SERAING MUNICIPALITY, LIÈGE PROVINCE, BELGIUM—Broadcasters airing the FIFA World Cup this summer were able to offer a complete range of multimedia services to their viewers. For the first time, users were able to get their own perspective of the event using connected devices or computers to select and review multiple camera angles as the games were being played.
FIFA, through Host Broadcast Services, offered its media rights licensees (MRL) a choice of turnkey apps for viewing the multimedia content on connected devices. The apps and players were adaptable to the look and feel required by each MRL.
A VIDEO FEED FOR EVERY DEVICE
Licensed by FIFA, HBS selected EVS for the distribution of live multimedia feeds of the games to PCs, tablets, connected TVs and other smart devices for the 2014 World Cup.
EVS designs and manufactures hardware and software systems for live sports and studio productions around the world, with our C-Cast platform providing an end-to-end second-screen production solution to deliver multiple live streaming feeds, multi-angle content and additional video-on-demand content to sports fans.
To provide the type of interactive World Cup coverage that was desired, our technical infrastructure was integrated with a multitude of leading technologies, including Elemental Cloud for cloud transcoding of live feed streaming, Aspera for the high-bandwidth file transfer from venue to the cloud, Zencoder BrightCove cloudbased media transcoding operations, Amazon Web Services, Akamai content delivery network (CDN) and the Netco Sports second-screen app designer. All of these worked together to provide a compelling interactive and multimedia experience for viewers.
OVERCOMING VIDEO PROCESSING HURDLES
When designing the 2014 World Cup C-Cast multimedia delivery workflow for this project, we knew that video processing resources could quickly become an enormous bottleneck. During the 64-game schedule, more than 4,500 hours of video processing (61.25 hours per game) was required to deliver premium live and catchup coverage to viewers.
Johann Schreurs Traditional hardware-based video processing solutions did not have the elasticity we needed, and this steered us to Elemental Cloud. For the World Cup deployment, Elemental Live running in Elemental Cloud converted as many as 48 input streams running at 10 Mbps into an HLS bouquet of nine outputs, ranging from 0.4 to 2.5 Mbps. During the 64-game event, that added up to an estimated 35,280 hours of output.
Once everything was up and running, contribution encoders from venues all over Brazil fed the International Broadcasting Center in Rio de Janeiro via the Akamai CDN. Feeds were then delivered over fiber from Rio to an AWS S3 facility in Dublin where the EVS C-Cast production and Elemental Cloud were deployed. From there, Elemental ingested the inputs and created the outputs for delivery to regional broadcasters globally via the CDN. Broadcasters then took the content and delivered it to consumers via their respective CDNs. We’re not sure how we would have done this without more than a little help from Elemental.
Johann Schreurs is general manager of new media broadcast at EVS and has been with the company since 2011. He may be contacted atj.schreurs@evs.com.
For additional information, contact Elemental Technologies at 888-900-8104 or visitwww.elementaltechnologies.com.
