For a change, Baseball TV France is shining a spotlight on a club that broadcasts its matches live. This time, it’s on the TWITCH platform, well-known among gamers.
A trip to Saint-Barthélemy d’Anjou, near Angers, to meet Florian, a licensed player with the Eagles, who shares his experience:
“The Eagles have been in Saint-Barthélemy d’Anjou since 1987. The club offers senior baseball, senior softball, and junior baseball (+9 years). Today, over 40 players, both men and women, enjoy this team sport, including around 15 active baseball players. Recently, new players have joined the team! In 2022, the amateur club from Saint-Barthélemy competed for the first time in the official baseball championship in the Pays de la Loire region. Live broadcasting of matches is a personal initiative. I wanted to share this sport and the championship matches. My teammates push and encourage me to go further.”
For now, we only use a phone and a tripod or whatever we have on hand. The setup takes 5-10 minutes. It also requires an internet connection. We will soon ask the town hall to extend the Wi-Fi from the sports hall next door. The town hall of Saint-Barthélemy d’Anjou has supported us a lot this season with field improvements. Maybe they could find a solution for the Wi-Fi that would help us broadcast better. We overlay the scoring with PED Scoreboard, a plugin for the streaming software OBS that we’ve customized to use remotely.”
We broadcast on TWITCH because it’s a platform I know well (I comment on video games from time to time). It’s quite easy to stream matches there. The broadcasts allow some players or their relatives to follow the matches when they can’t come to the stadium. It also lets the opposing team’s supporters watch the match. For the last broadcasted match, we even had a duo of commentators, which really helped to understand what was happening on the field. We have between 10 and 20 viewers on average. We’re trying to gradually increase visibility through social media.”
The goal is to broadcast all our championship matches, as well as friendly matches and tournaments. We plan to have other cameras/phones to get different angles during broadcasts and, above all, better image quality. And maybe even audio equipment for commentary.”
There is already a club channel at twitch.tv/stbartheagles, which is under construction. If I had to give advice to clubs that want to broadcast, it would simply be to try. It’s very easy with just a phone and a tripod to start streaming on Twitch or other platforms and share our passion for baseball.”
Thanks to Florian Morisset
Interview conducted by Thomas Houlez for BTVF
