As marketers look to up their game in live and on-demand video in 2023, Telestream® shared the approach of an executive chef who is doing just that. He is taking advantage of Telestream’s WirecastÔ easy-to-use professional live video streaming and production studio software to create new experiences for hotel guests as well as inspire and interact with the online food/cooking community on his social channels.

Jacob Burton is Executive Chef at the Renaissance Reno Downtown Hotel & Spa, a non-gaming, full-service hotel on the banks of the Truckee River. It features 200 guest rooms, bars, restaurants, conference venues, and an indoor/outdoor bocce court. It also features R\LAB, a unique, full-functioning restaurant and culinary event space where Burton and his team run hands-on cooking boot camps and private parties that give people a taste of the celebrity chef experience.

“R\LAB drops the curtain between front and back of house,” Burton explained. The space lets diners see exactly how the chefs work to prepare their food and gave Burton a venue to teach cooking classes and run culinary boot camps. A long-time creator of podcasts and instructional videos, Burton realized that the R\LAB could add another dimension to the live classes and also invite the online cooking community into the professional R\LAB kitchen by bringing his two passions together; equipping the kitchen to live-stream the classes on his YouTube and Facebook Live channels, and giving students the content to stream on their own channels.

The hotel installed eight 4K cameras to capture different angles around the kitchen, including overhead and stovetop shots to capture key actions. Burton uses Telestream Wirecast to capture, produce and stream his content. It includes tools like multi-camera switching, graphics, titles, and live encoding and enables him to re-edit live shows to produce short-form pieces, and to engage with live audiences by displaying curated social media comments live on-screen during his live casts.

Because he is both teaching the classes and producing the live casts, Burton needs a solution that’s extremely simple. “Wirecast is a one-stop shop. I don’t need to hire an audio producer, video producer and someone to wire all the cameras together. I just plug myself in via Wirecast’s Firewire feature, fire it up, and I can see the sources. It just works. I love the intuitive layering, so I can put titles and names over shots — it just makes everything easy.”

While Burton engages directly with students on-site in the classes, he missed the direct interaction when producing instructional videos or livestreams for the online community. “The social media features that Wirecast has is what takes the entire experience to the next level. Being able to curate and interact with comments when they come in makes the experience interactive; it makes it a conversation and changes the whole dynamic.”

Burton noted the difficulty of social posting with OBS (free open-source streaming software). “It’s super complex. With Wirecast I just log into my YouTube account or Facebook page, wherever I want to live stream, and I hit the ‘live’ button. At the end of the day, I’m a content creator, not a programmer. Having a program that just works, and is intuitive, was a game changer for me.”

Chef Burton has created more than 200 instructional cooking videos, including 30 live streams. His YouTube channel has 179,000 followers.