It’s Been a Full Year Since we Launched OpenShift TV

Josh Wood, Erik Jacobs, and Chris Short beat Prometheus into shape after setting up a Sinatra app to monitor first, during one of our first live streams last May.

Just over a year ago, we launched OpenShift.TV amid the pandemic, providing unprecedented access and engagement with Red Hat’s experts and leaders to our community, customers and partners. Our charter was for content to be honest, unscripted and accessible, with no user registration required. We wanted to air live programming not to convince the audience that Red Hat has fantastic people and solutions (we think we do,) but instead to validate these assertions and help viewers take their ideas further with Red Hat. If you want to learn even more about a subject on a show, then feel free to opt-in to our newsletters and lists during a show for follow-up; otherwise, just keep learning and interacting!

In one year, executive Producer Chris Short and the team have produced over 540 hours of content -- all of which is archived. To put this into perspective, someone would need to sit down for three straight weeks, without sleep to watch everything the team has produced. It would be like binge-watching all current seasons of Game of Thrones on HBO and Orange is The New Black on Netflix -- three times.

The content is technical, relevant and varied, presented by the experts and leaders in their fields. This includes favorite recurring shows, like 

• “In the Clouds,” where viewers can interact with leaders from all over Red Hat.
• “The Level Up Hour” where traditional RHEL admins learn how to start leveraging containers and OpenShift.
• “Ask an OpenShift Admin” where viewers learn more about running and managing an OpenShift environment.

Additionally, we have our syndicated shows from the popular DevNation and OpenShift Commons brands. We took the “unprecedented access” mantra even further with our OpenShift product management team live streaming the roadmap for the world every few months -- THAT is open source.

However, Red Hatters doing what Red Hatters do on a daily basis for an audience is cool, but it’s the unscripted part that has provided some of the most memorable and sincere moments. Chris Short and I chatted recently, and he provided me some of his “biggest surprises.” 

• When asked about the biggest overall surprise for OpenShift.TV, Chris shared, “Honestly, the guests themselves. Maybe not so much a surprise, but very validating that we have such a great and open culture. From engineers to our executive leadership -- everyone is genuinely nice and engaging. It really made my job easier.”
• When discussing the “neatest” things we have done, “Wow, there are so many things -- even simulcasting across Twitch, YouTube, Facebook, and Periscope is really cool when you think about it, but overall it is how we are pushing the envelope on engagement with live quizzes and gamification. It’s amazing how many people love Langdon’s “Sweet, sweet internet points,” and it’s always fun when guests beat me at our quizzes.”
• Biggest surprise? “Rob Szumski, he is one of our OpenShift PMs (Product Managers), and to be honest, I was expecting a lot of the same when we have PMs on, but Rob completely caught me off guard. He showed up with a remote-controlled, away mode CNC machine in the Running a Kubelet without a Control Plane — Controlling the CNC machine and camera episode. Totally safe. We swear. The audience said Szumski was on a Tony Stark level.”

These are just a few of the highlights, as Chris had many. So whether it is a high-level executive that opens up themselves to questions from any and everyone, audience members battling wits with our hosts, or multi-billion dollar superheroes with product management as a day job, OpenShift.TV’s first year delivered. At a time when the world was becoming less connected, we wanted to provide a way to stay connected. Mission accomplished, and I cannot wait to see what is next!