The Buzz
The Buzz
THE most-oft-uttered words in Hilo at this time of year are, "Merrie Monarch." ’Tis the season for
Hilo’s Merrie MonarchHilo's crown jewel of the year, the Merrie Monarch Festival, begins tomorrow as flights to Hilo get full, rental cars become impossible to find and women with hundreds of braids in their hair stop through Longs to get last-minute pre-competition needs.
There is also likely to be no room at the inn with the event sold out as usual.
However, there will be room aplenty to watch the Hula competition on television and via the Internet. Last year's competition was streamed over the Internet by Evolution Hawaii LLC, comprised of co-owners Daniel Fernandez and Kristopher Herrick.
Their labor of love is viewable at www.merriemonarchlive.com.
Fernandez said he called the festival office last year to ask about setting up streaming video and he was referred to KITV, which for years has broadcast the competition live.
"They let us have a go of it," he said. "We had a two-week lead time to put the site together, and put the technology together."
Once the competition was over, Fernandez said they had to begin caching the content, choosing a player for Web surfers to use to see the video and hear the audio.
"We worked a lot with the users to determine which was the best way to tweak our content," Fernandez said, adding "it was amazing, we got a lot of response from people around the world." Some of that response was an inquiry from Sony Interactive about the technology being used on the site.
Evolution Hawaii is an Internet integration company, and can be found at http://www.evolutionh.com.
In spite of what Fernandez called "total out-of-pocket expense," he said emphatically that "It was a great experience -- it's been a really good feather in our cap."
This year, Fernandez said, KITV will do the streaming via its own Web site, http://www.thehawaiichannel.com, but "we will be linking to them because everybody's still e-mailing me -- we're going to help out our community and help everyone link to the stream."
Erika Engle is a reporter with the Star-Bulletin.
Call 529-4757, fax 529-4750 or write to Erika Engle,
Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 500 Ala Moana Blvd., No. 7-210,
Honolulu, HI 96813. She can also be reached
at: eengle@starbulletin.com