The Broadcast Backbone We Built in a Night
How three of us spent a night, 7 PM to 7 AM, wiring an eight-input broadcast system into the Art of Living LA center, and how it paid off two years later.
Some of my favorite work never had a client, a brief, or a real deadline. This one started because a room deserved better.
I work closely with Art of Living LA, the Los Angeles home of the Art of Living Foundation, one of the largest volunteer-run nonprofits in the world. For over four decades it has taught breathing, meditation, and service programs in the name of a simple goal, a stress-free and violence-free society, with a presence in more than 180 countries. The LA center was purchased and activated in 2009, and its halls have hosted an enormous range of events ever since. Those recordings have quietly become an institutional archive, knowledge that over a million people around the world can now learn from.
The main hall had a lovely mixer and a genuinely good audio setup. The one thing it did not have was video. That was the gap three of us set out to close in the summer of 2024.
I use "us" loosely, because the real engineering came from my two friends. One is a former Chapman film student who now runs his own creative agency in India. The other was an Engineering Management student who now runs a large factory back home. Between them they designed a three-camera setup, measured every distance, drew up a diagram, and got a budget approved. On paper, a building with no video infrastructure was about to get a serious upgrade.
Then we had to actually build it.
We started at 7 PM. By the time every connection was hooked up, it was 7 AM the next morning. Somewhere around 2 AM, one of the center directors gently suggested we just hire professionals. We kept going anyway.
And this was bigger than three cameras. What we really built was a routing backbone: the room could now take up to eight camera and HDMI inputs, switch any of them into a single main feed, and send that feed back out to eight screens. The core kit was three PTZ cameras with a controller, an ATEM Mini Extreme switcher, and a 1x8 HDMI-over-Cat6 extender and splitter. We cut and crimped our own Cat6 cables and ports, placed the cameras non-destructively at their ideal angles, and ran ethernet so the whole thing could go live at the press of a button. My part was the media layer, the overlays that put the logo and event info cleanly on top of the feed.
We hit a lot of walls. My favorite: the cameras were outputting 4K, but our switcher only spoke HD, so nothing showed up on screen. After digging through the documentation, I found that each camera had a tiny switch you flip with a screwdriver to change its output format. One screwdriver later, we had a picture.
By sunrise it all worked. The main feed hit the projector in the hall and, through the splitter, every screen we had wired around the building, so anyone working in the halls downstairs could follow the program with audio too.
“Miracle work with setting up the cameras and getting them to output to both floors below.”
Fast forward to July 2026. We had an event pull in more than 4,500 RSVPs for a building that holds around 2,000. The setup we had sweated over two years earlier was ready and waiting. We broadcast the main program to eight locations with barely a one to three second delay, and ran wired live streams to projectors outside the building too, so the program reached every corner of the center, and the world.
The best infrastructure is the kind you forget is there until the night you actually need it. Three of us, a lot of Cat6, and one very important screwdriver. It is still running.