadcast went live and we had every problem you could imagine — but it worked. We had beaten the odds and were genuinely proud of our crappy stream.

Camera placement was dictated by a 25ft HDMI cable running back to the laptop, so flexibility wasn’t exactly our strong suit. Jordan grabbed a webcam from his house and we were showing off our newfound production skills with two whole cameras — one on the game, one on the announcers, who had no idea they were about to be on camera.

We averaged about 4 viewers. It was probably painful to watch. We assume it was our parents and grandparents tuning in — and it was genuinely nice that someone was proud of us.

Around halftime of that first game we discovered that Wirecast had a scoreboard feature. We could show the team names and the current score on screen. No other fancy features. But we were official.

2013–2014 — TigerVision Matures

We outgrew the laptop almost immediately. A proper desktop was requested — a beast of a machine. The downside was that portability went out the window. Special Teams coach Robby Stevenson had the solution: build a TigerVision box. Put it all in one place. His idea was sound. The execution was… ambitious. The result was a 7-foot behemoth containing a full desktop, monitor, soundboard, keyboard, mouse, microphones, and everything else we needed. It was absolutely not lightweight. A second box handled all the camera cabling. We were “portable” the way a refrigerator is portable.

During these years we also cracked the replay problem — in the most TigerVision way possible. We found that if you cast a portion of your desktop to the stream, and since USTREAM had a built-in broadcast delay, you could just open a browser, pull up the “live” (delayed) feed, and capture that on screen. When a play was worth showing again, you’d cut to the browser window and watch the delay play out. Instant replay. Almost. This became what we affectionately call “Tiiiiiiigervision.” It’s less of a technique and more of a feeling. Duct tape and band-aids — but it worked, and nobody complained.

Away games were their own adventure. The box was often too large to fit inside opposing press boxes. We’d show up at 2pm for a 7:30 kickoff, volunteers burning vacation time, haul everything in, get fully set up — and get told at 6pm to move to the other side of the press box. Some schools in Manatee County, with significantly more space than Palmetto, simply weren’t thrilled to have us. We took up more room than the home team’s press crew. How some of those broadcasts actually happened is either a miracle or simply Tiiiiiiigervision. We later noticed that the spots we’d been asked to vacate were often still empty by kickoff.

TigerVision also lost its original voice in 2014. Tim Knopf moved on, but the booth didn’t stay empty for long. Jordan and I had both been quietly lobbying for our dads — Brian Varnadore and Ken Burton, Jr. — to join Rick Wells on the call. It didn’t take much convincing. They were already Palmetto football fans and had both been helping behind the scenes for years. Honestly, it was only a matter of time before they were working it anyway.

2015 — TigerVision Blows Up

That box needed to die in a fiery grave. During the off-season it had no permanent home — when it wasn’t living in the lobby of GarrettRichard, it was sitting in the back of Jordan’s truck, baking in the Florida heat or getting rained on along with all the equipment. Setup at games was slow. We were still fighting for space in press boxes. Something had to change.

The questions started stacking up. How do we speed up setup? How do we guarantee we fit anywhere? How do we grow? The answer to all of them was the same: we needed a trailer. The internal plan started modest — two stations, maybe a third just in case. Then the what-ifs started. What if the press box won’t have us at all? The announcers need to be able to call the game from inside the trailer. What if… what if… After enough of those conversations and a series of well-placed phone calls, ClickingSpree and GarrettRichard made some hefty donations and TigerVision landed a 24-foot toy hauler.

What came next was genuinely intimidating. The interior was bare plywood walls and a sheet metal ceiling. No AC. In Florida. It was more than uncomfortable — it was dangerous to be inside for any real length of time. Robby Stevenson opened up his home for a work day. We built a desk for the announcers (which, by most accounts, looked more like a bar) and a couple of proper computer stations. We insulated everything we could reach, painted the walls, did the floor. Then came a portable AC unit and a Honda inverter generator, both funded out of personal pockets.

We still weren’t ready. A production trailer is useless if your cables only reach 25 feet. The fix was simple and expensive: buy longer cables. We did. None of this was sponsored. None of it was reimbursed. Every person involved was a volunteer who hadn’t made a single penny on the operation — and the time it took was already a real burden. The fact that people kept showing up anyway says everything.

