MILTON, Mass.—Milton Access TV (MATV) is the public-access TV station in Milton. We are a contractor for the municipality and have three cable stations in town. We livestream them on local cable as well as YouTube.
We televise live municipal meetings as well as town-focused live programming, covering events like ceremonies and school plays that are relevant to our community. Our biggest focus is on live high school sports, where we broadcast everything from baseball and football to lacrosse.
Live Shot From the Field
Because our live sports coverage is so popular, we’d been trying to get Ethernet at our sports fields for years. But to make that happen, it was going to cost $50,000 to dig up the parking lot and run cable—which was way more than we wanted to spend. We tried using cell networks, but coverage in our area is very spotty.
We were almost ready to give up until we spoke to Comrex. Following their suggestion, we began using Comrex LiveShot with unlicensed Wi-Fi repeater satellite dishes from MikroTik. While a Wi-Fi router sends a signal out in all directions, these dishes are very focused and can send a very strong signal directly between two points. Suddenly, we had a connection with close to 200 Mbps up and down and with LiveShot, we were able to broadcast HD over that connection.
We’re now using LiveShot in ways we didn’t think of before—we’re able to livestream sports events from the field in HD on YouTube and max out the quality available to us on our cable stations. People really love it, and because the system is so versatile we’re able to be more responsive to our community.
Easy HD Feeds
LiveShot is easy to use—just plug in cables, press the power button and check the signal. Customizing profiles to change bit rates is more difficult, but I was able to learn how to do that without too much trouble. We’ve been able to take the factory settings and bump them up to account for the much-higher bandwidth we have with our news setup.
Because our LiveShot kit is so mobile, we can also use it as a backup. Right before an important school committee meeting, our regular solution was acting up, and the situation was so dire that we thought we may need to announce that we wouldn’t have coverage that evening.
But a half-hour before we were to start, it occurred to me that we had the LiveShot Rack always on in our studio and the LiveShot Portable, which had always worked flawlessly. I plugged it into the Ethernet and connected our SDI feed, and about 30 seconds before the meeting was supposed to start we were online.
Anytime we need anything, Comrex has been great at helping us and going above and beyond. For example, we’ve had situations where we’ve had to get our signals patched through complicated city and school firewalls, and they’ve always been willing to get on the phone with us to work with IT. Comrex tech support does more than just help us figure out LiveShot; they help us figure out how to set the environment up for success.
Our LiveShot is really versatile, reliable and needs no maintenance. There aren’t many pieces of equipment like that, especially something as delicate and tweaky as an encoder, so LiveShot’s been a big part of our workflow. It’s been a great investment.
More information is available at www.comrex.com.
