22 STREAMPUNK Student Broadcasting
As with all broadcasts though, there are rules to follow. Ofcom compliance must be adhered to, and any programmes for broadcast go through quality control in order to meet industry standards. Productions have to be compliant with release forms and chain of title, in keeping with industry practice, and the channel must also be “aligned to Ravensbourne’s values, making content that is of interest to students and a similar demographic”. The RaveTV soft launch was at The Ravensbourne Degree Show back in June 2019 and a second broadcast was held in December. The channel is broadcast locally on UK digital terrestrial TV service Freeview during the summer degree show, and previously has managed to reach up to 3300 viewers. SPINNING UP A RAVE RaveTV’s infrastructure is heavily supported by Amazon Web Services, with AWS Media Services integrated into the TV channel’s cloud-based workflow. AWS Elemental Live is used for the encoding, AWS Media Live is used for managing the content and overall channel, and finally AWS CloudFront is employed for distribution. A feed from from RaveTV is also sent to Ravensbourne’s local Network-Attached
Storage (NAS) as a local master backup. Using Avid Interplay and Grass Valley Stratus systems, RaveTV also takes submaster feeds from the studio output at other points during the transmission chain to provide further backups. You can’t have too many backups. “RaveTV also uses a range of cloud software for production tools such as shared documents and, depending on the format of the content, we might work collaboratively on-location or in the edit, too,” says Aquilina. “Because Ravensbourne covers all aspects of production creatively and technically, it’s actually far more than just the transmission or studio production chain.” The project took around five months to implement – impressive considering the scale of it. “That included the business case and getting sign-off from various internal boards, securing a budget and putting in place the internal channel management under the guidance of specially recruited staff to oversee the project,” explains Aquilina. “It also meant training students, acquiring and scheduling content, commissioning new material and liaising with the annual degree show to provide coverage for some of its live events.” While a lot is already up and running, Aquilina admits there is a large amount still
CHANNEL SURFING The RaveTV soft launch was at The Ravensbourne Degree Show in June 2019 and reached 3300 viewers
under development. Work is underway on the streaming platform and embedded on-demand player. “We are building our own platform and intend to stream from our dedicated website, but this is still being planned and built by UI/UX students at Ravensbourne.” They also hope to build a metrics functionality into the platform to analyse channel and viewer data. A LiveU transmission system for remote OB set-ups is also in the pipeline. CONTENT CRASH COURSE Aquilina believes the channel will eventually “evolve into specialist strands and special events” over time. Ravensbourne students study a range of subjects and so cross- discipline programming is at the forefront of everyone’s minds. Augmented reality content and game streaming are just a couple of the ideas floating around RaveTV. “Our final year
RAVETV PROVIDES REAL-WORLD EXPERIENCE FOR STUDENTS, WHILE ALSO DEVELOPING A SHOWCASE FOR OUR WORK
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