M ountain Attack. The name says it all. The ski mountaineering race event, which has taken place near Saalbach in Austria since 1999, is a gruelling test of endurance. Solo male and female racers, plus relay teams of three, dash up and then ski down a series of mountains. Watching the live broadcast on Austrian sports streamer Laola1.tv, as well as YouTube and Facebook, you’re struck by three things: the gruelling races take place over a massive area, it all looks freezing and it can be very dark on those summits. None of these factors are beneficial to sports broadcasting. Nevertheless, this was the arena that host broadcaster Mediahaus GmbH chose for a proof of concept remote production of live SRT streaming from Blackmagic Ursa Broadcast G2 cameras over a 5G network. NEED FOR SPEED Mediahaus, based in Salzburg, has been the host broadcaster for the past dozen years. But this year, for the first time, it was able to send live H.264 streams from its Ursa Broadcast G2 race cameras using SRT, a protocol optimised for live video streaming, down the mountains to its outside broadcast truck in Saalbach. Working with Hutchison, Mediahaus utilised a stand-alone 5G network to bring live camera feeds with incredibly low latency from the mountaintops to the production team and the director, Wolfgang Angermüller, in the Mediahaus OB van. “Eleven years ago, when we started working with the race founder Roland Kurz, it was quite a challenge just to get two cameras on two summits,” recalls Angermüller, CEO of Mediahaus. “Last year, we had four cameras on four summits, each connected through SDI to an encoder and then via an IP connection provided by a modem in the infrastructure of the cable car. We also had two mobile cameras on skidoos using bonded cellular from Mobile Viewpoint. But it took us two whole days to set up all the cameras and encoders on the mountaintops.” The Mediahaus proposal to use SRT and 5G was inspired by new technology from Blackmagic Design – and the fact that Hutchison, one of the supporters and sponsors of the event, was building a stand- alone 5G network in the valley below Saalbach. “The skiing world championship takes place in the valley next year – and the 5G private network was ready in December,” recalls Angermüller. “But we were also lucky that the Blackmagic Camera 8.5 beta release allowed SRT streaming out of our Ursa Broadcast G2s; we would just need to plug in a mobile phone to send the H.264 feeds.” UPHILL BATTLE Mediahaus conducted tests of SRT over 5G, first in the lab with Hutchison in Vienna, then with Blackmagic Design’s Atem Streaming Bridges as receivers in the OB truck.
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