Birddog & WebRTC Live Remote Production
By Adam Noyes
“After we went through all the emotions of losing our full season, we started going through how we were going to bring the sport to the world during the COVID crisis.”
Josh Glazebrook, AVP Creative Director
THE PROBLEM
When delivering elite live beach volleyball to global fans around the world, Amazon Prime and NBC turned to the Millicast real time streaming service and BirdDog IP cameras to ensure their producers have a high-quality, low latency live feed for remote production.
AVP is the premiere Pro Beach Volleyball league featuring the world’s elite players. In 2020, AVP, like many sports organizations, had to postpone it’s competition schedule due to stay-at home orders.
However, it returned to competition in July with the first of three tournaments to be held in Long Beach, California. With no fans in attendance, AVP wanted to find a way to engage and interact with their audience.
THE SOLUTION
To make sure the best views and angles, rallies and spikes, were enjoyed by viewer, the producers turned to Millicast’s WebRTC platform to enable their remote production team to view and mix multiple feeds in real-time.
This use case was unique because both the production and delivery of the stream were made possible with near-zero latency with a geographically distributed team running consumer grade software and hardware over a public internet connection.
This is a new standard in sports streaming.
THE WORKFLOW
High-quality BirdDog PTZ (pan-tilt-zoom) cameras are controlled by remote operators, and the stream sent to remote editors via the WebRTC media protocol. WebRTC is the fastest, most reliable, streaming protocol available today.
The editors then mix the streams and send the final output to Amazon Prime Video viewers around the world.
All of this – from court to viewer – in less than a second.
“We have a really great group who have worked around the clock to make this happen. It has been a journey, but everyone has come together, and we’re excited to bring this to the fans.”
Josh Glazebrook, AVP Creative Director
Read the original article here!