About Aircast
Australian-based Aircast has developed a next-generation technology that provides both sports fans and broadcast professionals with real-time access to multiviewer video, audio, and data feeds via mobile devices and IPTV at sub-second latency – less than 300ms end-to-end.
During the 2023 high-profile women’s world soccer tournament Aircast recently leveraged Haivision technology for live commentary and monitoring.
The company was selected by the event organizers to provide broadcast distribution of live video streams from multiple venues simultaneously to all the venue stakeholders. This included the local and international commentary media services at each venue, back of house operation centers, IPTV services for logistics and workforce monitoring as well as low latency multiviewing capabilities for VIP areas within the stadiums.
“Working with Haivision, we were able to deliver commentators reliable video feeds for matches and commentary information systems in real-time, direct to their mobile devices."
Craig Horobin
CEO, Aircast
The Challenge
Costly, Cumbersome, and Time-Consuming
The services were all provided over the internet to the main operations center, two technical control centers, and 1,200 screens in ten competition venues across two countries, Australia and New Zealand, using the Aircast solution in combination with Haivision Makito X4 video encoders and a Haivision SRT Gateway.
As Craig highlights, “Before Aircast, this type of workflow would have been deployed using cable services and while it’s a tried and trusted approach, it’s costly, cumbersome, and challenging to deploy in short space of time.”
The Solution
A Winning Ultra-Low Latency Solution for Commentary and Monitoring
Leveraging the powerful combination of Haivision and Aircast solutions, all signals from the soccer games were encoded and streamed over the internet by Makito X4 video encoders and distributed by a Haivision SRT Gateway for both multicast IPTV streams direct to clients across all of the venues and unicast streams directly to operations centers.
The SRT Gateway proved to be particularly versatile as it allowed Aircast to distribute streams in four different formats from one signal at ultra-low latency for commentators, to VIPs, and to operation centers for monitoring in near real-time.
The Result
“Haivision Makito’s X4 powerful encoding capabilities were foundational to achieving exceptional low latency multi-channel workflows over two countries,” said Craig Horobin, CEO, Aircast. “The results we had were fantastic, once everything was up and running the signals were solid and pristine quality. Working with Haivision we were able to deliver commentators reliable video feeds for matches and commentary information systems in real-time direct to their mobile devices.”
