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Frank Rafka, Technical Manager, CP Communications
As technical manager at CP Communications, I’ve had a lot of experience covering live sporting events of all sizes. CP Communications provides broadcast solutions to a wide range of clients, including major broadcasters, sports leagues and teams, and event and production companies. For over 30 years, we’ve provided customized, high-quality and cost-effective production solutions to clients covering the biggest events in the world, including the 2023 TCS New York City Marathon.
Having had past success with deploying bonded cellular workflows for large scale events, we moved our entire production to an IP-based scheme for coverage of a previous edition of the marathon and planned a similar installation for 2023. However, we knew we would still be dealing with unreliable or unstable cellular coverage and the need to reduce latency to deliver high-quality live video to the production teams as fast as possible.
New Race, New Challenges
While I see these challenges in a lot of our IP-based workflows, we were also presented with new ones including being the intermediary for video distribution to ensure that everything is working as intended, and to provide improved coverage on the race’s official mobile app.
In the past, the app only featured a straight stream from the cars that were following the race leaders. But for the 2023 race, there was a demand for additional streams and better overall production, including overlay graphics and voiceovers, which presented my team and I with a whole new challenge.
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To provide coverage of the race to both broadcasters and the mobile app, we mounted three Haivision Pro460 mobile video transmitters in smart cars to follow the leaders of the men’s, women’s, and wheelchair races. We also attached three Haivision Pro360s to electric bikes to provide live broadcast contribution feeds of the marathon to various endpoints. Furthermore, we had three Makito X4 video encoder-decoder pairs set up at the starting and finish lines.
For distribution, we deployed seven Haivision StreamHub receivers, including one instance in the cloud, which acted as the main quality control center for all the feeds going to the mobile app. The StreamHub servers were situated in the production truck and were used to ingest feeds from Haivision transmitters and Makito X4 video encoders to distribute feeds for live on-air broadcasts and feeds to the app.
The Haivision Difference
Knowing the challenges that we were facing, we chose the Haivision Pro460 and Pro360 mobile video transmitters because they all immediately support 5G. We knew that Haivision’s transmitters can easily handle the instability or lack of reliable cellular coverage. We know that when we deploy Haivision products, we can depend on the technology to work right out of the gate and, if we have any questions, their team is always quick to provide us with support for whatever we need.
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From the production team to the broadcasters, everyone was very happy with the result and a big part of that was because Haivision’s mobile transmitters and encoders deliver high-quality video at low latency to the production teams quickly and reliably. The interoperability of the Haivision ecosystem allows for a versatile solution with products that all work together seamlessly. Having this level of cross-product interoperability and flexibility is key for productions like the marathon because we need to know how to correctly apply our resources for events this big.
Haivision mobile video solutions provide my team and I with the peace of mind they need to ensure that production goes off without a hitch while delivering high-quality video at low latency so our clients can tell compelling and dynamic stories to their audiences.
For the past nine years, Frank Rafka has been the technical manager of CP Communications, a provider of high-quality, cost-effective live event production solutions to major broadcasters, sports leagues and teams, and event and production companies.
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