Zoom farm. Before Zoom.

Hong Kong was on fire. The broadcast desk was in New York.

April 2019. The anti-extradition protests in Hong Kong were ramping up to what would become the largest mass-protest movement of the decade. Journalists were on the ground. The story was breaking weekly. The audience needed live coverage with broadcast-grade quality — but the production architecture for doing that with a small distributed team didn’t exist yet.

This was 2019. Pre-pandemic. Before the “creator economy” saturated the conversation. Before iPhone-as-newsgathering-camera was the norm. Before Zoom became broadcast-integration shorthand. The tooling for mixing broadcast-grade switchers with consumer-grade endpoints — phones, tablets, video-conferencing apps — was not productized. Most broadcasters did remote production by flying a satellite truck to the story.

We had a 5-person team. We had three cities. We had a weekly cadence to hit. The architecture didn’t exist. So we built it.

A Zoom farm. Eighteen months before the world had a name for it.

We integrated broadcast-grade production with AV/IT-grade tools — what later (during COVID) would be called a “Zoom farm” pattern. In 2019, this didn’t exist as a pattern. We were building it from first principles.

Studio (NYC): Blackmagic switchers, Yamaha sound boards, Canon and Sony broadcast cameras, journalists in front of the lens.

Field (Hong Kong): Everyman reporters with phones and tablets — consumer-grade endpoints feeding into a broadcast-grade pipeline. This was years before content-creator-on-a-phone became the cliché shorthand it is today.

Connective tissue: Skype. We used the consumer video-conferencing layer as the broadcast bridge. The same pattern Zoom would inherit and dominate post-2020.

Geographic redundancy: A backup site in Las Vegas with full hand-off capability. If New York went down, Vegas could pick up the show.

Five people. Three time zones. Six months.

The team was blended — internal staff, vendors, and on-the-ground volunteers. Five people total reporting into me as Interim Media Director. The daily standup synchronized New York, Las Vegas, and Hong Kong — three time zones, one weekly broadcast cadence.

We managed a global production budget. We coordinated with field journalists who’d never run a broadcast feed before. We trained vendors on a tool stack that didn’t have documentation because we’d just built it. We shipped weekly broadcasts for six months under the pressure of an actively-developing political story with global media attention.

By the time my contract ended in September 2019, the channel had grown +35.6% (from 204,345 to ~277,000 subscribers), captured 80+ hours of broadcast content across the period, and accumulated 9.3M+ cumulative views on the sampled videos. Marquee broadcasts in the window included a 2-hour-49-minute Bannon × Guo dialogue (April 20, 225K views) and the viral Sixtus Leung Chung-hang HK lawmaker connection (June 28, 32:56 runtime, 163K views).

The proof-of-concept I built at Gau Media in 2019 didn’t stay a proof-of-concept. I took the architecture directly to American Movie Company, where I iterated on it over the following years to build Skytron — the proprietary broadcast technology that became AMC’s production backbone. The same architectural DNA — remote-first, broadcast-grade-meets-AV/IT-grade, multi-endpoint — was used on:

And what I learned from running Gau’s Zoom farm in Hong Kong was the playbook I used to lead the Weight Watchers 6-Day Pivot — 14,000 in-person workshops to 4,000 virtual studios in 144 hours when COVID hit in March 2020. Same architecture. Pandemic-scale. And the same architectural lineage runs through FedTV at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — federal-grade Tier-3 broadcast engineering for the G30 / G12 communications, 100% reliability under the strictest security posture I’ve ever worked in.

Six years of iterating on what we built at Gau Media in 2019 has settled VAAV Industries into a specific kind of leader: the team you call when you need a non-standard space turned into a full production suite — fast.

The Hong Kong proof-of-concept proved you could mix broadcast-grade switchers with consumer-grade endpoints across three time zones. The WW 6-Day Pivot proved you could replicate that architecture into 14,000 coaches’ living rooms in 144 hours. Skytron proved the same DNA could carry Netflix-tier marquee work. FedTV proved it under federal-grade security.

What VAAV does today is the synthesis of all of it. Four recent proof points say it best:

Four different angles of the same thesis: speed (rehearsal studio → production studio in 2 hours), most-non-standard space (housing-project courtyard → concert venue), mid-flight architecture pivot (hybrid town hall → fully remote with proprietary + vMix), and audience pivot (same broadcast studio → kid-friendly education workflow). One discipline running underneath all four.

From a Hong Kong proof-of-concept in 2019 — through Netflix marquee, pandemic-scale virtual studios, federal-grade broadcast — to a working thesis: whatever room you’ve got, we’ll make it broadcast-grade. In hours, not days.

I keep iterating on the proprietary knowledge from Gau, Skytron, and the WW pivot for clients who need a non-standard space turned into a real production environment. A short tour of recent and current engagements:

Same architectural DNA. From 2019 in Hong Kong, to 2026 designing broadcast rooms for hedge fund clients, civic broadcast for the NYC Council, lighting plots at the UN, and 30-camera live-to-air builds inside historic churches. The knowledge compounds.

And the principals call back. The Greek Bicentennial (Hello World, 2021) earned the trust that brought me back through American Movie Company for the Patriarch’s consecration of the Ground Zero Greek Orthodox Shrine in 2022 — the same Patriarch on my desk thirteen months later. AudienceView / TheaterMania brought me back during COVID to spin down the NYC office I’d originally helped them stand up. TriTech brought me back several years after the AudienceView engagement to put me on the broadcast desk at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — FedTV / G30 / G12 federal-grade communications. The pattern is repeat business in the high-stakes lanes: religious broadcast, financial broadcast, federal broadcast. The architecture is the why. The repeat hire is the proof.

