WOW. Safe to say nobody could have predicted this outcome.
Haha - no kidding! Cool to see Johnston move up a spot and prove a lot of naysayers wrong. Truly the only thing you could predict is that it would be unpredictable... But I kind of wondered if Lincoln SW would be a bit of a spoiler - I really enjoyed their shows that have been put up on YouTube, and thought they were terrific last year. I'm anxious to see Ankeny and Prairie now - and of course the rest of Johnston's show.
Guess that's official! Whew - close one. I didn't want to predict anything out of fear of being wrong! When I saw this line up, I knew it would end up being a major challenge to make the top 6 - so huge congrats to Innovation - this marks the 23rd consecutive year they've made the top 6 at the Urbandale finals, and at least 25 / 26 years (the only year I know we missed was 1990 - and they were finalists in '88 & '89 - anything before that I have NO clue about!).
Pity about the live feed - but it was certainly worth a shot and the effort put into it. Maybe next year?
I'll try to enjoy 10 second snipets of the finalists through the night in between buffering bumps - should be a great show.
The day round has come to an end:
How I rank the choirs- my personal predictions only-
1st- Ankeny (BV)
2nd- Wheaton (BC)
3rd-Happiness
4th-Prarie
5th Lincoln SW
Okay. Well since the live feed is on buffering infinity, I just went ahead and started watching videos from past competitions with these groups.
So predictions (as always, I'm not from the Midwest, so definitely not an expert lol):
GC: CR Kennedy (BV)
1RU: WWS (BC)
2RU: Prairie
3RU: Lincoln Southwest
4RU: Ankeny
5RU: Johnston
I could see Johnston doing better too, of course only based on one YouTube video. And maybe Totino could move up to finals. Also, I'm sure the top two spots are going to be REALLY close, so I thought why not put Kennedy on top, since everyone else is choosing WWS--Kennedy's show looked and sounded pretty awesome on YouTube.
Okay...so the video stream was apparently a problem. I thought all was well, but then I was watching it from inside the school over our internal network's wireless. My apologies to any that tried to view it and had issues with drops and stuttering.
Thanks for the update Mr. Temple. Live streaming is a lot more challenging than people realize. When I've done it at different events, I've had to go through a 3rd party provider to get the bandwidth necessary; basically you just send them one stream and then they blast it out to the hundreds or even thousands of people who want to view it at the same time. Most school internet connections aren't going to be able to support a separate video connection for every user who wants to watch (although there are exceptions; Milton High School's live feed has been pretty successful over the years and I believe they do it in-house). I appreciate the opportunity to get a window into the competition in any capacity, and I believe that even the attempt is worth it... it's exciting to see more schools trying it and as I said earlier, I hope it's a trend that will catch on. As time goes by, this will all become easier to do.
