We are about to purchase a solution to enable us to stream our services to our remote campuses. Our primary criteria is the following:
Time-Shift / DVR Capable
16 Channel Audio (I know, I know… don’t ask why)
User friendly UI (think volunteers at remote campuses)
We have looked at Streambox and HaiVision Makito X for encoding/decoding to be used in conjunction with ProVideo Server for the DVR functionality (We also looked at the Grassvalley T2’s but a little outside what we want to pay). We are also looking at Living As One, since they encode, decode and time-shift all in one simple interface.
What are you using? Do you have any recommendations regarding the brands/products mentioned above? (If your production departments handle streaming infrastructure and would be willing to talk to me then feel free to forward my contact info: tim.peterson@tfh.org).
@codatory Yeah, definitely a lot of audio. No bi-directionality needed. We will be using public internet for streaming (no leased lines or anything like that). We have a total of three campuses right now. Bandwidth should not be an issue at the upload site where we can slice and dice as much as we need of a 50Mbps managed fiber connection. We have fiber at one of the remote sites as well. My only concern is our third site where we setup and tare down weekly. We are negotiating the ability to install our own connection, but we may be looking at a shared connection, or something where the total bandwidth is around 15Mbps.
Instead of trying to give you some pointers right up front, I think we need to know a bit (well, a lot) more first.
Take a moment a fill this questionnaire out with your own answers:
Background Information
Do you anticipate ever having to backhaul signal? (take a signal from a remote site and send it back to central)
Do you anticipate ever transmitting from more than location? (originate a broadcast from somewhere other than your defined “main” site)
Do you have multiple streams or just one? How Many? (Main Feed Only, Center + Sides, Main + Stage, etc)
What format are your video signals in? (SDI - 1080i59.99? HDMI 720p60?, etc)
What format are your audio signals in? (Embedded on SDI? AES clocked to audio console? Analog?)
What is the least amount of delay you would anticipate between your transmitting site and any one of your individual receiving sites (60 minutes? 6 Minutes? 1 Minute?)
What is the most amount of delay you would anticipate between your transmitting site and any one of your individual receiving sites (1 hour? 6 hours? 6 days?)
Do you anticipate a scenario where you would play back an event at a receiving site when there is no technical representation present in/on the transmitting site?
Do you anticipate a scenario where you would be transmitting an event for future playback at a receiving site when there is no technical representation present in/at the receiving site?
What is the level of technical competence at the host/streaming site?
What is the level of technical competence at the remote/receiving sites?
Physical location information
Host site:
Connection to Internet? (Type, Speed)
Average utilization of circuit (preferably a 95th percentile number factored over your typical full load production periods)
Connection to Remote sites? (Type, Speed)
Average utilization of circuit (preferably a 95th percentile number factored over your typical full load production periods)
Remote site (1):
Connection to Internet? (Type, Speed)
Average utilization of circuit (preferably a 95th percentile number factored over your typical full load production periods)
Connection to Remote sites? (Type, Speed)
Average utilization of circuit (preferably a 95th percentile number factored over your typical full load production periods)
(Copy/Paste additional remote sites until you have an entry for each site)
With this we should be able to give you a pretty clear idea as to what your options are, what opportunities you may face deploying them, and what alternate options you may have if you were to adapt yourself to additional constraints.
50 Mbps sounds like a lot, until you start breaking down your bandwidth needs.
Depending on your total delay tolerance (answer @iamkarlp) you’re probably looking at at a bare minimum of 4 Mbit for audio (16*256k mp3/aac) and another 8-24 Mbit for h.264 video (depending on 720p or 1080, motion content and encoder quality) per stream. Plus, bandwidth on the public internet isn’t guaranteed for any single destination so your week-to-week quality won’t be super duper consistent in a live scenario. And that doesn’t count any other bandwidth usage like web browsing, file transfers, public wifi, etc. that may happen at the same time.
The Living As One platform doesn’t support more than 2 channels of audio at this time. They seem confident they can do 5 (tho still unsupported). To get to more than that, they’ll likely be rolling out a newer gen decoder.