For more than 35 years, SXSW has been a place that brings people together from across the world to celebrate not only music but speakers, artists, and filmmakers everywhere. Over 10 days in March, an iconic music festival, a legendary film and TV festival, and an impressive conference as well as hundreds of exhibitors and a weeklong comedy festival take over Austin, Texas to celebrate creativity and innovation in every way possible.
Spread over multiple venues with numerous events taking place simultaneously, it’s no mean feat to ensure everyone can experience the magic of SXSW, not just those who are in the city at the time. It has always been the goal of the event to provide a tool to bring together people from around the world to meet, learn, and share ideas. Vizrt products, and specifically TriCaster – the powerful media production tool – have played a key part in making that possible and providing the technology to help share inspiring content.
2022 saw an increasing amount of online content being made available for fans of SXSW in addition to those who were attending the event in person. In 2023, the decision was made to record the all-important Keynote and Featured Speaker rooms and to stream a curated selection of those sessions. By using 9 TriCasters across 5 different venues in the city of Austin, these powerful video production platforms were how all the content was captured using the open-source protocol Secure Reliable Transport (SRT) and moved into the cloud and converted to NDI® (Network Device Interface), the industry-leading video connectivity technology. Once in the cloud, SXSW production teams could operate with the speed, efficiency, and accuracy they needed to make sure online participants didn’t miss a beat.
Over the years, as the number of locations and sessions being captured grew, so did the demand for technology. Pulling together content from so many NDI sources meant that the mighty Viz Vectar Plus (now TriCaster Vectar) – Vizrt’s enterprise-grade 4K switching platform in the cloud – was the natural next step to manage all the streams coming in from every TriCaster. It sat at the heart of the production for the SXSW TV App and ultimately what every eager viewer would be watching from home. The years of using TriCaster prepared the production teams to seamlessly bring Viz Vectar Plus into the mix for 2023 as the master control for all streaming content.
Known globally as one of the biggest live events in the world, SXSW prides itself on bringing inspiring content to audiences around the world and Vizrt has the products and technology to help them do that, year after year – truly supporting our purpose of “more stories, better told.”
