Are We Moving Toward a REMI Hybrid Live Event Production Model?
Blizzard Entertainment's Corey Smith discusses the shift toward full cloud remote (REMI) production in large-scale event streaming in this clip from a panel at Streaming Media East Connect 2020.
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Watch the complete panel from Streaming Media East Connect, "Live Streaming in a Changing World," on the Streaming Media YouTube channel.
Learn more about live streaming production at Streaming Media West 2020.
Read the complete transcript of this clip:
Corey Smith: In our esports programming scenario, on a typical weekend, when we have four shows running, we're producing over 55 hours of live content over the course of three days. The only way we were able to do that was to move our complete production workload online. This meant that we weren't backhauling single-pass to people's houses. All contribution from folks's homes were either through direct RTMP, and now we're even moving down the SRT route to do more low-latency contribution. Our saving grace is, we were doing a lot of work with our online technology partners early on to develop a master control solution that we've announced with SVG and whatnot. We've been working with Grass Valley over the last year and a half to develop an online cloud strategy there.
When we took master control, we said, "Okay, well that works well for master control. Now we're going to go online. How do we expand its capabilities to do full REMI cloud production, where my TD and my graphics op can be in different parts of the country?"
Basically, they're just plugging into a cloud interface. There's no backhaul to people's homes or anything like that. So our model for IP has really been a focus on cloud and getting stuff out of people's homes and out of backhaul to specific locations.
That, to us, is the REMI/hybrid model that is going to continue to be the model of how even live events at venues take place in the future. To Alex's point, you can send a guy out in the field with a couple of cameras, get him set up, backhaul those ISOs, and cut the show remotely.
So, I think it's going to be a very interesting world from a technology perspective on how much investment we actually continue to make in CapEx at specific venues for, for shows and tours that run around the country or the world.
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