Behind the Scenes

with SimonTV LIVE

Presenting and producing a live broadcast concurrently takes a bit of doing.

Presenting is the priority because the audience needs to be entertained but there are a lot of knobs and dials to control in the background. I have to perform both functions, almost entirely by myself.

SimonTV LIVE is simulcast to ten different platforms, sometimes twelve. There are two cameras and two microphones pointing at me and I’m wearing two earpieces so I can listen to different channels. When guests come on I need to switch in their audio and video too. There is data going everywhere.

Fortunately my friend PLJ stepped in a few months ago to moderate the text chat and operate the Green Room where guests arrive. Thank goodness he did, as it all became too much to manage and I’d regularly suffer from task overload.

Here’s a look behind the scenes. This is what I see when you’re watching SimonTV, a large 42” monitor stacked with everything I need to see to run the show:

I detest context switching in my everyday life, it’s why I have a big monitor. Studies show that productivity, particularly for males, diminishes significantly when a person has to tab between windows to make them visible. People work better when all the information is presented and accessible at a glance.

Despite appearances my workspace is arranged specifically to comply with this philosophy. The three windows that are occluded are applications I need to see but generally don’t need to touch: they’re stacked in a manner to present just the salient information.

“What about all that wasted grey space in the middle?” I hear you ask. “Isn’t that the most valuable screen real estate and you’re wasting it?”

It is indeed. And corresponds to the area occupied by the main camera and the swing arm it’s mounted to. During the show I have a camera right in my face and the workspace is arranged around it:

A lot can go wrong and when it does, diagnosing and resolving the issue rapidly is the objective. I actually can’t problem solve and present at the same time, it’s too much to think about while talking. During BAU I play old cinema and music as interludes to afford myself the time to attend to the production aspects and prepare for the next segment. In a crisis the audio-visuals me the time to rectify problems while the audience at least has something to watch.

Philosophically I love that technology has commoditised broadcasting to the degree that an Average Joe like myself can do it but it is a stretch. The minimal (let alone optimal) configuration in my opinion would consist of three people: two presenting and one producing. With it I could dispense with the audio-visual fillers and focus solely on the presenting message rather than the production medium.

It’s fair to say I push the limits though, by including a variety of features on SimonTV LIVE other presenters don’t.

-SRA. Auckland, 8/iii 2026.