Teradek Encoding Live Streamed Time Square New Year Eve

Thanks to the Teradek Cube 655 encoder this production company successfully roamed and captured festivities around the Ball Drop in Times Square this last New Years Eve. In the article below you can get a feel for their workflow and how they met the challenges of a big production that needed reliable streaming of b-roll footage to really capture the scope of the event. From theBroadcastBridge.com

...The Live X team used three ENG cameras each equipped with a Teradek Cube 655 encoder and a Silvus StreamCaster transmitter feeding a Cube decoder located onboard Live X’s HD production truck. They secured a reliable feed by using an underground fiber circuit to the company’s master control facility in the Hudson Yards section of NYC before final distribution via a dedicated Verizon Fios line. They also had a second Fios line as a backup.

While Live X had its own stage with cameras, the roaming cameras helped capture on-screen host Jonathan Bennett as he interviewed revelers and captured general audience B-roll footage for insertion into the program as needed.

The Silvus StreamCaster is a military-grade variable bitrate transmitter that can transport audio and video at up to 100Mbps to receivers up to eight blocks away. This was paired with Teradek’s Cube 655, a real-time, scalable video encoder for point-to-point video transport. Once the Cube encoded the video into the MPEG-TS (transport stream) format, the StreamCaster transmitted it via a 5.2Ghz link using multiple range extenders back to the broadcast truck. A Cisco switch on the truck received the data and sent it to a Cube decoder, which decoded the video and pushed it to the switcher. The final video was then sent to Live X’s master control room in the Hudson Yards....[continue reading]