Quite possibly you have tried Livestream style video coverage at your Club. We all enjoyed Gladstone, Croatia and several North American championships on YouTube. It’s early days but probably we’re all going to have to learn how to do it.

At the Datchet Worlds it was hugely important for us to get it right. Worldwide expectations were extremely high but more importantly the Press Coverage (Y&Y and Livestream by Evergreen) took up one third of the Championship budget. It was hugely important that it was “good”.

We took some risks, but how do you think it went? Nigel was keen to step up to the commentary role and spent six whole long days trying hard to make the video engaging to the wide audience. Immensely hard to do. He did brilliantly.

https://www.youtube.com/@IOMWorlds2026

Nigel was of course getting loads of advice from all us experts everywhere – poor chap!! We’re all experts in watching sailing videos. Key advice though was to engage a larger audience by using skipper names, not simply sail numbers. Easy to say – hard to do when there’s 84 of them.

How??

Did you see how Nigel was doing it? Check any of the race videos and you’ll see that Nigel was constantly referring to a phone device in his left hand – scrolling with his left thumb – to get the skipper name (and result) information he needed.

If you click on this link using your phone, you will see what Nigel was seeing

https://connect.afleet.app/events/7G1umvd38yGVLemstzbX

Initially it was just to get Nigel (and Mark Jardine) the names and sail numbers to hand, but it was quickly obvious we could get them smack up to date results for each skipper too. How? We sent it from the Parallel Scoring systems. It was using a yet unannounced product called AFleet-Connect based on web servers in the US.

If you look through our workflow chart, after “Results Match?” you will see a box to the right in the Afleet column saying “Commentators Assistance Tool”.

That’s how we published it right there.

I was initially concerned after an incident at the Nationals with unapproved results getting out, that we might have a similar issue. You need one source of the truth in Results Publishing. But in the end, it was our brilliant new Parallel Scoring audit process that made it safe to issue. Absolutely every race completion saw us check every detail across HMS Excel and AFleet. It was only if we had precisely a 100% match, that I gave approval to the Team to release results. They went to the Official sources and Nigel/Mark’s handsets at the same time and the handset results were 100% identical to the HMS Results.

In the odd way of things, because the technology was so easy – we released the Commentators’ results from a tablet in New Zealand (our GlobalTeam!) and they reached the Commentary Team before the Scorers would have got their pins in the Clubhouse noticeboard …or before Austin popped the race results on to the website.

Update :

We have just deployed the same AFleet Connect technology at the DF65 Nationals at Barton’s Point. There the same feature was used to send results automatically (without webmaster intervention) to the East Kent Club website. Quite a few result updates were ‘sent’ from my kitchen many miles away !!!