Oct 27, 2026

90 Days to Kickoff: Building a Live Football Broadcast

For several decades, Capital Community Media, Salem’s Cable access station, has broadcast Willamette University Football. As the cable landscape has changed, it has struggled financially, causing it to back out this year.

We have equipment, but not enough for a football broadcast and definitely not enough if we had a soccer game at the same time, which usually happens a couple of times a year. So we needed to purchase everything for a football production.

Initial planning began in June, but we couldn’t make any purchases until our budget turned over on July 1st. Our first game was September 12th.

To do what I wanted to do, I needed about $50,000, but I only had about $30,000 to spend. I had to make a lot of cuts.

In about 90 days, we put together a 5-camera production with 4 channels of replay and custom data-driven graphics. Through 4 games, we had 1,781 unique viewers and 155,374 minutes watched.