When the pandemic first hit and sports leagues were forced to cancel their seasons or televise games without live audiences, it sent production companies and technical engineers scrambling to find workaround solutions. Broadcasters needed content to support viewers at home due to health safety restrictions and streaming that content at the highest quality was the only answer.
In November of 2020 Media.Monks, a digital-first marketing and advertising services company—with 57 talent hubs in 33 countries around the world— received a call from a major sports league inquiring about producing roughly 20 games in pristine 4K UHD. The catch: due to COVID restrictions, the on-site crew at each of the league’s arenas would be limited to two people and they would have a mere 4×4 table-top encoding setup. This made it challenging, the Media.Monks’ team knew, but not impossible.
Led by Lewis Smithingham, Media.Monks Director of Creative Solutions, quickly set to work devising a workflow to produce multiple games, sometimes simultaneously, that would include six fixed (unmanned) cameras strategically placed around each arena along with a camera technician and one encoding engineer. The live game would be distributed via public cloud service AWS.
Taking into account the cameras, graphics, remote announcers, and other production sources, they needed a 4K switcher that could handle up to 16 inputs and also support 59.94 frames per second distribution. Smithingham said that type of product was not easy to find. After some trial and error, the answer came in the form of a decentralized architecture based in the cloud that could basically do the work of three traditional mobile production trucks. Once the cloud was chosen as the foundation of this remote production workflow, the TriCaster® Vectar, a new Live Production Solution from the Vizrt Production Control Suite portfolio of software-enabled products and systems. After some “real-world” testing in January, the TriCaster Vectar platform was fully integrated into Media.Monks’ workflows in a matter of two weeks and the first live games went on air (from the cloud) in another week.
“We knew we had to build our workflow from the ground up to be cloud-enabled, allowing remote working,” said DeMax. “TriCaster Vectar was our way of getting there quickly and efficiently. There really was nothing else powerful enough.”
TriCaster Vectar is a fully featured live production solution that can be implemented either as a software download to install locally on-a standard PC that meets the necessary performance requirements on-premise or as a virtualized package that runs in private or public cloud environments that support GPU processing. This flexibility has proved invaluable for a lot of production companies that work with a myriad of clients in different environments.
With built-in media players, recording, streaming, audio, and graphics control, this cloud-based production tool suite makes it simple to output multiple versions of the same program with differences in graphics presentations, aspect ratios, and resolutions. And because TriCaster Vectar is purpose-built software—tightly integrating standard computing and network infrastructures with NDI® IP integration and optional SMPTE 2110 connectivity—Media.Monks said it has led to reduced physical technology costs and constant software updates.
“We looked at other products in the cloud to serve our purpose and there was no product out there that could handle the workflow the way we wanted it to go,” said Smithingham. “Our production trucks can work around the world in a single day. It’s fascinating to see that type of business transformation occurring.”
This cloud connectivity has also allowed Media.Monks to keep its staff of some 6,000 people around the world working steadily throughout the pandemic.
“When we first looked at TriCaster Vectar, we immediately realized it had all of the tools we were used to, just in a virtualized environment.,” said Joe DeMax, Broadcast Technical Manager, Media.Monks. “This meant we could continue to put our best people on the production no matter where they were located. It was like being in a broadcast truck, except it was all in the cloud.”
Indeed, TriCaster Vectar helped the digital media company staff up its teams best suited for the job by offering a fully remote solution and a secure bridge to the cloud. This enabled the team to work collaboratively without being in the same physical location. During one of the live sports productions, Media.Monks used a truly global team: one person is based in Nottingham, England, several in the U.S., and some in the company’s São Paulo, Brazil office. So it was truly a global production team working on the same project in real time. That, said DeMax, was critical to their success.
And the best part, according to Rob McNeil, Operations Director Live / Broadcast at Media.Monks, is that TriCaster Vectar “eliminates the need for a stack of servers and UPSs, power, generators, etc. You can now have flexible access and all of the production capabilities you need via a license that you can fire up at the drop of a hat. We realized that the applications that were using a year ago simply were not capable of what we are able to do now with TriCaster Vectar.”
Since that initial success with TriCaster Vectar, Media.Monks have now signed up several clients that are leveraging cloud-based production operations with it. In fact, several of the company’s clients and their brands have been able to thrive, thanks to the production work provided by Media.Monks.
“What we have been able to do given the restrictions were working under is nothing short of amazing,” said DeMax. “It truly distributes the team, not based on where you are but based on talent. The response has been absolutely amazing, with clients’ expectations exceeded time after time.”
Media.Monks now has most of its staff using working on TriCaster Vectar and they are creating more content for multiple distribution platforms than ever before.
“This has been the most productive year of my career,” said Smithingham, despite the myriad pandemic restrictions and event postponements. “Having the ability to leverage this scalable platform to work the way we want it to is very empowering,” he said. “It has really added a layer of stability, comfort and performance to our operations. We’re now working with a tool that we’re used to, and that we trust. With TriCaster® Vectar, we have not had a problem with latency or some of the issues you get with other solutions on the market. This Vizrt suite of live remote production tools is designed with professional large-scale broadcasters in mind.”
Media.Monks, a digital-first marketing and advertising services company—with 57 talent hubs in 33 countries around the world—received a call from a major sports league inquiring about producing roughly 20 games in pristine 4K UHD.
The Catch: due to COVID restrictions, the on-site crew at each of the league’s arenas would be limited to two people and they would have a mere 4×4 table-top encoding setup. This made it challenging, the Media.Monks’ team knew, but not impossible.
“Having the ability to leverage this scalable platform to work the way we want is very empowering,”
Lewis Smithingham
Director of Creative Solutions, Media.Monks
