Critical Factors to Setting Up an At-Home Broadcast Solution
The recent months has seen an explosion of at-home broadcast contribution – especially from late-night hosts and broadcast news. For some in the broadcast industry, at-home broadcast contribution is familiar territory, but for many, it has been a learning experience.
Fortunately, Microsoft put together the Media and Entertainment Summit, dedicated to helping broadcasters master the many rapid changes transpiring, and to prepare for the future. This summit features presentations from Microsoft experts and partners on the strategies and solutions that are transforming the media and entertainment world.
In this post, we will focus on a presentation dedicated to exploring the basics of at-home broadcast, and the strategies to make it an effective solution for broadcasters adapting to a changing world. Click the image below to watch the presentation through Microsoft’s Media and Entertainment Summit.
For a little more background on what makes a good at-home broadcast contribution solution, let’s review some of the important factors.
Considerations for At-Home Contribution
The first step in planning an at-home contribution solution for broadcasters is to review the important considerations, and weigh them in importance, according to your use case.
Latency
For news broadcasters, it is critical that the delay between the reporter, or interviewee, and your newsroom, remains as low as possible. This is particularly important for live interviews, where pauses that seem awkward to participants appear even longer to viewers.
Quality
The video quality that you need is closely tied to your use case. For at-home podcasts, a lower quality video, clearly shot on a webcam, might be acceptable. However, for a news broadcast, viewers expect a higher level of production, and professional-looking video.
Networks
Unfortunately, you do not control your reporter’s home network. And considering how spiking internet traffic has been throttling home internet connections, these networks can easily be labelled as unreliable. You don’t want to worry about the video quality dropping or audio losing its synchronization in the middle of a live broadcast, so you will need a solution that can adapt to unreliable internet connections.
SRT ensures you get high quality video even over unpredictable networks
Learn more about the open source Secure Reliable Transport video streaming protocol, which enables low latency, high quality, secure streams, even with unreliable networks.
Ease of Use
When deploying an at-home solution for broadcast contribution, you should keep in mind that most reporters won’t have a broadcast engineer at home with them to help them set up. By choosing a solution that is easy to operate, your reporters can focus on the story, while ensuring professional quality video for your production team.
Haivision EMS
Haivision EMS allows you to manage all of your devices from one location. Remotely organize workflows, centralize updates, and monitor the real-time status for your encoders and decoders.
Enabling Remote Talent to See Themselves
It is important that the people contributing their video from home be able to see how their video looks. It can help them to make last-minute adjustments to lighting, the positioning of the equipment around them, or even how they’re moving in front of the camera. Those little adjustments will make for a better quality video, and a better quality broadcast.
Coordination with the Broadcast Studio
It is easy to coordinate with your talent when they’re in studio. However, when you have on-air talent contributing from home, your contribution solution will need to be able to facilitate easy coordination between them and the studio – this is especially necessary for live broadcast, when last-minute adjustments may be needed.
How to Contribute Content from Home
In this presentation, Marcus Schioler, Haivision’s Vice President of Product Marketing, walks viewers through the important workflows used for at-home broadcast contribution, including contribution from multiple sources, remote monitoring, and return feeds.
He explains how to set up and configure the critical components of these workflows for easy deployment, including the SRT video streaming protocol, the Makito series of video encoders and decoders, Haivision Play Pro, and Haivision SRT Gateway.
Register free for the Microsoft Media and Entertainment Summit to watch the full presentation, and learn how to develop your own at-home broadcast contribution solution.
