The Californian recently launched "B Varsity Live," a multi-platform approach to covering the hectic Kern County high school football scene. 

The Friday night show is hosted by Louis Amestoy and produced and directed by our multimedia intern, Christopher McCullah. Sportswriter Zach Ewing is also front and center, sharing expert analysis on the night's games and developments, this after a crazy night of live blogging, Tweeting and writing a story for the next day's newspaper. 

The "BVarsity Live" show streams live via a Ustream player in various sections on BakersfieldCalifornian.com beginning at 11 p.m. Fridays. The plan is to stream for an hour, but this most recent show stretched about 10 minutes beyond that to include discussions and video of non-football sports and to take calls from viewers. 

The webcast culminates what is usually a busy night, with the @BVarsityLive Twitter feed building a digital community to help fans stay up on local scores and developments. Amestoy and McCullah both shoot video at different football games, then jam back to the office to edit and ingest that video on the fly. When you get back in the office 20 minutes before "air time," there's little time to prepare storylines, so Amestoy does a lot of riffing on the fly. That's OK. We have no inclination to mirror any of the prep-football programs on the local network affiliates. Those shows are perfectly fine -- we just think there's an opening to do something different. 

This show also serves as the flagship of The Californian's increasing focus on shooting local sports video at The Californian. You can find a lot more examples parked on our BakoTube channel. 

Longtime readers will remember I first wrote about Amestoy's foray into prep webcasting three years ago at the Riverside Press-Enterprise. "BVarsity Live" borrows a lot of the cost-effective tricks he's learned over the years (for example, the scoreboard is built with Google Docs, which allows multiple people to update it as fresh scores arrive). The show is powered by a mobile studio that we plan to use for remote events, whether planned or breaking. As you can see, we're not spending our money on pricey sets -- the emphasis is on the content, not the look so we're repurposing our newsroom conference room.  

"BVarsity Live" is a work in progress, but we're excited about the direction it's taking us.