Advanced Systems Group Collaborates with California School District to Provide Live Streaming Remotely
By Jamie G
Advanced Systems Group (ASG), a full-service production and post-production value added reseller in California recently collaborated with California’s Del Norte Unified School District (DNUSD) to create a remote solution to help the school district live stream sports, academic events and other activities. Since COVID restrictions were put in place, DNUSD wanted to create a live stream system to keep the community connected.
“We’re a small, rural community with a huge, diehard community of superfans and a lot of senior citizens who’ve lived here their entire lives and follow the school events. We’d been thinking of creating a live streaming system like this for a long time. Last summer, the State of California limited the number of guests who could attend graduation ceremonies and large events. The graduation date became our deadline to get this done. We wanted to get this set up for everyone in time for graduation and beyond.”
Michael Hawkins, director of communications, DNUSD
The setup included 14 BirdDog PTZ NDI Cameras which we helped distribute to ASG. The 14 cameras were spread throughout the campus with staff directing the streaming output from one central operations center. ASG choose BirdDog’s PTZ Cameras because of their fully featured NDI capabilities and because they offer outdoor PTZ cameras which DNUSD required. BirdDog’s A200 and A300 outdoor weatherproof cameras are perfect for the field and their P200 PTZ cameras are perfect for the classroom.
This is a fantastic showcase of the power of NDI and BirdDog PTZ cameras. We’re humbled that our gear played a part in enabling these important human connections through the pandemic.”
Eamon Drew, co-founder and CMO of BirdDog.
This live streaming setup was used for multiple school events including their 2022-22 football season. When the school received positive feedback from offering virtual events, they decided to install another five BirdDog PTZ cameras for their outdoor and indoor sports.
When creating the live streaming setup, range, durability and video quality were some of the top priorities to Hawkins team.
NDI was the initial draw to the BirdDog cameras because we’re very rural. We have 4,500 students in the largest geographic school district in the state. In terms of durability, there are no other PTZ camera built as solid as these. With all the wind and rain we get in the Pacific Northwest, that was important to us. And the video quality is full NDI, which is unlike most PTZ models. We have the network to handle it, so we want to make our coverage as good as possible.”
Ryan Bahten, director of information network services, DNUSD
DNUSD is not done yet. They are planning to build out their streaming capacity to more schools in the district. Hawkins says “Currently, we have three cameras in the Crescent Elk Middle School Auditorium. At Del Norte High School, there are multiple indoor cameras installed for basketball, volleyball, and wrestling. For our outdoor sports at Del Norte High, we have cameras at our soccer, baseball, softball, and football fields. We are currently in the process of installing cameras at our outdoor tennis courts and near our track fields. After we finish these installations, we plan on building out streaming capacity at all of our middle schools across the county to begin offering live-streaming to our community and career technical education to students interested in broadcasting and live-streaming.”
Kudos to ASG for helping DNUSD keep their community connected!