A live discussion (YouTube webinar) about whether building a B2B virtual studio is prohibitively expensive. The hosts solicit audience estimates (ranging roughly 10k–125k) and Speaker B explains that their build cost about £/€/$20k for kit (including a rehearsal day and full build), which also covered rental of the warehouse space in Oxfordshire. The studio used creative production techniques (e.g., a live window with a Boston cityscape feed and a mix of local and remote panelists) to reduce perceived cost and create a convincing location effect.
Chapters
What about the. So there is a barrier within media and event organizers that they say, oh, a studio that's too expensive. Right. And I'm not asking you to share specific numbers and everything, but I think it will be helpful if you can share some context around that label. Oh, is it too expensive? It takes too much, it's too much work. So, yeah, can you talk us a little bit about that kind of element, how you would advise someone to overcome that barrier of that label?
Yeah, so, I mean, I'd be really interested actually, from the audience perspective just for them to potentially throw some numbers into the Q and A and what they think we would spend in terms of kit and production. I'd be really intrigued by that. Ricardo.
Audience, do you want to put it in the chat panel? How much do you guys think Adam spent building on tech, building his studio?
Right.
When you say tech, are you referring to, okay, sets, chairs, lighting and all that stuff?
Yeah, exactly that. So I would say. I'd say lighting, set build. Cameras. What else have we got? Yeah, like, you know, sort of vision mixers, etc. I'm not including the behind, I'm not including the. We put Spot Me behind the scenes. So we integrated our studio with Spot Me. We had that as our networking platform. Don't include that because I think that's.
Don't include any event, like any event logistics, like the usual virtual tech. Just talk about this stuff. Okay, so we're saying. Someone's saying 125k. Anyone else wants to have a punter?
There's a 50. There's a 50k from Oliver McCourt. 85k. Any other numbers coming through? Silk 7 and 10. There's some big variants. 10. Yeah. What's interesting is that the sort of. The hidden cost here. I'll just let. I'll see if there's a few more before we. I will talk about it. But the. What's interesting is that the sort of the hidden cost was time. Team time. You know, our sort of. Our events team, which is a very lightly staffed events team. Their time really was. The way they used their time changed materially during this. You know, they spent a large amount of time working with the sponsors and actually we ended up bringing in a lot. We brought in our events producer for our awards program to manage that and work with our own event operations manager because we felt like our awards program is a very highly choreographed evening that works to time and we felt that that was close to how that studio worked, as it were. We got any more numbers coming In.
Yeah, no, we've got. Basically we've got anything from 10 up into 125. But, yeah, probably the majority of people kind of think that was around. Yeah, let's say north of 30k, 40k, 50.
Yeah, I mean, it was. You know, there's going to be a lot of ways to cut this budget, but we spent roughly 20k on that kit, tops. And that was. That included a rehearsal day, full build, and of course, we now own a lot of that set as well. So, you know, we invested. Some of it was. Some of it was kind of leased in, some of it we bought, etc. So, yeah, about 20k, which.
About 20k. There you go. So it doesn't really have to be that high. That high. And then he was saying it includes rental of the spec. Actually, it would be. It's fair to clarify that you build a studio in a warehouse in Oxfordshire.
We did, yeah, we built.
Did that include the rental of the space?
That did. That included the rental of the space. And actually the way we built the set was that we built a Skylar. We built a window into the set with a. With a live stream from a Boston harbor cityscape. And we only had. Because it was obviously a North American panel, we. We only had North American panelists. You know, we had a live North American panelist in the studio and the rest was all videoed in with us with a screen at the back. So actually most of our. And we were never asked the question, are you hosting this in Oxford or in North America? But the assumption from our audience was that it was in Boston, which we kind of, you know, we kind of enjoyed, actually. Amazing.
Amazing. That's kind of pretty good. So you've touched on the. So I hope we've removed aspects on the. On the element about the financial. It doesn't really have to cost a lot. As long as you're creative, as long as you kind of think outside the box and how you could undertake that, you've demonstrated that. Amazing. For clarity purposes, the studio still is still sitting in that warehouse in Oxford.
