NDI Powers a Stay-at-Home Graphics Operator

Rob Moser could be in trouble. He’s working on the TV crew for tonight’s United Soccer League match between the Pittsburgh Riverhounds and FC Montreal, it’s three minutes to game time, and Moser is still in his kitchen. Worse yet, he lives more than 120 miles from the soccer venue. But Moser is unconcerned. With both teams on the field, ready to start the game, he pours himself a cup of coffee and walks back to his home office. In the production truck parked along the banks of the Monongahela River in downtown Pittsburgh, director John Powell notices Moser’s absence. “Graphics, are you there?” he calls out over headsets. Moser sits down at his home computer and turns up his speaker. “Graphics is ready to go,” he says. “Do you want to start with line-ups?” And the game begins. For the next three hours, every graphic generated for the soccer broadcast, every score panel, every player’s name, every substitution, every game clock, will be generated in real time from Rob Moser’s office in Millersburg, Ohio, a small town in the heart of Ohio’s Amish country. Horse drawn buggies ply the streets, and yet, Millersburg is at the center of a technical revolution in video production. Something groundbreaking is happening here. Thanks to NewTek’s NDI technology, Moser is able to do his job from the comforts of his own home, saving himself eight hours of travel time to and from the game site, and saving the production company the expense of traveling him.

NDI: A Revolutionary Technology NDI, which stands for Network Device Interface, is a revolutionary innovation that is changing the face of remote video production. Thanks to NDI, Moser can run graphics for any television production from his home, provided that production is being produced with an NDI-enabled switcher like a TriCaster running NewTek’s Advanced Edition software. The Novatel Wireless 4G LTE router is also the key that allows Moser to view Powell’s cameras through NDI, providing plenty of bandwidth to provide Moser access to the truck’s compliment of cameras. And Moser isn’t limited to working out of his office. He could do his job from anywhere with sufficient bandwidth.

“I’m just running a MacBook Pro,” he tells me. “I’m running Boot Camp on it, and then, using TeamViewer to connect to the truck. My network connectivity is nothing special out here in this rural area. I could do this almost anywhere.”

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