52 XTREME The Congressional Cup
while further post production was performed at Samsung VR. BANDWIDTH BATTLE Technical consultancy and support for the immersive coverage came from Ocon Solutions and its president, Jim Ocon. “Geoffrey Talbot called me because streaming has really come into its own in recent times and he was aware of the problems that can arise through the need for high bandwidth from, say, a sail boat to the pier. It sounds easy to do – and it is with traditional broadcast video, but harder to do when you have straight internet and need clean upload speed. And that applies whether it is a 360 camera or anything else.” Ocon says that the major challenge was finding a clean pathway from ship to shore for the robust connection needed for Samsung’s VR cameras. “Each has 17 4K cameras on the device and it stitches the images together through a central processor. So, when we were looking at getting the images at 200-plus megapixels from ship to shore we knew it was going to be difficult to do.”
ROUTE TO SUCCESS Two TVU Routers supplied the connection needed for the Round VR cameras to provide live distribution to the Samsung VR Video website and the Congressional Cup website. The coverage was also streamed to the Tribeca Film Festival’s website. TVU Router uses multiple data communication links simultaneously, including cellular 4G/LTE, cable, DSL, satellite or WiFi, to deliver a reliable broadband connection up to 200Mbps remotely. TVU Router dynamically can aggregate up to a dozen different data connections and supports multiple 4G/LTE connections from different cellular providers. Talbot was enthusiastic about the performance of the connectivity. “The VR wireless connectivity from the water back to the pier and the network streaming set-up performed flawlessly. Integrating 360° footage requires an enormous amount of bandwidth. We couldn’t have done it without the rock-solid connectivity of our TVU Router, which performed above and beyond expectations from stationary and moving boats.”
In light of those potential difficulties, one suggestion was to carry out the stitching of the images together on board. As a result, a couple of the cameras were mounted on chase boats, all of which had power that could be utilised to drive the computer. “As it was, we were still looking at having uploads of 50Mbps,” states Ocon. “We ended up using Statistical Inverse Multiplexing where we were aggregating four different carriers using the TVU networks router.” WE NEEDED TO BE ABLE TO TRANSPORT ALL OF THIS DATA-INTENSIVE VIDEO LIVE AND UNTETHERED
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