And the pattern isn’t recent. It started before any of the three tracks I’m about to describe.

Track 0 — JDTV (Aug 1997 – Sep 2001). Four years, two months as Sports Director at JDTV. Reframe whatever “high school TV station” image just popped into your head. JDTV wasn’t a school AV club. It was a professional, self-funded, independent broadcast operation that happened to be based at Juneau-Douglas High School. We ran it like a station because it was one.

The business model. We wrote grants. We sold copies of productions as revenue. We raised money from the Juneau community to fund the group. We got paid by the district to run external events as a production vendor — the district hired us the way any other production company gets hired. We installed and maintained our own hardware. We owned our own gear. We produced our own shows. The operation paid its own bills.

What we shipped. Telethons. Every Juneau high-school sport — sidelines, crow’s nest, balcony cameras. I was the on-air play-by-play voice for football and basketball, and that on-air work continued onto NBC during my KATH-TV tenure. We floor-directed for KJUD, the ABC affiliate. We worked with ESPN for regional basketball tournaments. We covered — and produced the scout tapes for — Carlos Boozer, the future NBA Hall of Famer, during his two-year Alaska state championship run at JDHS. We covered Comtech — one of the biggest tech industry conferences of the era — including Bill Gates and Howard Charney of Cisco Systems. We technically produced and directed the Southeast Alaska leg of the Slick Shoes and 5 Iron Frenzy US tour. We covered both state-wide and municipal elections.

And we transformed the channel itself. When we started, GCI channel 6 was a bulletin-board station — static slides on a loop. By the time we were done, we were sending footage to Anchorage for major broadcast across all three major networks (NBC, ABC, CBS). A self-funded production house took a slide-loop cable channel and turned it into a working Southeast Alaska news bureau.

The peer cohort is the proof of what JDTV produced. Two collaborators from that era went on to become Alaska broadcast-infrastructure leaders in their own right: Mikko Wilson — two-time Alaska Goldie winner, 2011 Alaska Broadcaster of the Year, Production Manager at KTOO / 360 North, and the person who runs JDTV today. Jake Carpenter — Juneau-based, designed and built the Alaska Legislature’s live HD video streaming system, through which all committee meetings and legislative proceedings stream today. Three operators from the same independent broadcast operation, three independent careers building the broadcast-streaming infrastructure of the era.

The KATH-TV work I describe below started directly out of JDTV — same operator, same town, same studio relationships. Same with the UAS engagements. The infrastructure I’m known for didn’t start in 2001 in a corporate IT department. It started in 1997 in an independent broadcast operation we ran ourselves — grants, copies, community funds, district contracts — that happened to share a building with a high school.

And then in 2001–2003 in Juneau, while my JDTV tenure was wrapping, I was running three industry-foundational engineering tracks in parallel — not sequentially, not as separate jobs years apart. At the same time.

Track 1 — KATH-TV: FCC digital transition. The NBC/UPN affiliate in Juneau where I held three separate hire cycles. Won three Alaska Broadcasting Association Goldie Awards on Master Control / Camera / Edit. And served as one of the engineers working on the FCC-mandated transition from analog to digital broadcast standards. Every American watching broadcast television today is watching on the digital infrastructure that engineers like me stood up at affiliates across the country in this window.

Track 2 — UAS / IT: the streaming backbone. Concurrently, in the UAS IT department, I built a Windows-based live streaming server from scratch. That server became the backbone for the entire UAS distance-education initiative — multi-codec (Windows Media, QuickTime, RealPlayer) and multi-distribution simulcast across terrestrial broadcast, cablecast, and satellite. Early-model PTZ cameras (years before they became ubiquitous), a Java-based chat portal for live audience interaction, a broadcast headend with custom overlays. The first “Zoom farm before Zoom” pattern in my career — twenty years before COVID forced everyone to figure it out.

Track 3 — UAS / Wireless: NASA RID grant. Also concurrently, the wireless-innovation work that earned the NASA RID Grant for innovations in wireless technology. The deliverable: a fully wireless campus. Every classroom. Every coffee shop. Every cafeteria. The dorms. The quad. All of it. We built it with a combination of wireless access points and Radiax radiating coaxial cable — leaky-line distributed antennas that we buried in the ground, ran above ceilings, and pulled through walls to get RF coverage into every corner of the physical campus. The result: UAS became the first campus in North America fully wired for WiFi. That sounds trivial in 2026 because WiFi is in every coffee shop on earth. In 2001–2003 it was groundbreaking RF infrastructure engineering, and we set the standard.

Digital broadcast, multi-codec streaming, and campus wireless — three industry-foundational categories of infrastructure, running simultaneously, before any of them was a category yet. Then in 2006–2007, UAS brought me back as Master Control Operations / Camera Operator / Broadcast Technician for the twice-weekly distance-education production — running shows on top of the streaming server I’d built three years earlier. Same operator, both sides of the build/operate loop.

This is the real positioning. Not “remote-first broadcast specialist” — that’s a category that exists now. The actual claim is: I have quietly been building the tech that built the industry, for decades. The FCC-mandated analog-to-digital broadcast transition. The first North American campus fully wired for WiFi. Streamed university classes. Multi-codec broadcast simulcast. PTZ cameras as a workflow. Live audience chat layered over broadcast. Remote-first newsgathering with consumer endpoints feeding broadcast pipelines. Each of these was novel when I shipped it. Each of them is now table stakes — or in the case of the digital-broadcast transition, it’s the literal infrastructure every American watches television on.

The clients I work with today aren’t hiring a category specialist. They’re hiring the operator who shipped the original.

Same pattern, twenty years earlier. This is what I do — come in, build the thing right, leave the bones in, and get called back the next time it matters.