What does live broadcast and rally driving have in common? Quite a lot, as Teradek discovered
Photography by DirtFish & Trevor Lyden
Words by David Evans, DirtFish Head of Media
Derek Nickell shuffles in his seat, pushes his glasses back to the bridge of his nose and stares ahead. His peripheral vision frames an outstretched hand. Five fingers. The countdown has begun.
In those final seconds, Nickell rifles through a mental checklist. Yes. He’s ready.
Two.
One.
Go.
The stage is live.
Nickell’s focus is intense. Unflinching and without blinking he’s up and running in search of a flow state which banishes butterflies and isolates him in a place where the next five hours will fly by in 15 minutes.
Welcome to the world of live broadcast.
Months of planning went into last month’s DirtFish Women in Motorsport Summit at LeMay – America’s Car Museum. Central to that planning was an agreement with Teradek, arguably the world’s finest producer of video transmission hardware and with AT&T, the world’s third largest telecommunications company.
An event as big as the DirtFish WiM Summit needed the best to produce it
The combined might of Teradek and AT&T would carry the DirtFish Women in Motorsport Summit around the world, serving up one very special Saturday to half a million people watching live.
But for now, DirtFish WiM coordinator Josie Rimmer is wrapping up her introduction to the stream and her and Claire Williams are about to welcome hundreds of guests to the event.
“Camera one…”
And pause. Let’s rewind to mid-afternoon Friday. Nickell and his team are joined by AT&T’s Scott Beckett and Oregon-based event production firm Papertrees Creative as they walk through the front door of LeMay – America’s Car Museum for the first time. There’s been no shortage of meetings for this moment, but nothing prepares you for the moment virtual becomes reality.
“When you walk in for the first time,” Nickell tells DirtFish, “you need to see the bigger picture. You walk in and you have this drawing, an overhead and you’re like: ‘Great, this is cool…’ I know where the edges are. I would say 85 or 90% of every new show is different in implementation to how it’s planned.
“You guys had the stage sorted and you wanted everything to be centrally located around that. We started at the stage, figured out where the camera placements would be, the video village and once we had the bigger pieces in place then it was the small pieces and getting everything connected to facilitate a show.
“We could have done this wireless, but we had a dedicated fiber line which went around the outside of the building and up a stairwell – that solidified the connection. Don’t forget, we were delivering two feeds: one to screens locally for people onsite to watch and the second to the stream itself.”
Talking through the process now, Nickell is matter of fact. In the heat of the moment?
“I was fairly relaxed,” he said. “A lot of this thing is about connections. That’s why we brought Papertrees in. When you work in this industry, you need to work with people you trust that when I say I need two cameras here and I want that over there, I don’t have to hold their hand. They just do their thing, they know what they’re doing and they get it done on time.
“Having somebody that’s in your pocket that you could just hand that stuff to changes the scope of work completely – now I don’t have to take on 100% of everything, I can have these guys who really know what they’re doing take care of it!
“You asked if I had time for a cup of tea before we went live. I would say yes, there was time for a cup of tea – and maybe even the cookie my daughter brought for me.”
But when you get to the start, the broadcast equivalent of the arrival control?
Nickell’s a rally man and has been for much of his life. He understands the sport, the timing and the need to maintain complete control of what sits in front of you. Especially when it’s go time.
Nickell: “The start of the stream, pushing the button to go live… it’s an interesting feeling. It’s hard to describe. It’s one of those: ‘I could really screw this up by just fat fingering a thing or missing something that I didn’t even have on my radar…’
“You get the butterflies, you get that high of: ‘OK, so this is going to go out and, at this point, I have no control over it. Whatever goes out to the world is what the world is going to see.’
“I used to get really anxious, I’ve been on a bunch of live productions now, including events like the GRAMMYs and major tours, but you just have to push past those feelings. In a sense, you get used to it, but just as you push the button, that feeling is always in the back of your head: don’t screw this up.
“The feeling is kind of the same as when you’re racing: you’re putting yourself and everything on the line.
“It’s the same when you get into it as well, lose focus and that’s when mistakes happen.”
And we are very much into it now. Introductions done, the first of three panels is being teed up. We’re getting into the guts of the event now; this is when the remote cameras will be doing their work, providing pictures for the producer and director to split between.
It’s for this moment that Nickell had been interested to study how moderator and legendary rallying commentator Becs Williams… breathes.
Learning how Becs Williams breathed was vital to a smooth operation
“I’d never worked with Becs before,” he said. “I had no idea how her pacing was, what she was like on stage. When you’re working on a live production – especially one with talking heads like this one – it’s so important to understand how a person is going to breathe so you can cut between breaths and not in the middle of a word. I used to work on a lot of rock shows and you could prepare for the beat and the timing, the chorus, the breaks in the song and time the cuts to that.
“Getting that kind of thing that gives the broadcast a really natural feel.
“Once you’ve got that rhythm, everything else kind of goes away. The cameras are good, the audio’s perfect, the graphics are working well, this is the flow state. Everything is seamless.”
In-car, this is that moment of being in sync, driver and co-driver singing the same song.
“It’s almost an emotional feeling,” admits Nickell. “It’s similar to being in the car when you get a corner right, it’s like when you switch from one shot to the next and you say to yourself: ‘That was perfect. I couldn’t have done that better.’”
And if it doesn’t go right?
“Again, same like being in the car: you move on. You don’t hold on to your mistakes. If you take the wrong camera, or the shot’s shakey or the camera operator has a problem, some people focus on that problem, some can move on.
“The worst is when the camera operators – or anybody – stops talking. They’ve clammed up and you’ve got to understand: ‘OK, we’re not getting anything out of you right now.’ You need to reset and move on.”
Quickly forgetting your mistakes is paramount - a similar principle to competing in the car
There are drivers and co-drivers the world over who will be drawing parallels.
Anybody fortunate enough to have driven a stage or two will know one thing: the finish comes way quicker than you were expecting.
“When we were closing the show and the stream was nearly done,” says Nickell, “honestly it felt like 15 minutes had gone by.”
It was more than five hours.
“You can take a breath. You’re done. If something lights on fire at this point, it doesn’t matter. Now, we’re good. Shut everything down. We did it. And we didn’t hurt anybody!
“This is when the first feedback starts to come. And you realize that, actually, you didn’t watch at all. I remember talking to one of my friends about switching on stage live with The Cure. She asked me: ‘How was the show?’ And I was like: ‘I have absolutely no idea!’
“You have this kind of checkbox in your head, you’re ticking things off. The bonus you get is when somebody comes along and says: ‘We had 400,000 people watching…’
“That’s like: ‘Oh s***! That’s cool.’ It’s a big thing not to think about the numbers, though. Whether you have 50 people or 400,000 people watching, it doesn’t change how you shoot or switch a show. If somebody tells you half the planet’s watching, that’ll kill you. You start to second-guess things. You need that tunnel vision for the entire show. Right up until it’s done.”
And that’s how it was done. Three hours later, Derek, Scott and their teams had derigged, dismantled and boxed everything. The DirtFish Women in Motorsport Summit had informed half a million around the world and hundreds in the room. On every level, it was a huge success.
That Saturday night beer had never tasted so good.
Words:David Evans
Tags: AT&T, Derek Nickell, DirtFish Women in Motorsport Summit, Terradek
Publish Date June 21, 2025 DirtFish
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