ST. PETERSBURG, Fla.—CP Communications subsidiary Red House Streaming designed and deployed a wide-area Layer 2 network across multiple event locations for the SXSW Conference and Festival, March 11-20, in Austin, Texas, the company said today.
This year’s SXSW, the first to feature a hybrid of in-person and remote participants, relied on the network to support the crew onsite responsible for delivering sessions, panels and music and comedy performances to audiences around the world.
With festival locations around the city, the SXSW relied on CP Communications and Red House Streaming to support events at 10 venues, including the Austin Convention Center where many of the largest sessions and Radio Day Stage music events were held and Brush Square Park, an outdoor venue where the International Day Stage music showcases took place.
Red House Streaming connected SXSW’s master control center, located in the Austin Marriott Downtown, with the 10 remote venues and a roaming camera crew that covered other venues around Austin. RHS’ family of IP and bonded cellular technologies were used to manage all Dante audio signals and intercom communications over the network, CP Communications said.
The expansive wide-area network and supporting technology infrastructure required a three-man crew from CP Communications and Red House Streaming. Besides building out and crewing the master control center, RHS technicians supported the remote camera crews on location, provided field support and maintenance services for all connected remote venues and managed a large communications infrastructure across all sites. The master control center also doubled as a network operations center for live signal monitoring and troubleshooting, it said.
“The technology infrastructure put into place for this year’s events proved exceptionally reliable,” said Marshall Dungan, technical director and senior producer for SXSW Conference and Festivals. “Their video and audio equipment worked very well between master control and our many remote sites, which is not an easy endeavor given the complexity of the network. The reliability of the bonded cellular video encoding equipment proved invaluable when we had to switch from the primary feed.”
More information is available on the Red House Streaming and CP Communications websites.
