From recorded to live

At 7.10 pm on 26 November 2025, Gabriel Coimbra, Partner at GoingNext, welcomed the room at the Casino Estoril, which was taking its seats for the 10th Axians Portugal Digital Awards. Nobody watching at home saw him at that hour. We were recording, and the broadcast was scheduled for 8.30 pm.

We produced the livestream for Expresso, the Portuguese weekly, which was media partner of the awards, on Expresso's LinkedIn and on Axians' YouTube channel. GoingNext organised the evening. Two of us went from agora, Bruno Amaral and Rafael Reigota, with four cameras set up in the morning for a broadcast that only happened at night. The opening photo, with all the winners on stage at the end, is by Matilde Fieschi, of Expresso.

A ceremony with a dinner in the middle

In the room, the evening followed the order of any gala: the welcome at 7.10 pm, the Secretary of State for Digitalisation at 7.25 pm, dinner at 7.45 pm and the awards at 9.15 pm. At the table, an hour and a half of dinner goes by quickly. At home, an hour and a half of cutlery is a long time to sit staring at a screen.

Axians wanted the people at home to get the ceremony without the dinner. We recorded the opening before the room sat down to eat and kept it in vMix, like a covered plate waiting to go out to the table, until broadcast time. In the broadcast, Gabriel Coimbra is followed by Carmo Palma, Managing Director of Axians Portugal, and then by the Secretary of State, Bernardo Correia, with about twenty minutes at the lectern. He spoke once, at 7.25 pm, and was heard twice, by the room and, more than an hour later, by the people at home, without having to repeat a word.

Bruno sums up the evening in one sentence: "the people who were there watched a ceremony with a dinner in the middle, the people at home watched a ceremony without interruptions."

Ten minutes that shrank

There are events that start on time and there are the others, and galas with dinner tend to be among the others. The plan had slack for that, like leaving home ten minutes early so as not to miss the train. The recording would end, at 9.05 pm a live wide shot of the room would go up with "starting soon" along the bottom, and at 9.15 pm the awards would begin.

The room ran late, and we were asked to start the broadcast a little later. Bruno tells me the margin was needed. The recording of the broadcast shows how it was used up: the Secretary of State finishes, the wide shot of the room stays on air for a few seconds, and the host, Marta Atalaya, a journalist with the Portuguese TV channel SIC, is already at the lectern. I have a difficult relationship with holding screens, and that night ours lasted a few seconds.

The handover from recording to live was the critical point of the night, the moment when the time in the room and the time on air became the same again. The recording was playing out of vMix and cut straight to the live wide shot. Bruno remembers it as "all normal".

Four cameras and just over an hour of awards

Two cameras stood at the sides, close to the stage, and two in the centre, at the top of the audience. One of them spent the night locked off on a wide shot, as still as a doorman watching everyone come and go. The images on this page without an Expresso credit came from these four: the host, the winner holding his trophy, the three winners in front of the logo.

The stage fills up often. Winners almost always come up in groups, two or three at a time, and the shot has to take them all in without cutting off the trophy. In the broadcast, the awards run for just over an hour and end with all the winners in a line, the photo at the top of this article.

At home, the ceremony went from start to finish without a plate in sight, and Expresso published our broadcast in its article on the evening (in Portuguese).