THE STREAMING REVOLUTION WILL BE TELEVISED
As Storm Eunice battered Britain in February, an unlikely celebrity was born. Jerry Dyer didn’t stay at home to protect his wheelie bin and his garden furniture. Instead, he took his van to a field just outside Heathrow Airport and pointed his camera at the skies to capture truly astonishing footage of the parade of large jets struggling to land in the high winds.
This wasn’t an unusual thing for Dyer to do. Big Jet TV has been around for several years now, and has become a fixture in the plane-spotting community as aviation geeks have watched him streaming live from around the world. Storm Eunice made the rest of us pay attention, too.
The YouTube live stream quickly became the only topic of conversation on Twitter as winds pushed planes to fly almost perpendicular to the runway, and several landings were aborted just before touchdown. At some points during the day, Big Jet TV had more than 200,000 people watching live – more viewers than would typically be expected during the day for even rolling news channels such as GB News.
It was a striking achievement: a team of only two people were able to stream live, uninterrupted HD video from an outside broadcast, capturing the attention of a wind-battered nation. Not least because of Dyer’s infectious, football-style commentary of the landings. “Easy, easy, easy, go on, son! Get it down! WOAH!”
We wanted to find out more about how they – and other enthusiasts like them – do it. What follows is four tales
