Subject – How Sports Broadcasting Work flows, including edits at home and live delivery are being revolutionised using IBM Aspera
Speaker – Per Hansen, Regional Manager, Sales Engineering Europe, IBM
The final speaker on the Sports Broadcast Conference was Per Hansen of IBM.
Mr Hansen opened his presentation by talking about the challenges of transporting video streams over large distances at high rates.
The speaker highlighted the most common choices of doing this and the issues faced.
Satellite
- Very Expensive
- Requires Large physical footprint
- Difficult to integrate with production tools
- Not available ‘on demand’
- Remote mobile satellite production is expensive and requires lots of moving parts
High Speed Fiber & Dedicated Circuits
- Cost Prohibitive
- Requires dedicated connectivity to the Fiber provider
- Long haul WANs can cause uncertainty and degradation in quality
- Not widely available enough at production venues.
Mr Hansen then went through the key features and capabilities of IBM’s Aspera, which:
Supports the transport of live video with broadcast quality over commodity internet networks, globally, with glitch-free play out and negligible start-up time.
Software solution supporting virtually any video types, encoding, formats and hardware.
Supports live video, growing files and adaptive bit rates from transcoding workflows and media servers.
During the FIFA World Cup in Russia, Fox Sports used IBM’s Aspera to overcome the challenge of covering 64 matches over 31 days, with matches played in 12 stadiums across 11 cities – getting the HD feeds streamed live to Los Angeles for remote editing in its state-of-the-art production facility.
This was the largest live production in FOX Sports history and was undertaken with the help of IBM’s Aspera.
