December 31st, 11:42 PM. Nine minutes to midnight.
Marco didn’t panic. He opened vMix’s bridge. Within twenty seconds, he had re-routed Rio’s feed directly from their laptop in Copacabana, using cellular bonding through vMix’s built-in SRT support. Latency: 0.4 seconds.
“vMix doesn’t care about your hardware problems,” Marco said, almost smiling. “It just needs a network port and a GPU.”
“It’s a PC with a capture card, Marco,” he grumbled, staring at the Windows desktop. “One blue screen, and we’re a meme.”
Camera 7—the main wide shot of the stage—went black. Not a cable. Not a camera. The primary hardware switcher they’d kept as a backup “just in case” had overheated and died. Its fan failed at 11:43 PM.