GigCasters · Travis Bonnet

About the work

Engineering the broadcast when the
world stopped going outside.

GigCasters is an Austin-based digital video technology and engineering services firm. They run managed live streaming and video-on-demand for content producers: their own platform stack (Hydra for acquisition, Iris for distribution, Flight Deck for content management), plus broadcast engineering services for clients who need a tier-one livestream and don't want to build the chain themselves.

I joined as a Technical Director in July 2020, four months into the global shutdown. Conferences had stopped happening. Concerts had stopped happening. Product launches had nowhere to launch except a livestream. The pivot wasn't subtle. Inside two years, I helped technical-direct a global product launch, a livestream concert series, a culinary livestream, a motorsports series, and several headline DJ sets. All of it ran live. The mistakes you can fix in editing are the ones you can't fix on air.

The discipline transfers. Live broadcast and AI infrastructure run on the same shape: many fragile sources, one output, on the clock. I treat both the same way.

The marquee

Samsung Galaxy Unpacked, Part 2.

October 20, 2021. Galaxy Z Fold3 and Z Flip3 reveal. The launch went out live across YouTube, Samsung's owned channels, and a Korean social platform with localized subtitles and its own playback infrastructure that we couldn't see, only feed. Multiple broadcast partners contributing to a single output, then a quick-turn VOD pipeline so the audience that missed the live stream caught up the same day. My role: Technical Director on the streaming side. Failure mode: the launch goes dark or stutters, and the news cycle stops being about the new phones and starts being about the broken stream.

Multi-path simulcast

Combined feeds from co-broadcast partners into a single output, then split that output across YouTube, Samsung's owned properties, and the Korean platform's custom playback chain. The stream that goes out has to be the only one you see; everything that fed it, and everywhere it landed, has to disappear into one experience.

Redundant encoding

Multiple encode paths running in parallel. If a primary path drops mid-show, a backup catches it without the audience seeing the seam. A tier-one launch can't have dead air. It can't have a stutter. The failover is the part nobody notices when it's working.

End-to-end testing

Walked the full chain before the show. Every camera, every audio path, every encode, every distribution endpoint, the Korean localization split, the VOD turnaround. Tested the failover. Tested the failover's failover. The testing is the work.

Partner & Samsung coordination

Live alignment with co-broadcast crews who have their own conventions and their own headsets, plus direct coordination with Samsung. The harder part is at-show in-the-moment, when something shifts and everyone has to stay on the same downbeat without a meeting.

Watch: Samsung Galaxy Unpacked Part 2 (October 20, 2021).

The slate

Around the marquee.

Samsung Unpacked is the title that gets the cocktail-party recognition; the rest of the slate is what kept the muscle memory sharp. Live food television, motorsports, headlining DJ sets. Each one is a different broadcast register. Each one has different ways to fail.

Traeger Kitchen Live 2020 to 2022

A pandemic-era cooking show. Matt Pittman of Meat Church BBQ as the recurring host plus a rotating roster of grill masters, each cooking from their own kitchen or backyard because nobody was anywhere else. We shipped remote production kits to every guest's house, walked them through the setup over the phone, and debugged signal from a distance. The output went out as a single coherent multicam broadcast on YouTube and Facebook. The format reads as casual on camera; on the production side it was a distributed live operation with a different home network, a different camera angle, and a different power situation every week.

Grubhub Sound Bites 2020 to early 2022

Livestream music + food programming for Grubhub. The 2020 run hit Dominic Fike, Lupe Fiasco, and UMI. 2021 went deeper: Anderson .Paak + The Soul Rebels (Feed the Soul Foundation partnership), King Princess, Megan Thee Stallion, Noah Cyrus, 24kGoldn, and Charli XCX (with a World Central Kitchen partnership for that episode). Tai Verdes closed it out on New Year's Day 2022 as the series wound down with the pandemic captive-audience era ending. Music broadcast under brand sponsorship has a delicate frame: artist needs the show to look like a music show, brand needs the show to look like its show, audience has zero patience for either if production breaks.

View from the TD desk during a Grubhub Sound Bites broadcast featuring Megan Thee Stallion.

Tito's Made To Order 2020 to 2021

A pandemic-era virtual performance series from Tito's Vodka with a World Central Kitchen charity partnership. Same model as Sound Bites, different sponsor. Captive home audiences, virtual sets, the charity angle. Lineup I worked: Young M.A (October 2020), A-Trak, Bun B, Kali Uchis, Portugal. The Man, Claude VonStroke, and Summer Walker (the "Made To Order: East" episode). Two virtual-performance series with overlapping production style and identical pressure: get the show out clean and on time.

Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series 2020 to 2022

Broadcast productions for the late model dirt racing series. Motorsports television means fast cuts, layered audio (engine, crowd, commentary, sponsor beds), and a tolerance for things going wrong on the track that has to be balanced against not letting the broadcast itself go wrong.

Home workstation running Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series broadcast.

Taylor Hicks · Live Game Show 2020 to 2022

Technical direction on a live game show broadcast featuring Taylor Hicks. Game-show format on a livestream is its own choreography: timed segments, hard cuts to graphics, interactive bits with the host that need to land on cue without a producer in the room calling each one.

View from the TD desk during the Taylor Hicks live game show broadcast.

Bud Light Seltzer Sessions · NYE @ Hakkasan December 31, 2020

New Year's Eve livestream for Bud Light Seltzer, broadcast from Hakkasan. Headliner Post Malone, with sets from Steve Aoki and Jack Harlow. The brand's marquee NYE moment, going out as audiences rang in 2021 from home. A headline DJ set is a single sustained performance with light, crowd, and beat all moving on the same downbeat; the stream has to ride the same downbeat or the show looks broken. Billboard coverage.

