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Video: Home Runs: Using Fiber to Direct and Deliver Live Shows Remotely

In this excerpt from his panel at Live Streaming Summit, Peter Hartz of The Switch explains the workflow The Switch calls "Home Runs," in which the company leverages fiber technology on MLS live soccer broadcasts for Univision to bring all of the individual camera feeds from stadiums around North America into their home studio in Miami, and handles all technical direction and media delivery off-site. This approach, Hartz contends, "creates is a tremendous opportunity for the streaming community." 

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Read the transcript of this clip:

Peter Hartz, The Switch: One of the things that we're seeing on the production side is something that we're referring to as home runs. As an example, we have a customer Univision who airs soccer games, airs all the MLS soccer games. The traditional model of production is that you send everybody to the venue, the director, all the editorial people, all the production people and you make a show and then you have that show come out on one cable and maybe go to the satellite truck, and go to the fiber truck. What's happening now is realizing that what we're doing for Univision is instead of that, the director stays home. The crew stays home in Miami, sleep in their own bed, the A team can come to work every day, knock out show after show, and what we're doing is bringing all the camera feeds back, individually, one for one protected on the fibre back to Miami, sending also cameras back to the venue having Ethernet connection that let them do tallies, and all the normal things they have in production.

Because of this, they're cutting the show back home, so we call that at home production. What I think that creates is a tremendous opportunity for the streaming community, because if you think of all of those feeds, what you could do with those, you could, instead of them falling to the floor after the directors pick which ones he wants, you could have those be available in the streaming world. That's incredibly powerful. One of the things that is futuristic, that is coming and actually there's a demo today from a company called Net Insight that is an OTT live demo which is attempting, which is offering a solution to synchronize the broadcast signal with the online OTT signals. That creates what you saw Microsoft was doing, that real interactive capability. They build it a switch away, a switch back. I think the future is incredibly exciting in terms of what the capabilities are now, and how they're going to evolve.

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