49 THE LIVE LIFE Children’s Hospital
Dante (Digital Audio Networking Through Ethernet) Delivers
Dante is a protocol designed to transmit professional-quality audio over conventional Ethernet networks. Itʼs useful in a variety of situations but particularly in an environment such as a hospital, where the appetite – and budget – for an upscale production centre installation is limited. Using a network that’s already in place makes for a hugely cheaper, faster approach, and Dante offers a much simpler way to perform complex signal routing. “Audio is 75% to 80% of what you watch,” Ben feels. “If you have bad audio, no-one’s going to want to watch. As soon as we found a system we liked we just attached ourselves to Dante fully. We connect both our studios together over our network.” All this convenience, however, depends on the good grace of the hospitalʼs IT department. Most corporate IT hierarchies are used to dealing with more conventional networking tasks, and the concept of the network as broadcast infrastructure can be a surprise. “We are a hospital,” Ben continues, “and most of the systems we use over the network had to be a secondary use over the hospital’s
CONNECTED Audinate’s Dante Domain Manager joined up two hospital studios 12 miles apart
digital audio,” Ben says. “We’d been doing analogue audio since day one ten years ago, and now that we have two studios it’s hard to route audio. We wanted to do more things. Running cables all over the place is hard and there’s already Ethernet in our walls.” Dante audio networking is widely admired for its very low latency, something that’s crucial to the studio’s very interactive service. Even so, while the audio is fast, video can be another matter. “MPEG is slow,” Ben confirms. “We’re trying to get it down to a second to two seconds. The more you delay it the better the quality is and the more reliable it is [but] patients can call into shows, play games, win prizes, and we deliver the prizes to the rooms. It goes from our camera to the TVs in less than five seconds. We’re a little faster than the news, because we need it to be interactive. If we didn’t need to be interactive, we’d crank that delay up and make the pictures look good.” requirements. They do understand why we’re doing it, and what the need is for it.” Making the system work in this environment was greatly simplified by Audinate’s Dante Domain Manager software. “A couple of clicks and we were up and running, and now it runs flawlessly. We chose Dante Domain Manager because we work across two hospitals, connected with fibre but 12 miles apart. Linking two studios between two subnets was a challenge: Dante came around at the right time.” Beyond replacing and expanding upon a more conventional analogue audio set- up, the bidirectional nature of networked audio can make it easier for the studio to communicate with the location team. “I’m working on an intercom on our set-up,” Ben says. “Right now we're doing it through phone calls. We’re working on
PRODUCING HAPPINESS The studio’s team includes Ben and five other full time staff. With this skeleton crew and a pool of volunteer and contract presenters, the channel produces an astounding 13 hours of original live television every week. “We get people from the news come in here and say, how do you do this? We put a smile on our face and we do it. We keep things simple and clean. If we have time to make it pretty and nice, we’ll do it, but we’re also looking at how can we make this simpler, faster? Is this going to improve the patient experience? Will kids watch this?” “I've been here almost 11 years,” says Ben, “and I really enjoy it. I could be working in news or some other TV station and it would be stressful. I get people who say, how can you work in a children's hospital and hear their voices? But we’re not hearing a kid sad, we’re here to make them happy.” as a bidirectional converter. “It has an input and an output, two XLRs, male and female. It plugs into a network jack that has power-over-ethernet and you can send audio anywhere. The hope is that we can plug into a jack anywhere in the hospital and send it back to the studio.” This would allow Star Studioʼs teams to feed audio from anywhere in the complex where there’s an Ethernet port – which, in modern buildings, is most places. having mini mixers mixing our program feed and microphones into anyone’s headset through Dante. Then, they can control whether the program feed or the mic is louder. Luckily Audinate came out with their Dante AVIO devices which has made this quite simple.” Audinate’s AVIO (currently aorund £150) is a pocket-sized device that functions, in a Dante environment, almost
THE RIGHT INSTRUMENTS Star Studio is outfitted with a solid range of gear, including Vaddio UHD robotic cameras, a Livestream Studio vision mixer, a Blackmagic Design Hyperdeck recorder, a Teradek Cube encoder and a Behringer X32 sound mixer
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