I’ve attended all main Dreamhack events in some capacity (participant, crew, sponsor) since 1997. The first couple of years as a normal participant, starting in Borlänge and later in my home town Jönköping.
When Dreamhack moved to Jönköping me and a friend got an idea of setting up webcams and streaming the buildup and event for everyone to see. This was well before Twitch or any other platform that made it easy to stream your own video so we had to invent most of it ourself, and use equipment we had lying around.
Webcams wasn’t that common and the quality was very poor so the solution was to get hold of a couple of PCI video-in cards and borrow handheld VCR cameras. With gaffatape and pure will we mounted the cameras on the bleachers and beams and connected them to a dual Pentium 200.
With a program that fetched an image from the camera every second and saved it to disk we had the first part sorted. But to stream it we needed to create a video of some kind. I found a small Perl script that could load and concatenate JPEG images into a MJPEG stream that i modified for our use. As a frontend we used the smallest http-server we could find which was thttpd from acme.
Even with this monster computer and optimized setup (sic!) the poor server got overloaded all the time during buildup when the interest was at its peak.
Timelapse
As well as streaming the webcams out on the internet we saved each frame and created timelapse videos, those are still around and uploaded to Youtube.