When a world-class music school needed a streaming platform that could keep up with its ambitions, the answer wasn’t more staff or more gear. It was a smarter system.
The Challenge: A Relentless Calendar, a Limitless Audience
At Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music, the performances never stop. Orchestras, jazz ensembles, opera productions, faculty recitals, student degree recitals, visiting artists — the Blair calendar runs to roughly 300 to 350 events per year across multiple halls and spaces on campus.
“90% of the events we do at Blair are going to be instrumental classical or jazz style music,” said Kyle Odum, who oversees live audio, video, production, and broadcast for the school. “But in between all of that, we have full opera productions, full orchestra productions, rentals with someone like Rick Beato coming in to give a lecture — it could be anything.”
Before Covid, getting a performance on screen meant a two-track stereo recording from hanging microphones, a camcorder in the back of the hall, or a security camera feed. There was no infrastructure for anything more. When the pandemic forced the school to rethink access to performance entirely, Blair undertook a major technology upgrade — adding PTZ cameras, a PA system, and Resi encoders throughout the building.
“When the integrator brought in Resi, which I don’t think anyone had used or seen before — it’s not Twitch, it’s not YouTube, it’s not your consumer-grade product — I think since they brought it in, we use it five, six, fifteen times a week,” Odum said. “Of the 300-plus events we do a year, I’d say 90 to 95% of those are all live streamed via Resi.”
The infrastructure was in place. Now the question was whether the platform could handle the pace.
The Solution: A Scheduler Built for Scale
Three hundred events a year doesn’t leave much room for error — or for manual setup. For Odum, the ability to plan an entire month of streams at once wasn’t just a convenience. It was what made the whole operation possible.
“I can look at a month out and see I have 45 events, and here’s all the dates and times,” Odum said. “I can literally layer them all in, schedule all of them. So even if I’m not here, the event still happens — as long as the camera is on and pointed correctly, the stream will happen.”
Odum’s workflow runs like clockwork. At the top of each month, he pulls together all incoming event requests, cross-references them against the school’s calendar, and builds out every Resi event simultaneously — setting encoder start times 30 minutes before each event for troubleshooting buffer, and scheduling the stream to go live ten minutes before curtain. On a given Saturday, there might be four concerts happening across three different spaces. The scheduler makes the whole thing visible at once.
It really comes in handy to see everything laid out,” he said. “Because we might have a day where there’s four events in the same hall using the same encoder — that overlap starts becoming a thing I have to be aware of. Resi tells me instantaneously there’s a conflict and I can go in and adjust.”
That proactive approach extends beyond scheduling. Before major rental events — like a four-day medical conference that streamed from open to close every day — Odum works with clients’ web teams weeks in advance to test every parameter of the stream before anyone is in the room.
“In the moment the event is occurring, you don’t have a lot of time to troubleshoot without the event going down,” he said. “I can deal with five obstacles on the day-of easily. Fifteen is a lot harder. All of that testing beforehand gets rid of ten of those obstacles before I ever walk in the door.”
Resi also serves as a redundant recording layer for every event — even those that aren’t being publicly streamed. Copyright and licensing considerations sometimes prevent a faculty concert from going live, but Odum creates the Resi event regardless.
“I still want it recorded,” he said. “So if I need it quickly, I can pull it from [Resi]. It just becomes a redundant backup — and it’s come in handy so many times.”
Artistry Without Borders
Blair is exclusively an undergraduate school of music. Every student who walks through its doors is there to perform — and to be heard. Live streaming has fundamentally changed who gets to do the listening.
“Vanderbilt is an international school,” Odum said. “We have students from every corner of this country, every corner of the globe. Streaming gives their family an opportunity to actually see what their child is performing. Grandma in Wisconsin can see it. Family over in England can see it. It’s all there for anyone to access.”
That reach matters in ways that go beyond sentiment. Faculty members on research trips can still watch their students perform and provide feedback. When a piano faculty candidate performed as part of a competitive application process, Odum used Resi to get the recording to the hiring committee immediately — no download delays, no format conversion, no waiting.
“As soon as the stream is done, we can basically download it and use it,” he said.
There are also moments where Resi’s flexibility makes the difference between an experience happening and not happening at all. When a faculty member celebrated a milestone anniversary recital, licensing restrictions prevented a public stream — but his family couldn’t be there in person. Odum solved it by routing the stream to a private YouTube link directly through Resi.
“None of our workflow had to change at all other than adding one more destination,” he said. “His family was able to see him get presented with a chocolate cake at the very end. Resi made that really, really easy.”
Measuring the Moment: Analytics That Tell the Full Story
Ingram Hall — Blair’s flagship performance space — seats 550 people. On a big night, it fills up. But what Odum has discovered through Resi’s analytics is that the audience inside the hall is only half the story.
“Our orchestra concerts are getting typically 400 to 500 concurrent viewers on the live stream,” he said. “So if our house is about full at 550 and 500 people are watching online — that means it’s an event people care about and want to be a part of, whether digitally or in person. We’re getting roughly the same numbers in both places.”
That kind of reach was simply unmeasurable before. Ticket receipts told you how many seats were sold. They told you nothing about who was watching from a living room in California, or a kitchen in Canada, or a university hall in England.
“It changes and expands our outreach almost exponentially,” Odum said. “It can double our audience size, it can triple our audience size. We can see that what our students are doing isn’t just falling on deaf ears — because we can live stream, we are pushing their performance and their artistry out to people all across the globe.”
Analytics also inform how the school plans and markets events going forward. Knowing that 61% of watch time for a given week came from Nashville, for example, helps the team ask the right questions — are they adequately serving a local audience that isn’t making it in person? Which events are drawing national attention, and why?
“We’ve used the numbers to audit events for good and bad,” Odum said. “It’s all helpful. We can sit there and go — okay, are we serving a bigger Nashville audience? Should we be looking further? How do we get more people in person? It helps us plan how we staff events, how much marketing we put behind something, because we can see the impact an event is having not just in the hall itself, but what it reaches across the country.”
For the students on stage, that context means something too.
“I can tell our students that are performing here: it’s not just people in Nashville watching you,” Odum said. “There are people in California. There are people in Canada and Mexico watching these performances happen. Your exposure and your audience is a lot bigger than the room you’re sitting in.”
Kyle Odum oversees live audio, video, broadcast, and production at the Blair School of Music at Vanderbilt University, where Resi powers 90 to 95% of the school’s 300-plus annual events.
