What started as a way to put Friday night games on a screen became something much bigger — a lifeline for families, a standard of excellence, and a platform that the entire college now depends on.
The Challenge: Big Audiences, Bigger Expectations
College athletics has a way of bringing people together. But for the families of Pensacola Christian College athletes, “together” often means separated by hundreds — sometimes thousands — of miles.
PCC began live streaming its athletic events around 2013, driven in part by NCCAA, National Christian College Athletic Association, requirements to record sporting events. Soccer, basketball, volleyball — each season brought a new wave of parents, alumni, and supporters tuning in from wherever life had taken them.
“There’s a student on the basketball team who’s from an international country,” said Diane Burdick, advertising video media supervisor. “There’s no way his parents could come and see him play. The only way they can is through the live stream.”
That reality repeated itself across every roster, every season. Military families, parents too far to travel, alumni who never stopped caring about the PCC Eagles. For all of them, the stream wasn’t a nice-to-have. It was the game.
Which made it all the more painful when the stream didn’t hold.
“We were streaming with our previous provider using RTMP,” said Caleb Haywood, creative producer for PCC’s video advertising department. “It was okay — until 2020, when there was so much more live streaming going on. Our viewers were experiencing buffering. We started noticing dropped frames.”
A buffering wheel in the third quarter. A dropped stream during overtime. For a college that holds everything it does to an exacting standard, technical failure on game night wasn’t just frustrating — it was a breach of the trust those families had placed in the program.
The Solution: Reliability Built for the Game
The fix had to be as dependable as the athletes on the field. That’s what led PCC to Resi — and to its patented Resilient Streaming Protocol (RSP).
“We switched to Resi for their Resilient Streaming Protocol,” Haywood said. “And that eliminated the buffering we were experiencing and created a smoother experience for our viewers.”
RSP is engineered to absorb network disruptions in real time — the kind of interruptions that plague live sports broadcasts on unpredictable networks. Where other solutions buckle under traffic spikes or inconsistent bandwidth, RSP keeps the stream on the air. For PCC’s game-day audiences, that meant no more missed goals, no more frozen screens at the free-throw line, no more calls to the production room asking what happened.
The hardware setup reinforced that reliability. PCC now runs three distinct streaming configurations across campus: a permanent encoder in the sports center for basketball, volleyball, and other arena events; a dedicated unit in the Crown Center for major college-wide events; and a mobile rack that travels with the team.
“We can have [any event] streamed and broadcasted from any location on campus,” Haywood said. “Soccer out on the field — we just take the mobile rack out there. A random event they decide to stream that week — we can handle it.”
A Workflow Built for a Full Season
Running a college athletics streaming program isn’t a single event — it’s a season-long operation, week after week, across multiple sports and venues. PCC’s team needed more than a reliable stream. They needed a system that could keep up.
Resi’s scheduling tools and destination groups became the backbone of that system.
“One of the things Resi provides is the ability to create destination groups,” Haywood explained. “Each event has its own destination group — men’s basketball, women’s basketball, soccer, volleyball. All I have to do is select the destination group in one click, and all of it populates for me.”
Rather than manually reconfiguring every stream destination for each game — titles, descriptions, platform outputs — destination groups let the team set the parameters once and apply them consistently across an entire season. Scheduling events well in advance adds another layer of reliability that translates directly to game-day confidence.
“One thing about scheduling events ahead of time is that we can quality-control and double-check all of our settings,” Haywood said. “And you don’t have to worry about starting the live stream — it starts by itself.”
When the final whistle blows, the workflow doesn’t stop. Monica Keffer, who manages PCC’s digital media and web presence — including watchpcc.edu, the college’s dedicated streaming destination — picks up from there.
“After a live stream is over, the production team will provide the embed [stream],” Keffer said. “The digital media team will then take that and place it on the watchpcc.edu website to be available instantly.”
Once the stream wraps, the PCC team takes the finished recording and makes it available on demand — giving families, coaches, and scouts the ability to watch, rewatch, and review from anywhere in the country.
Support That Shows Up on Game Night
Even the most reliable systems have moments of pressure. What separates good technology partners from great ones is what happens in those moments.
“When I needed to call support, it was very quick,” Haywood said. “They responded immediately. They went in to look at the event and the details, and they were able to figure out what the issue was and have it fixed before the event began. That was vital to our operation.”
Over time, the calls have become less frequent — not because the team stopped caring, but because the platform has matured alongside them.
“We haven’t had to call Resi support in the past few years,” Haywood noted. “Things have really grown. The site’s responsiveness, the improvements to the web experience — we just don’t run into those issues anymore.”
More Than a Broadcast
What PCC has built is more than a streaming operation. It’s a connection between athletes and the people who love watching them play — no matter where those people happen to be.
Burdick, herself an alumna of PCC, sees it clearly: “When I wasn’t working here, I could still feel like I was a part of campus. I could go online and watch what was happening — a game, a graduation. And now I get to help other people experience that same thing.”
For the international student whose parents watch every game from across the world. For the alumnus who still bleeds Eagles blue. For the grandmother who can’t make the drive but never misses a tip-off. The stream is how they’re there.
“Streaming is vital to what we do here,” Haywood said. “And with the excellence that Resi provides, we’re able to give our viewers an excellent experience — the kind of experience they’ve come to expect from Pensacola Christian College.”
Pensacola Christian College’s advertising video media department, led by Diane Burdick and supported by creative producer Caleb Haywood and digital media specialist Monica Keffer, manages live streaming and on-demand video for athletic events, campus ceremonies, and major college programs using Resi hardware and software.