2015 — The Fancy Trailer Era Begins

We didn’t upgrade a single piece of equipment. We just had all of the room. It was huge — opening-scene-from-The Sound of Music huge. All the room. And we had air conditioning, which was — and still is — genuinely better than most press boxes we’d ever worked out of.

This season brought some real donations. Mostly hitting up the same businesses around town, but we were able to get the trailer wrapped — a pretty sick TigerVision logo across the side, plus the logos of our larger sponsors. We didn’t actually improve our setup times, but we finally had a central home base for every game instead of a truck bed and a prayer.

We also acquired a 16-channel audio snake with a 300-foot reach. Sounds great on paper. In practice, the thing weighs an absolute ton and we drew straws at every game over who had to lug it. Nobody ever volunteered twice.

The AC unit was a blessing with an asterisk. It works great — it just needs about a 16-hour head start to actually cool the trailer down. Since the door stays open for most of the three-hour setup window with volunteers constantly going in and out, we’d often have no idea if the unit was even running. By kickoff it was still a sauna. It usually got cold somewhere around the third or fourth quarter. An improvement, for sure. But more was needed.

Our favorite piece of equipment that entire season was a shop fan donated by the ever-reliable Robby Stevenson. We named it “Turbo Blaster.” It was the only thing keeping the air moving in that trailer and it earned every bit of that name.

2015–2016 — TigerVision Baseball?

We were hot stuff in that fancy new trailer. Naturally, we decided we could take on baseball.

Only one problem: we had no graphics package for baseball. The right move would have been to spend $1,500 on proper baseball broadcast software. That would not have been the Tiiiiiiiigervision way. Instead, a custom application was hand-coded in Visual Basic. 1,434 lines of code on the main form alone. It was, genuinely, quite a good app — built by someone who actually knows the sport, which matters more than most people realize.

The app ran a bottom-line ticker much like ESPN, had Twitter integration, a full inning-by-inning scoreboard, going-to and coming-from-break graphics, headshot support, and player stats. The only thing it lacked was animated graphic transitions — and had those been cracked, it would probably still be in use today and quite possibly available for sale. It’s since been open-sourced on GitHub.

Baseball went smoothly. We were legitimately proud of it. We kept it to home games only — the commitment was real and finding volunteers who actually knew how to run the setup was its own challenge. But for a sport we had no business broadcasting with a graphics package we had no business building, it worked.

2016 — TigerVision Receives Outside Help

There was a small mutiny happening over at Manatee High School’s streaming operation. The details are murky, but the short version is that their expert crew was ready to jump ship — a feeling we understood all too well. They wanted to see what life was like on the other side of the bridge. Their leader, Justin Stancil of Stancil Entertainment, was hungry and had a vision: he wanted to transform TigerVision into a full-time product. We welcomed them with open arms. Our volunteer roster nearly doubled overnight, and every one of Justin’s people came in skilled. In fact, a few of them would later be hired by Jordan or myself at our respective day jobs.

The trailer got a complete redesign. The makeshift studio desk that had never once been used for an actual broadcast was torn out, freeing up precious square footage. It didn’t go to waste — the bar was donated to MSTV. A wall went up in the back of the trailer, separating storage from production. It helped the AC work more efficiently, even if it did cost us some room. In its place: two more desks, a sound room, and the biggest TV we could fit mounted to the new wall. The trailer now housed 5 computers, 10 monitors, and a TV. Sound was wired through an old home theater unit pulled from the house. There must have been 10 miles of cable linking everything together inside that production area. We had reached capacity.

It was still TigerVision, though. Chairs were sourced on Craigslist for no more than $10 each. They would break without warning, mid-broadcast, without apology.

With a real crew now in place, the duct-tape era of broadcast software was officially over. Sponsors were called. Actual hardware was purchased. We finally got proper football broadcast software from Graphic Outfitters — the same package ESPN had used at one point. We ran a VMix trial (or two) to get legitimate replay working. All of it was tied together with a Blackmagic ATEM switcher, which changed everything about how we operated.

This was also the first season TigerVision ran actual 30-second commercial breaks and produced proper intro videos. We had grown up.

