Mobeon is a company that thrives on creating live interactive events, where audiences are engaged and the client’s messages can be seen and heard with the highest quality possible. They produce live production and streaming services for concerts, competitions, conferences, conventions, corporate events, houses of worship and worldwide product launches. This company specializes in transforming media.
Because of the rapid growth of video streaming, Mobeon’s team members are constantly on the go. They help enterprises and organizations connect with their audiences across the world on multiple platforms such as mobile phones, tablets, PCs, Smart TVs, and Virtual Reality Head Mounted Displays. Whether it’s producing a small corporate meeting or helping big name brands launch new product lines, they have to be flexible to meet the growing and rapidly changing demands of their clients.
This company has expanded significantly to meet the fast-growing hunger for content delivery over IP. The increased demand for web streaming services led them to look at cost effective, multi-purpose live production and web streaming solutions. One of the key additions to their AV toolkit is the Roland VR-50HD Live Production and Web Streaming Switcher.
Mobeon’s owner, Mark Alamares, credits the VR-50HD as a “great live production tool, because it is extremely portable, easy to use and quick to set up. It provides most everything we need in a single solution.
“A prospective client of ours was launching a new video game last year at the E3 conference, and we needed something that was compact and could fit into a travel case that was less than 50 pounds,” Alamares continues. It also had to have the ability to handle a variety of tasks, such as switch and scale multiple video resolutions as well as have multiple audio inputs.
In preparation for E3, Alamares brought several different solutions to the office of the client, who wanted to test a switcher that could specifically handle displaying video from high end gaming workstations and gaming consoles at high frame rates.
“We tried other switchers, converters and a number of other solutions and ended up with a lot incompatibility issues on a number of levels, including ‘blank screens,’” Alamares says. “Fortunately, when we plugged in the video, audio, and computer sources to the Roland VR-50HD, everything worked flawlessly.”
If they didn’t have the Roland VR-50HD during the testing process, Alamares adds, it would have been a complete failure. Instead, they decided to hire Mobeon on the spot.
That client’s E3 setup consisted of two VR-50HDs set up at the client’s booth. The Mobeon team switched between different video gaming consoles, cameras, plus had audio coming from the live commentary.
The VR-50HD handled the audio, video and streaming at 1080p live from the show floor and streamed out to hundreds of thousands of online viewers on Twitch.tv. “We were happy with the results and, most importantly, our clients were happy with the results,” Alamares says.
Multiple Video Formats
Multiple video formats seem to be one of the biggest issues, especially when working live and corporate events. The VR-50HD handles video inputs from SDI, HDMI, RGB and computers and integrates them seamlessly without the need for scalers or converters. Because it could handle a variety of inputs and includes a built-in preview monitor, audio mixer, and USB output for web streaming, the VR-50HD is sometimes called a “Swiss Army Knife” switcher. The switcher can handle it all without the need for video converters, and has the ability to pass through HDCP content, which is a huge plus for live production.
With its low latency, the Roland switcher also proves well suited for I-Mag, eliminating noticeable lag issues between the audio of the presenter and the I-Mag screens. This also means that Mobeon only needs one switcher to do streaming and live I-Mag production instead of separating out the functions with additional gear.
“Another application is streaming and producing conferences,” Alamares continues. “With Mobeon serving as the official streaming and production partner for the Streaming Media Conferences, we now exclusively use the Roland VR-50HDs as the main switcher in each of the conference rooms. These conferences are the largest streaming and live production events in the U.S., and the event is a great place to learn about cutting-edge online video technologies and new business strategies. Over the course of four days, we produce, capture and stream over 40 conference sessions and keynote addresses. The ability to handle multiple input types, scaling, analog or digital, computer or video resolutions, mix audio, plus USB 3.0 output for streaming makes it a perfect solution for our conference. Not all sessions are live streamed, so we use the VR-50HDs to produce each session and record ‘Live to Tape.’ This allows us to get most of the editing and production done on the fly and saves us postproduction time to get the content ready for upload.”
So far Mobeon has used the Roland VR-50HD, for fashion brand product launches, University Admissions, panel discussions for artists, manufacturers, and software developers, sports, music industry launches, corporate communications and video game tournaments and more. “We are very satisfied with the results of such a powerful live production and streaming tool found in the Roland VR-50HD,” Alamares concludes.
For more on the Roland VR-50HD and Mobeon please visit http://proav.roland.com and www.mobeon.com.
