ITHACA, N.Y.—Cornell University is part of the Ivy League group of schools, famous not only for academic excellence, but sports rivalries as well. The school has 36 varsity intercollegiate teams, so there is no shortage of sports action to follow.
Cornell uses the Wirecast system to live stream sports like football, basketball, hockey and volleyball.
The Athletics Department is tasked with live streaming 16 NCAA Division I sports, which amounts to hundreds of games annually. Using Telestream Wirecast live streaming production software, the athletics department is able to meet the challenge, delivering HD-quality live streams of Big Red home games to the Ivy League Network, through the League-branded mobile app or through ESPN3, and Facebook Live.
MULTISPORT PRODUCTION
On busy game days, we often send multiple video crews across the campus to cover six or seven simultaneous events, including football, basketball, ice hockey, soccer, volleyball, wresting and field hockey. Our broadcast operation runs on a tight budget and relies largely on crews comprised of about 30 student volunteers. Despite these limitations, we’re able to use Wirecast to deliver 720/60p HD video, encoded using H.264 compression, with production standards that meet or exceed our fans’ expectations.
In addition to using Wirecast software on our laptops, we also use Wirecast Gear, a preconfigured, turnkey, self-contained device that includes what our crews need to set up and start streaming quickly. To move to the soccer, hockey and wrestling venues, Wirecast Gear is packed into its specially designed travel case, which has room to store a 19-inch monitor and two or three cameras.
Once on-site, it can be set up in minutes since it’s fully configured for live streaming. A second travel case is used to transport the audio equipment, including a PV6 six-input audio mixer, microphones, announcers’ headsets and more. This audio equipment feeds the six-input audio mixer via XLR connections, while the mixer itself interfaces with Wirecast Gear via USB.
In many cases, instant replay footage is ISO-recorded by one of the production cameras and put onto the Wirecast timeline where it’s ready to go into the live show. In addition to the four camera inputs on Wirecast Gear, additional media assets, such as live graphics from our specially designed branding library, can be brought into the live production over network device interface (NDI) standard.
Our reliance on Wirecast Gear is only going to grow, especially as we migrate to remote video over IP production. It’s very important to us that Wirecast Gear support our future NDI-based roadmap. Its all-in-one design streamlines our training, set-up and operations, saving us a tremendous amount of time.
With the ability to bring in four cameras, and enhance the video with real-time graphics, text, effects and other
professional touches, Wirecast Gear has dramatically elevated our production standards, making our Big Red live
games that much more appealing to our valued fans.
John Lukach oversees Cornell’s presence on the Ivy League Network (ILN), guides the athletic department’s multimedia initiatives. He can be contacted at jlukach@cornell.edu.
For more information, please visit www.telestream.net or call 530-470-1300.
