Spalk Intern Blog, Week 6: Late Night Edition

Spalk
Spalk
Jul 10, 2017 · 5 min read

Alex Porte | July 10, 2017

We did it!

As I write this post, the Spalk team is celebrating the conclusion of the FIBA U19 World Cup. Last Friday, Jacob and I stayed up with the Spalk team all night, and this event was eye-opening from an intern’s standpoint for a number of reasons. Not only did we get a chance to see behind the scenes when Spalk partners with a major event, but we also made our commentary debut.

We were thrilled to partner with FIBA (International Basketball Federation) for this event, and the team operated 24/7 tech support for the duration of the event. Before I take you through the night with Spalk, I have to give a shoutout to the rest of the Spalk team. The event was being held in Cairo, Egypt, which has a 10 hour time difference to New Zealand — this meant lots of late nights and early mornings for all of them!

Here we go:

3:15 pm: Jacob and I arrive at The Icehouse and start queueing up tweets to go out at the tipoff of each game. Since the tournament is in Cairo, we’re preparing for games to go live between 12am and 7am New Zealand time. We also cut some commentary clips from previous games into highlight reels and put them on Facebook to raise awareness of the upcoming games and feature some of our commentators.

5:30 pm: Earlier this week, we found the Paddington Bear, a stuffed bear from the Paddington Bar 4 floors below the office. We kept the bear safe all week, and claimed our reward of a $50 bar tab before the night began!

Nice hat, Paddington Bear!

7:30 pm: Jacob and I got some pizza for dinner and got to talking about what we want to do after school, and it was interesting to see how our time here at Spalk has changed that. If someone had told us 6 months ago that we’d be spending our free time thinking of ways to help some startup in across the world, we wouldn’t have believed them. Fast forward to now, and we’re sitting in Sal’s Pizza obsessing over planning a Spalk trip to Ann Arbor this fall. There’s a fascinating spark of potential that becomes evident from spending time here, and at this point, it seems like there isn’t a goal that’s out of reach.

10:30 pm: I helped test Spalk’s Facebook Live feature by commentating on a SpongeBob episode for a few minutes. Everything sounds good!

11:30 pm: the first live streams are supposed to start soon, beginning with a game between Lithuania and Italy.

11:38 pm: Jacob and I learned that, because tonight is the quarter-finals round of the tournament, the TV rights to some of the games have been bought by various broadcasters around the world. For example, ESPN have bought the US rights — they only have one English language commentary team though!

The Spalk night shift!

12:32 am: The stream is up, and within 10 minutes the commentary is live!

1:00 am: In between games, one of the engineers gives us a quick lesson on how the Internet and live streaming actually works in this context. When the games start again, everyone goes back to monitoring the active games — making sure the streams from YouTube are okay and answering questions via Facebook and Twitter.

2:00 am: I write out a cheat sheet for our commentary of the US vs Germany game by writing out the rosters and player positions on a huge whiteboard. This way, we’ll have a more visual reference board to note while we’re commentating.

Commentary prep!

3:00 am: The support team finds couches around the office to get a few minutes of sleep, while Jacob and I watch the Spain vs Argentina game to make sure everything’s going well. We’re prepared to text them to wake them up in case of a network connectivity problem. Fortunately, everything goes as planned and we can enjoy the thoughtful insight of “Bench Talk with Gerrit” for the rest of the game.

Just keeping an eye on things to make sure the games go smoothly.

4:15 am: The support team wakes up, and they take over monitoring the games as Jacob and I try to get a bit of sleep before we’re on air.

6:30 am: Jacob and I wake up and prepare to go live. FIBA wants us live five minutes after 7, so we’re setting up in a meeting room with Spalk’s microphone and an extra laptop to keep track of stats.

7:05 am: Game time! Jacob and I introduced ourselves and started commentating the game — he chose a more color-commentary angle and I provided more stats and analysis (tried to, at least). Right off the bat, we were watching the game while keeping track of Spalk viewers and Facebook Live viewers. It was crazy to have 300 viewers instantly, and we kept talking as the numbers eventually rose to over 30,000!

I’m happy with how we did, and it was fun to see some Facebook comments roll through. Some rave reviews included “worst reporters ever!” and “stop talking”, but we also got some nice ones: “thanks for this broadcast!” and “well done guys!”. I like to think that the negative reviews came from an anti-Team-USA standpoint instead of an anti-Jacob-and-Alex standpoint.

Our game was the last FIBA game of the night, and we went home to sleep after that. There’s something about putting in late nights like this to get something done — a feeling similar to pulling an all-nighter for a final project — that makes the conclusion or the final product feel more rewarding. Especially for the guys who had this kind of a night many more times than Jacob and I did during this tournament.

Now, after this hectic week of late nights and 24/7 game monitoring, we’re off to celebrate and get back at it!

If you’d like to hear more about my internship with Spalk, please contact me at alex@spalk.co or connect with me on LinkedIn. Additionally, you can find our commentary on www.spalk.co!

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