Zedd · Michelob ULTRA Movement Live November 10, 2021 · Petco Park

Technical direction on the livestream of the world's largest spin class. Zedd performed live; Becky G hosted hundreds of cyclists on the baseball diamond at Petco Park in San Diego; co-produced with the Adaptive Training Foundation. A live music broadcast wrapped around a fitness experience wrapped around a brand activation, all going out as a single hybrid workout stream.

Movement Live by Michelob ULTRA at Petco Park, with Zedd performing live and hundreds of cyclists on the baseball diamond.

The full stack

What we shipped on.

GigCasters' three-product platform on top, the broadcast hardware on the bottom. Owned platform, owned signal chain, the gear at the TD chair that everyone in tier-one production uses.

HYDRA

Live encoding platform

Turn-key live video acquisition and contribution. Where the cameras land before the world sees them.

IRIS

White-labeled video player

The player viewers actually watch on. Customizable, monetizable, the brand's color and the brand's logo, not ours.

FLIGHT DECK

Master control interface

The CMS and master control where a TD sits and runs the show. Where I sat for two years.

BLACKMAGIC DESIGN

Switching · capture · signal

ATEM switchers, capture and routing, SDI / NDI through the entire chain. The broadcast hardware tier-one productions are built on, configured for our pipelines.

VMIX

Live production switcher

The software switcher and routing brain. Multi-feed live production, replay, graphics, streaming and recording all from one surface. The middle layer between the cameras and the encoders.

ELGATO STREAM DECK XL

Control surface · macro chain

32-key programmable control surface mapped to switching cues, transitions, lower-third recalls, and macro chains. The TD's right hand at the chair.

The control room

We built the room the broadcast came out of.

Two full custom racks in the data center. Three to four cameras typical, six or seven feeds when the show needed them. Live cams, pre-recorded inserts, lower thirds, brand bugs in and out. VMix as the live-production switcher and routing brain. OBS for custom encode paths. Blackmagic ATEM as the hardware switching layer. The control room is the thing nobody sees and the thing the entire broadcast depends on.

The crew at work in the GigCasters control room mid-show.

The crew running the room

Two custom racks

Designed, built, and installed two full custom racks in the data center. Hardware tech end of the chain: server install and modification, cable management, power distribution. The physical foundation everything else sits on.

Audio routing & DSP

Multi-channel audio routing through the rack chain. DSP for live mix and broadcast loudness compliance. The audio side of a tier-one stream is half the production and the half people complain loudest about when it breaks.

Video routing & encoders

SDI and NDI routing across multiple feeds. Hardware encoders running primary and redundant paths. Ingest, switch, encode, distribute. Each stage with its own failure mode and its own recovery plan.

Multi-view & ATEM

Blackmagic ATEM switching ecosystem with multi-view monitoring. The TD chair: every camera, every PGM, every PVW, every audio meter visible at a glance.

Three full custom racks side by side in the data center, the broadcast and stream gear chain we built. — The data center · custom racks for the full chain

Control room mid-prep with Sound Bites, Late Model Dirt, and Traeger Kitchen Live all queued for the same night. — Mid-prep · three shows queued for one night

You can't switch what you can't see.

What this demonstrates

Broadcast TD muscle,
applied to AI infrastructure.

Live broadcast and AI infrastructure share more than you'd think: both are pipelines of fragile dependencies running under deadline, with no second take when the show goes out. The discipline transfers.

Live-stream merging → Multi-source data pipelines into a single decision surface (operational architecture).

Failover → Redundancy design for AI workflows: when one model, one provider, or one path fails, the system keeps running.

End-to-end testing → AI workflow audits: walk the chain, find where the latency hides, find where the silent failures are.

Partner coordination → Multi-vendor AI stacks: keeping Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and Cloudflare in alignment for a single output.

Control room build → Building the operations dashboard a non-technical operator can run without the engineer in the room.

What I'd do differently

The work held. The rest didn't.

I worked this gig through one of the harder personal stretches of my life. The broadcasts I cut here are some of the cleanest TD work I've done. The wake I left around them is the part I'd run differently.

With distance, the lesson is straight. Protect the work from the rest of your life. Protect the people you work with from the parts of your life you're still figuring out. The signal chain doesn't care what's going on at home. The people on the other end of it sometimes do, and that's the part to manage.

Watch · Read

More.

→ Samsung Galaxy Unpacked Part 2 October 2021, full broadcast → Traeger Kitchen Live Show hub, every episode → Bud Light Seltzer Sessions NYE · Post Malone December 31, 2020 → Bud Light Seltzer Sessions NYE · Steve Aoki December 31, 2020 → Billboard · Bud Light NYE lineup Press coverage → Sound Bites · 24kGoldn Episode → Sound Bites · Anderson .Paak + The Soul Rebels Episode · Feed the Soul Foundation → Sound Bites · Charli XCX Episode · World Central Kitchen → Sound Bites · Noah Cyrus Episode → Sound Bites · Megan Thee Stallion Episode → Tito's Made To Order Pandemic-era virtual performance series → Tito's Made To Order: East · Summer Walker Episode → gigcasters.com Engineering services firm → Peak State case study Festival app, Worker, 28-day build → Highland Sound case study Studio build, podcast TD, documentary AD → Livid Instruments case study Acting CEO, Minim Kickstarter, manufacturing pivot

Live, Tier-One,No Second Take.

Engineering the broadcast when theworld stopped going outside.