NEW YORK – For the Streaming Media East conference, held in New York May 16-17, video production provider Mobeon used Roland V-1SDI switchers to help stream the event’s activities, in the main room plus five breakout rooms.
Streaming a conference presumably presents an unusually high potential for critical viewership, and video production provider Mobeon met such a challenge head-on at Streaming Media East 2017.
“We partner with Streaming Media Magazine in producing the actual streams – producing the live stream as well as capturing the event,” says Mark Alamares, Advanced Media Producer for Mobeon, an “advanced media studio and consultancy that develops, manages and delivers immersive and interactive content” including live streaming events and augmented/virtual reality experiences.
For events like Streaming Media East, Mobeon relies on Roland Professional A/V video switchers, including the V-1SDI.
The two-day Streaming Media East 2017 event, held May 16 and 17 at the Hilton Hotel Midtown in NYC, featured morning keynote addresses by leaders from the streaming industry and six tracks of panel discussions, How-To sessions, case studies and presentations by experts from the streaming industry covering business and technology categories.
Those categories included encoding and transcoding video, OTT and TV everywhere, live webcasting, education and enterprise, monetizing content, devices and platforms, content management and workflows, online video and traditional media distribution and formats, protocols and standards.
For the third year straight, Mobeon provided video streaming and recording services. “We streamed from a main room and then also captured video in five other breakout rooms,” shares Alamares. “We chose the Roland V-1SDI and the VR-50HD as our go-to units, specifically for corporate presentations or corporate conferences, because of both the versatility of the units and the portability.”
Alamares says that Mobeon became aware of Roland switchers and their capabilities, “ironically, at an exhibit at a previous Streaming Media conference. We saw them and decided to drop by their booth. After seeing what they had featured we thought it was something quite unique in the streaming industry. In addition to their capabilities to switch from various video inputs, they also handled audio brilliantly. That was one of the key factors because audio can be overlooked in video production.” Mobeon has since deployed V-1SDI, V-1HD and VR-50HD switcher models from Roland.
“For the breakout rooms,” Alamares says regarding Streaming Media East production, “we had two cameras going into the V-1SDI, so those would be sources one and two, and the third source would be a feed from a laptop that was converted from HDMI to SDI – or fed directly into the HDMI input on the V-1SDI.” Signal out of the V-1SDI fed Akamai encoding software. “We had a standard computer monitor with HDMI that was displaying the multi-view coming from the V-1SDI.”
The Roland V-1SDI handles 3G-SDI and HDMI audio/video sources with resolutions up to 1080p, with one HDMI input including scaling capability. Also featured is a 14-channel audio mixer for mixing stereo audio from SDI, HDMI and external stereo audio sources and its dedicated microphone input. The V-1SDI includes two SDI program and preview outputs, an HDMI output and a stereo audio output.
Setup for the sessions was “relatively quick,” says Alamares. “We had a minimal footprint in regards to the table space occupied, and the gear was compact to transport as well. Mobeon has a core staff of techs that do the full setup, and then our staff did the actual camera switching.”
Alamares credits the V-1SDIs and other Roland gear for making the setup simple, and for their easy learning curve. “Roland switchers allow individuals to just jump into a production with some very basic training. The key word seems to be easy, as Alamares concludes: “It’s very challenging to do multi-room events, but the V-1SDI made it so much easier to provide high quality capture, and as well as being straightforward to maintain, it made it easy to produce these productions. Overall, it is just a very simple and easy-to-use product.”
To learn more about the V-1SDI, visit http://proav.roland.com/products/v-1sdi.
For more about Mobeon, visit www.mobeon.com.