2017 — Trouble in Paradise

We finally figured out why Manatee had parted ways with their crew. TigerVision couldn’t keep up with the budget Stancil Entertainment required. We parted ways with Justin, and honestly, we weren’t too shaken up about it. We had learned more during that stretch than in any other period, taken careful notes on everything, and felt confident we could deliver a quality broadcast on the same duct-tape-and-band-aids model the whole thing was built on. That was always the point.

We did retain one key piece of the Stancil operation: Christian McClanahan, their lead engineer. Christian would go on to play a significant role in where TigerVision went next. Viewership grew exponentially. For the first time ever, sponsors started coming to us — we weren’t making the calls anymore. That was a milestone nobody said out loud but everyone noticed.

This season also brought the first appearance of the TigerVision fan cam. Crude by any measure — a cheap security camera run directly into the stands at home games — but the crowd loved it. We also made a run at 360° video and VR livestreaming, experimenting with what was a genuinely new space at the time. It just wasn’t in the cards that season and the VR plans were eventually scrapped. We filed it under “ahead of our time” and moved on.

After the season wrapped, we entered TigerVision into the first annual streaming awards hosted by PTZOptics. We placed 2nd in the sports category and 3rd overall. For a volunteer operation running on Craigslist chairs and a shop fan named Turbo Blaster, that meant everything. We knew we were on the right track. We knew we could take first.

2018 — Present — TigerVision to the Future

Fresh off a second-place sports finish at the PTZOptics streaming awards, we knew first place was ours to take. The company behind the awards also ran a weekly show covering the latest in streaming technology. We paid close attention. That’s where we first heard about NDI — a radical, bleeding-edge protocol from NewTek that turned any networked device into a plug-and-play broadcast camera. No more miles of cable. No more running signal over SDI just so a handful of monitors could see a feed.

Our older cameras weren’t compatible and adapters weren’t cheap. Thankfully, we had sponsors. We picked up three NewTek Spark Connects and went all-in on NDI — pre-alpha technology, running live on a high school football broadcast. Because of course we did. The results were immediate: screens appeared in the press box, at concessions, and in the new VIP tent at games. We added a telestrator so talent could draw on replays like John Madden in his prime. The Blackmagic ATEM switcher we’d been so proud of became unnecessary. Thousands of feet of SDI cable were thrown out. Setup time dropped from three hours in brutal Florida heat to about 30 minutes.

In typical TigerVision fashion, the moment we solved the setup time problem we also installed a new overhead AC unit in the trailer. It works spectacularly. It will freeze you out if you’re not paying attention.

We entered the 2018 PTZOptics streaming awards. TigerVision won best stream overall. A volunteer high school football production from Palmetto, Florida — best in the world. Jordan and I were invited by PTZOptics to attend NABShow in Las Vegas, which quickly evolved into an on-stage interview in front of an audience of industry professionals. Completely outside of the comfort zone. Worth every second. Watch the NABShow interview →

Those conversations opened real doors. We built lasting relationships with PTZOptics and with VizRT, the new owners of NewTek and the company behind NDI itself. TigerVision is set to become an industry case study — and is on track to become the very first high school program in the world to implement First and 10 yellow line technology in a live broadcast.

We started with a borrowed webcam, a 25-foot HDMI cable, and four viewers who were probably our parents. We’ve broadcast Friday night football and a .38 Special concert. We’ve had our statistician call in from Atlanta and our color commentator phone in from a hotel room in another state. We’ve won best stream in the world. None of it cost the community a dime — every dollar came from sponsors or out of our own pockets, and every hour came from volunteers who gave up their Friday nights because they believed in something. That’s TigerVision. That’s always been TigerVision.

A Note About the Team

TigerVision is powered by 10–20 volunteers on any given game day. Our crew spans business owners, insurance professionals, tech entrepreneurs, elected officials, government workers, and even a music minister. Every one of them shows up because they believe in what we’re doing.

The operation is funded entirely through sponsorships and out-of-pocket contributions. We are genuinely fortunate to have what we’ve built — none of it was handed to us.

To everyone who has ever volunteered a Friday night, written a check, or just showed up — thank you. This is all because of you.