Live Streaming Infrastructure

Problem

Patagonia needed broadcast-quality live streaming for quarterly company-wide town halls. Existing solutions were ad-hoc — a single webcam pointed at a stage, poor audio, no production switching. With a global hybrid workforce, employees outside headquarters felt disconnected. Leadership wanted a professional production that would make remote employees feel present and engaged, not like an afterthought.

Decision

Built a multi-camera production workflow using OBS Studio for scene switching and compositing, ProPresenter for graphics and lower-thirds, and Microsoft Teams as the distribution platform (since the entire company already used Teams). This avoided proprietary hardware encoders and gave us software-defined flexibility — we could add cameras, switch sources, and overlay graphics without new hardware.

Implementation

The production setup was designed for reliability and flexibility:

• Multi-camera capture: Three PTZ cameras connected via NDI to OBS — wide shot, close-up, and audience angle.
• OBS Studio: Scene composition, transitions, and NDI-to-virtual-camera output. Custom scenes for speaker, slides, Q&A, and hybrid layouts.
• ProPresenter: Lower-thirds, speaker name cards, brand graphics, and countdown timers. Output fed into OBS as a transparent overlay via NDI.
• Microsoft Teams: OBS virtual camera selected as the Teams camera source. Teams Live Events used for large-scale distribution with moderated Q&A.
• Audio chain: Professional microphones → audio interface → OBS with compression, noise gate, and EQ. Separate mix for in-room PA and stream.

Result

• Delivered broadcast-quality town halls reaching thousands of employees globally.
• Remote employees reported feeling significantly more connected to company leadership.
• The production setup became the standard for all company-wide events — not just town halls but product launches, all-hands, and fireside chats.
• Zero production failures during live events thanks to redundant audio paths and backup streaming configurations.

Lessons Learned

Live production is a different discipline from IT infrastructure — it requires real-time troubleshooting with no room for error. We learned to always run a full dress rehearsal 48 hours before each event. Redundancy is essential: we ran dual audio interfaces and had a backup streaming laptop configured identically. The biggest surprise: the production quality directly impacted employee engagement survey scores. Professional AV signals that leadership values the time and attention of every employee, regardless of location.