Pro Streaming for Juniors | Telestream Wirecast
By Jim Bask
From Telestream
Pontus Eklof, COO of LiveAreno, was quick to realise the potential of the Internet as a means of distribution. He used this headstart to carve a unique niche in youth sportscasting across the Nordics
Around 15 years ago, a group of Swedish broadcast veterans got excited about the shift from analogue to digital TV that was taking place in countries around the world. The digital switchover (still in progress in some countries) promised an increased channel space, greater opportunity for niche channels, new types of interactivity and a host of other features. But the new technology didn’t quite meet their expectations, as Pontus Eklof, COO of Internet broadcast company, LiveArena remembers.
Eklof says,”Quite early on we realised this wasn’t going to be the big game changer. We saw that the significant change was actually going to be on the Internet, not in the switch from analogue to digital. So we started looking at what it was possible to do on the Internet We thought we’d get our usual production team together and we’d be ready to go.”
But Eklof and his colleagues discovered that delivering a production over the web was a different scenario from what they were used to doing in television. They needed bandwidth, storage, a whole lot of things that hadn’t been issues until then, before they could fully utilise the Internet as a means of distribution.
In 2005, they launched their first Internet platform, based in Stockholm, called MPS Broadband. The company became LiveArena, a specialist in delivering live on-demand TV channels over the Internet to any device…..
….The service is also spreading to other countries. LiveArena has begun working with the National Sporting Federation of Norway, streaming additional sports, as well as other sporting federations in Sweden outside of ice hockey.
Norway took things a step further and wanted to have increasingly sophisticated productions for the more advanced players, including multi-camera shoots, scoreboards and graphics and commentary.
“We needed to figure out more advanced solutions. We developed a sturdy compute r that would work in cold ice hockey arenas and be rugged. We needed a good software solution and chose Telestream’s Wirecast‘….read more