MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.—When Kansas City’s KMBC sought to produce a live local news special that touches on race and policing following the protests that occurred after the murder of George Floyd this past summer, the Hearst TV ABC affiliate ended up turning to some of TVU Network’s cloud systems to help with the production because of in-studio restrictions from COVID-19.
KMBC utilized the TVU Producer, a live cloud-based production platform, and TVU Partyline, a cloud-based video conferencing system for live production, to provide two return video and audio feeds to the remote guests, enabling them to watch pre-recorded segments and see each other during live interview segments.
The four guests for KMBC’s “Project CommUNITY: The People and the Police” joined the program through TVU equipment as well—three through TVU One cellular transmitters and one through the TVU Anywhere mobile app.
TVU Partyline, with TVU Producer, enabled the low-latency of all of these different feeds through its Real Time Interactive Layer to enable the participants to see each other’s return video so that they could interact with each other with as little lag as possible.
This was setup by using the TVU Producer to create a quad-view box in which the four remote guests appeared. Live video of three guests was shot on ENG cameras and transmitted to the station using the TVU One transmitters; the other video footage was streamed live from the TVU Anywhere app on a smartphone.
Each of the four videos was assigned in TVU Producer to one of the panes in the quad-view box, which in turn was streamed back in HD with what KMBC says was no detectable latency using TVU Partyline.
“While this was one of our first uses of Partyline, it proved to be exceedingly easy to set up and delivered the low-latency interaction needed to make the discussion of these important community issues natural,” said Neeley Schmitz, director of news operations at KMBC.
“KMBC’s application of our technology illustrates how our solutions working in concert can solve production problems that arise—especially as the new requirement to respect social distancing mandates takes hold and remote workflows increasingly become the norm,” says Paul Shen, CEO of TVU Networks. “TVU Partyline in particular stands out in this application because it leverages both RTIL and IS+ technology to deliver reliable high-quality video and audio return with no detectable latency in a virtual interactive conference setting.”
