MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.—When COVID-19 prevented competitors for Cybathlon 2020 to travel to Zurich, Switzerland, TVU Networks was brought in with its remote production technology to help create a live-streaming event so that teams from all over the world could compete.
Cybathlon 2020 is a series of races in which people with disabilities use exoskeletons, brain-computer interfaces and other state-of-the-art assistance systems to complete everyday tasks. The Cybathon organizations tasked TVU with finding a way to transmit high-quality live video over the internet from multiple locations to create a virtual event.
Using TVU One mobile transmitters and the TVU Anywhere app, the production was able to bring together a mix of footage captured by both professional cameras and camera phones. Thomas Stäubli, CEO of BBM Productions, whose team produced nine hours of live streaming content for Cybathlon, said the flexibility of the TVU systems helped with working with everyone involved, some of which had no broadcast or streaming experience.
To coordinate the live feeds from competing teams, the production used the TVU Command Center, a cloud-based management platform that remotely controls and monitors all live transmissions. Five BBM operators managed the event—one was assigned to the Command Center, the other four coordinated live streaming efforts with the competing teams.
In addition, the TVU Partyline system provided a videoconferencing interface for content creators to have real-time interaction between talent, crew and external content contributors.
TVU systems and support were provided by Cybathlon participants by Videolink, a systems integrator based in Zurich.
