The story of CNL3 Productions

CNL3 Productions is ready to help livestream your event — to a private audience, a pay-per-view audience, or the world.

CNL3 co-founder Jeff Noedel, 65 — who started out as a broadcast television producer in 1982, has innovated on the internet from the beginning.

Noedel loved digital connectivity so much, he created a sort of internet e-commerce network in 1992, two years before the widescale roll-out of the internet. Technically, Noedel’s e-commerce invention was known as an “EDI-VAN,” electronic data interchange value-added network. Noedel’s EDI-VAN was named PrintertCom. It was an electronic marketplace where buyers of commercial printing could shop for quotes among St. Louis commercial printers. Modems were still a novelty. Noedel sold Hayes 2400 baud modems to PrinterCom customers from the trunk of his car. Data connections were so rare in office meeting rooms that Noedel brought along a bulky “bag phone” to connect a demo computer to the Printercom network.

In 1996, when the internet was just three years old, Noedel produced a web page for a telecommunications client that featured a short animated clip explaining what a “SONET” self-healing fiber optic ring is. The clip ran only a few seconds, and it took a long time to load at 1996 baud rates, but there it was. Very early streaming of an animation on a web page. But it wasn’t time yet.

In 2010, Noedel innovated in streaming again, this time the nascent world of livestreaming. As publisher of CountyNewsLIVE.com in rural Mid-Missouri, Noedel used the UStream platform (now owned by CBS). Using a smartphone connected to 3G cell towers, Noedel streamed footage live from Washington, Missouri as the Missouri River was overflowing its banks. Months later, CountyNewsLIVE livestreamed a Hermann High School football game through the town’s 2G tower. It was a spotty livestream at best. It wasn’t time yet, at least in rural Missouri.

But a broadcast engineer from one of St. Louis’ television stations watched, and that station quickly followed. Then a second St. Louis television station followed them, leveraging St. Louis far-superior cell networks.

Today, livestreaming is common. People livestream over their phones and laptops with ease. But high-quality multi-camera broadcast-level video livestreams are still out of reach for most people and small businesses.

That’s why, at CNL3, Noedel and co-founder Jeremy Tyler, 35, are pushing the livestreaming envelope again. Our aim is to make broadcast-quality livestreaming widely accessible. We are perfecting two levels of production values tied to 2 different prices.

We live in a paradox today, in which audiences are consolidating into social media — including YouTube and Facebook. But from these huge platforms, audiences are fragmenting into an infitnite number of niches. So it’s harder than ever to reach target audiences with precision through legacy television. CNL3 livestreaming delivers compelling live content in these large social platforms (or to your own website) at a price that allows you to livestream big, and livestream often.