Major League Gaming (MLG), the largest professional video game league in the world, has selected the Osprey 700e HD video capture card from ViewCast to deliver more than 1.9 million streams of its live events in HD to viewers around the globe for up to 60 hours at a time.
Live event streaming is a critical component of MLG's operations, allowing it to cultivate and cater to a growing online community of professional and aspiring professional gamers while expanding sponsorship and revenue opportunities, according to Lee Chen, senior vice president of premium services and live event streaming for MLG.
In addition to meeting MLG's performance and reliability requirements, ViewCast's Osprey 700e HD cards ensure seamless compatibility with MLG's encoding software, Adobe Flash Media Live Encoder and Microsoft Windows 7 drivers, in a compact form factor for easy integration within MLG's proprietary streaming hardware.
MLG uses multiple Osprey 700e HD cards to power its encoding infrastructure, encoding real-time video for live streaming while simultaneously capturing content for post-event VOD. The company provides three concurrent live broadcast streams in multiple resolutions from its events, which take place throughout the year at various locations nationwide.
The Osprey 700e's ability to maintain consistent performance and stability throughout HD broadcasts that can run up to 62 hours is critical to the success of MLG's event coverage, precluding the need to reboot or cycle through encoders. For MLG's 50th anniversary event in Raleigh, NC, fans consumed more than 2.3 million streams and 825,000 hours of video over the 60-hour long broadcast, all supported by the Osprey 700e HD cards.
ViewCast's Osprey 700e HD cards provide dual SD/HD support with seamless on-the-fly signal switching and the ability to feed multiple encoders (RealVideo, Windows Media, Adobe Flash and MPEG-4) at the same time in any combination. Osprey cards also enable advanced features such as hardware audio gain control, closed-caption extraction, image cropping and bitmap overlay to ensure maximum management flexibility and control.
