When a university’s streaming ambitions outgrew its infrastructure, one platform helped them go from backburnered broadcasts to a campus-wide operation — and a curriculum that sends students out the door ready to lead.
The Challenge: Big Vision, Bigger Obstacles
For Jeremy Harford, executive director of event operations at the University of Mobile, live streaming was never supposed to be complicated. But for a stretch of years, it was.
Like many institutions, the University of Mobile was thrust into streaming during Covid — scrambling to get gear in place, processes running, and performances in front of audiences that suddenly couldn’t be in the room. What started with OBS and a USB webcam eventually graduated to a hardware encoder, and things worked — until they didn’t.
“We ended up moving our theater department to a new facility that did not have a quality internet connection,” Harford said. “That ended up causing us to backburner live streaming, because our hardware encoder really couldn’t keep up with the need to stream.”
With theater being one of the primary drivers for streaming at the university — and with families of performers depending on those broadcasts — the fallback was painful: record locally to hard drives, clean up the audio, edit the video, and upload it manually. A process that could take weeks. One that occasionally resulted in corrupted files or accidentally overwritten drives. And one that left students, parents, and staff waiting far longer than anyone wanted.
“We would hear, ‘Hey, can I get a link to this?'” Harford recalled. “And it would just kind of have to get put in the pipeline of, we will get to it as soon as we can.”
Something had to change.
The Solution: Stream From Anywhere, Worry About Nothing
Harford’s first encounter with Resi wasn’t at the university — it was in the middle of the Caribbean. While working alongside a video production company on a corporate event, he watched Resi power a simultaneous live stream between two cruise ships at sea.
“It just kind of opened my eyes to the capability of the platform,” he said. “It was always kind of in the back of my mind — that if one day I could bring that to the university, it would just be a huge plus.”
That day came when the university needed a solution to its connectivity problem. Resi’s patented Resilient Streaming Protocol (RSP) was the answer Harford had been looking for.
“The resilient streaming protocol really is a game changer in the way that you don’t really lose content when your internet has an issue,” he said. “Those momentary blips that would often seem catastrophic before are really not a thing you have to worry about anymore. It almost is just a solution that has already thought about that problem and created a way around it.”
With RSP in place, the University of Mobile built out a flexible, campus-wide streaming infrastructure. Both performance halls in the Alabama School of the Arts are equipped with their own permanent encoders — cameras, audio capture, and a direct line to Resi Studio from anywhere with an internet connection. A portable encoder handles everything else.
“We have a portable encoder that we can run to any individual area on campus, drop it in, plug it up,” Harford said. “As soon as it’s got internet, it’s ready to go. You get it power, you get it internet, you get it signal — you’re off to the races.”
That flexibility has transformed how the university approaches its 250-plus annual events. Graduation, theater performances, chapel, concerts, meetings — whatever needs to be captured or streamed, the infrastructure is ready. And for everything that gets streamed, Resi’s automatic archiving means the recording is in the cloud and shareable almost the moment the event ends.
“What used to take a whole lot of time and manpower to turn around and upload — it’s literally instant now,” Harford said. “Before, if we were super busy, it could take a couple of weeks just to get to it. Now, it’s pretty much instant.”
Christmas Spectacular: When the Whole Community Tunes In
Few events at the University of Mobile capture the scope of what streaming makes possible quite like Christmas Spectacular.
Every year, the Alabama School of the Arts stages its flagship Christmas program at College Hill Baptist Church — a full-scale production drawing roughly 10,000 attendees over the course of its run. Students from the Production Technologies program help run much of the show, handling video, lighting, and audio alongside a small team of staff engineers and outside vendors. It is, by any measure, a major production.
With Resi already in the workflow and an encoder ready to drop in, the university found itself with a straightforward opportunity to extend the event’s reach far beyond the church’s walls.
“We’ve got great audio, we’ve got great video, and this is an opportunity to grow the audience and reach out to even those family members that couldn’t come in person,” Harford said. “We’re able to bring them in via live stream, because we already have that tangible product ready to go. Simply dropping in an encoder at that point really enabled us to allow those family members — and anybody else in the community that wanted to take part — to come into the performance that’s happening at that moment.”
It’s a story that repeats itself across the university’s calendar. A theater student whose military parent is deployed overseas. An alumnus watching a performance from across the country. Family members who can’t make the drive to campus for a graduation or a recital.
“The biggest reason why we do live stream is that it’s really just enabling the community to gather,” Harford said. “It just allows everybody to come together to experience it all at the same time.”
Built Into the Curriculum: Training the Next Generation on Industry Tools
The University of Mobile’s Production Technologies degree was built with a clear mission: train the next generation of AVL engineers for wherever the industry takes them — churches, touring productions, integrators, corporate AV, theme parks. Students graduate knowing audio, video, and lighting from both a live and studio perspective. They run chapel every week. They run theater performances. They run Christmas Spectacular.
And now, they learn Resi.
“In one of our classes — Intermediate Video Technologies — one of the areas we focus on is live streaming,” Harford said. “Students will spend a couple of weeks just diving into how streaming works and the different ways to do it.”
Bringing Resi into that curriculum was, in Harford’s words, a natural handshake. The platform is already running across campus, so students aren’t learning on a simulator — they’re learning on the actual gear they use every week. And when they walk out the door with a degree, they carry that knowledge with them.
“When they’re graduating, they already have the knowledge of a great solution that they can bring to that next place they’re going to,” Harford said. “When they’re asked, ‘How do we make the live stream better?’ — they’ve got firsthand experience. They know how streaming works, what makes it good, what makes it bad, and they can offer a good solution to help take whatever organization they’re a part of to the next level.”
For Harford, the logic is simple. You invest in the right tools, and you teach students to use them — because that investment pays off in the field.
“You’ve kind of heard the mentality of ‘buy your second LED wall first,'” he said. “It kind of can be said about encoders as well. Just go ahead and buy your second encoder first — get a high quality one that will do the job right the first time. I don’t think you’ll regret it.”
Jeremy Harford serves as executive director of event operations at the University of Mobile, overseeing campus-wide event operations and the Production Technologies degree program within the Alabama School of the Arts.
