Optical Media Turns To LiveU For FastNet Yacht Race Coverage
![](/cache/uploads/content_images/Optical-Media_liveu_1-1024x589_789_454_70_s.jpeg)
Working for the Royal Ocean Racing Club, UK, organisers of the Fastnet Race, streaming and broadcast production company Optical Media was tasked with providing eye-catching coverage of the start of the race in late July. The largest offshore contest in the world, the bi-annual event begins at Cowes on the Isle of Wight, and finishes in Cherbourg, France, having first ventured out into the Atlantic Ocean.
James Light, Founder of Optical Media, said, “This was our first year working on the Fastnet race. We covered the start, which took approximately three hours. We wanted to capture the full flavour to provide really dynamic coverage from the shore and the water. The latter was crucial but was also where the real challenges lay.”
Initially looking at RF technology, over and above fibre connectivity for parts of the shore-based coverage, the company knew that it might be cost-prohibitive alongside other complexities. Light said, “Using RF, there’s the limitations of it requiring line-of-sight and as we had cameras in many positions, this was problematic. Given the budget we had, to have the multiple RF systems we needed to mitigate this issue would have been unaffordable. It formed a part of our overall toolkit, but we also looked for another, more cost-effective, integrated solution."
![Optical Media deploys LiveU’s on-site production solution to provide expanded coverage of the FastNet Yacht Race.](https://www.thebroadcastbridge.com/uploads/content_images/_Medium/Fastnet_image_4_(comp).jpg)
Optical Media deploys LiveU’s on-site production solution to provide expanded coverage of the FastNet Yacht Race.
Optical Media turned to LiveU, specifically its recently launched On-Site Production Solution. This enabled bonded wireless transmission from multiple LiveU field units – two on the shore and one in a camera boat on the water, moving at 15-20 knots – straight into the production truck, set up in a single click. Light explains, “The LU-Link cloud service, which is at the heart of LiveU's solution, allows the LiveU Server to be hosted within an unmanaged network. This enables a quicker and more agile server set-up. Working in an environment where we have to borrow internet connectivity – which happens all the time – to have a service where you just plug in, connect the units to the server and the server to the internet and can then immediately run a full LiveU system, is brilliant. LiveU has made something complex very simple. It worked flawlessly and is very cost-effective.”
The OB unit was next to the Royal Yacht Squadron, Cowes, on the Isle of Wight - the building where the race officers started the race from, and with the three LiveU units effortlessly connected, the flexibility to create the coverage needed was easily in place. From the on-site production server, an SDI feed was output and then further production processes applied. Light said, “The thing that’s amazing is effectively having full control of a network when you’re on-site, which is incredibly rare. I can’t overstate how cool a solution this is. It allows you to go into any environment. Moving forward we see LiveU as a key partner. Sailing, in particular, is very challenging but LiveU worked seamlessly. We are always working in environments where we don’t have network control. LiveU opens so many doors for us as our rapid growth continues.”
You might also like...
An Introduction To Network Observability
The more complex and intricate IP networks and cloud infrastructures become, the greater the potential for unwelcome dynamics in the system, and the greater the need for rich, reliable, real-time data about performance and error rates.
2024 BEITC Update: ATSC 3.0 Broadcast Positioning Systems
Move over, WWV and GPS. New information about Broadcast Positioning Systems presented at BEITC 2024 provides insight into work on a crucial, common view OTA, highly precision, public time reference that ATSC 3.0 broadcasters can easily provide.
Next-Gen 5G Contribution: Part 2 - MEC & The Disruptive Potential Of 5G
The migration of the core network functionality of 5G to virtualized or cloud-native infrastructure opens up new capabilities like MEC which have the potential to disrupt current approaches to remote production contribution networks.
Designing IP Broadcast Systems: Addressing & Packet Delivery
How layer-3 and layer-2 addresses work together to deliver data link layer packets and frames across networks to improve efficiency and reduce congestion.
Next-Gen 5G Contribution: Part 1 - The Technology Of 5G
5G is a collection of standards that encompass a wide array of different use cases, across the entire spectrum of consumer and commercial users. Here we discuss the aspects of it that apply to live video contribution in broadcast production.