When a high-visibility live show runs in parallel with the Super Bowl, there’s no margin for a streaming failure. Despite the venue being 2 levels underground with poor internet, the show must go on.
The Production: When The Ads Are The Main Event
Every Super Bowl Sunday, while the rest of the country is watching football, the media and marketing world has its own event to follow. ADWEEK’s Big Game Live is a live show dedicated to analyzing Super Bowl commercials — before, during, and after the game — for an audience of advertising and marketing professionals who care as much about the ads as anyone cares about the score.
For this year’s production, ADWEEK brought in Jacob Wilson, a freelance producer and technical director, to help pull it off. The scope was ambitious: a two-day production setup in a Manhattan studio, a live show that would run the length of the entire Super Bowl broadcast, and a stream going out simultaneously to an embedded web player, YouTube, and LinkedIn — all while talent reacted live to commercials airing for the first time.
Wilson had roughly 30 days to plan it. And from the beginning, he knew exactly which part of the production he wasn’t going to lose sleep over.
“There were a lot of questions that I felt like we had to answer in the planning of this production,” Wilson said. “But the one that I knew the answer to from the beginning was that Resi would be the absolute best choice for the streaming technology for this production.”
The Problem With “It Has to Work”
Every client says the same thing going into a high-stakes live event: this cannot fail. Wilson has heard it enough times to have a standard response.
“There’s no such thing as failsafe,” he said. “Even in the most professional broadcast — the Super Bowl, for example — they have tiers and tiers and tiers of redundancy to as much as they can to guarantee a flawless outcome to the viewer. But that is all stuff that needs to be scoped ,budgeted, and paid for.”
For the ADWEEK production, the budget had limits. The studio was two floors underground, which ruled out cellular backup — running external antenna cabling all the way upstairs simply wasn’t feasible with the crew he had. The production was on a shared building network, using an unmanaged network switch, with no IT staff on site and no way to fully control what was behind it.
Wilson had been in that situation before with other streaming solutions. The experience wasn’t reassuring.
“There’s always a need to have eyes on those systems,” he said of other platforms he’d used. “Whether it be high-end bonded cellular or SRT-based systems — it always requires a person to have a moderate amount of attention on that network. And when you’re wearing multiple hats, that can be something that’s hard to do, especially if you’re the one switching a show. Your hands are literally cemented onto a switcher.”
Resi’s Resilient Streaming Protocol (RSP) changed that calculus entirely. With built-in first mile error correction absorbing whatever the network threw at it, Wilson could set a five-minute delay and stop thinking about the stream.
“I didn’t have to worry about it because I knew Resi will handle it,” he said. “That was a lot off my mind, to say the least.”
A Lot of Hats, One Less Thing to Watch
On the day of the live show, Wilson was running the production largely on his own. He was switching the show, managing graphics and playback, cueing lower thirds, wrangling last-minute file deliveries from the design team, and communicating with the DP about camera feeds — all simultaneously, all live.
There was no dedicated stream engineer. There was no one whose job was to watch the Resi encoder.
“Resi really stands out as a solution that you can just set and forget,” Wilson said. “I would go over and check on it every once in a while during a lull and just be like, yeah, still looks great. “
That freedom mattered. When something did go sideways during the production, — a problem with their media playback— Wilson had the mental bandwidth to catch it, engineer a fix in real time, and execute a clean swap that viewers never noticed. But the stream itself never wavered.
Why Resi, When Other Options Existed
Wilson was direct about why he didn’t go with one of the many multi-destination streaming platforms that have emerged since 2020.
“There’s a lot of random cloud providers these days claiming they’ll send it to many destinations,” he said. “It sounds attractive, but when you actually get into those systems, they’re very basic. They have virtually no support. Troubleshooting is tricky. It expands quickly in complexity.”
When ADWEEK was initially looking at one of those platforms, Wilson went in for a demo and came away unimpressed. He picked up the phone and called Resi instead.
“This is an event that needs high reliability,” he said. “I’m always looking for solutions that offer extremely high fault tolerance for your money — because that’s what gets people to greenlight things.”
For Wilson, the broader point extends beyond this one production. In a media landscape increasingly saturated with AI-generated content, he believes live streaming is becoming the new credibility signal — the proof that something is real, unscripted, and actually happening.
“Live content is going to be the new source of truth,” he said. “I think there’s a place for Resi in the corporate sector for these high-stakes events that don’t happen weekly. The budgets are there for people to say, we need the highest reliable solution. And Resi is a perfect fit for that.”
Jacob Wilson is a freelance producer and technical director who served as technical director on ADWEEK’s Big Game Live, a live Super Bowl commercial analysis show produced for ADWEEK’s media and marketing audience.
