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“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.”

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!

Learn more about BirdDog here!

Check out our webinar about BirdDog PTZ Cameras here!

Video Production Specialist Adam Noyes gives us a deep dive on how to use the RGBlink mini+ PTZ Control options with a BirdDog PTZ Camera!

The first thing you will need to know is your camera’s default IP address. You can always find this by consulting your camera’s user manual.  

For this example, we’re using a BirdDog P100 camera with a default IP address of 192.168.100.100. 

To use BirdDog PTZ Cameras with the RGBlink mini+, you’ll need to format the LAN port to 52381. To do this, you need to download the XPOSE software for free from RGBLink’s website. 

When installing, it’s important to extract, then run as an administrator. Installation will then run smoothly.  

After being installed, plug your RGBlink mini+ into a NIC on a computer. Be sure to set your computer to the same network sequence the mini+.  

After doing this, open XPOSE and hit search. Your unit will pop up on the menu. Click it.  

Now hit the menu button, scroll to FX, and select PTZ Control. Here you can scroll down and change the IP port to 52381. 

Now you’ll need to hit set, then reboot your RGBlink mini+. 

Next, plug in your camera via HDMI into the RGBlink mini+. Then use a standard ethernet cable to connect your camera’s LAN port to that in the Mini+. Do this before you turn on the units.  

Turn on your PTZ Camera, then the RGBlink mini+ and let both units boot up.  

We’ve noticed it’s easier to turn on the PTZ camera first, then the Mini+ instead of the other way around.  

Once everything is turned on, press the M button on the mini+. Scroll to the IP Settings, and change the IP address to one that’s on the same Network Sequence as your PTZ Camera.  

You may need to reboot the mini+ to make sure the IP Address has taken.  

Now you press the S button 4 times to reach your PTZ Settings. This is where you can select which camera you are controlling.  

Scroll down to IP Settings, select the camera you wish to control, and enter it’s default IP address.  

Once that is completed, scroll up to enable, and make sure you set the camera to “on”.  

Make sure this is the camera you want to use, and select CONTROL.  

Now you can control your PTZ Camera. If you wish to zoom, just press the left knob, and you can now zoom in and out. 

Now you can use PTZ cameras with your RGBlink mini+ video switcher. I hope you found this helpful.

Watch the full video here!

Learn more about RGBlink here!

Learn more about BirdDog here!