In autumn 2016, after the merge of mytaxi and hailo, it was made clear that the new management wanted to make the monthly “ all hands ” meeting visible to everyone in the company, not just the employees in our HQ in Hamburg. That meant recording the speakers and the presentation to stream it live to all our ~20 offices in Europe.
I asked a company for help, and they made an offer for a setup consisting of a video camera with streaming capabilities, an audio mixer and some microphones for about 12000 €. That was way too much in my opinion. So I went to my boss and told him I thought I could do it for much less money. In the end, I managed to build the setup for just about 4500 € .
The goal was to have a point from which we can direct what’s shown in the stream and control what’s being said. We wanted to switch video sources in software as this seemed far more flexible than a hardware solution.