Digital Rapids provided technology to stream the World Cup qualifier between England and Ukraine in October over the Internet. The event became the United Kingdom’s first-ever competitive international match available for live viewing exclusively on the Internet. There was no broadcast TV coverage.
Perform Online, a digital sport and entertainment specialist, set up the streaming of the event using Digital Rapids’ StreamZ encoding systems and Broadcast Manager software.
The international football agency Kentaro had acquired the broadcast rights to the match from the Ukranian Football Association and had sold the UK TV rights to pay-TV broadcaster Setanta Sport. Setanta Sport went into administration over the summer, leaving this key match without a UK broadcaster. With no offers for the rights from other UK free-to-air or pay-TV broadcasters, Kentaro appointed Perform to market and stream the match online on a pay-per-view basis.
Perform Online used Digital Rapids’ StreamZ systems to encode SDI video inputs into live streams for viewing through Adobe Flash player technology. For encoder management, Perform used Digital Rapids’ Web Services API to integrate the Digital Rapids Broadcast Manager software with Perform’s live event content management system.
The Broadcast Manager software enables at-a-glance monitoring of all feeds and failover functionality for multiple StreamZ encoders, providing maximum uptime through flexible redundancy configurations with automated switchover. Upstream video router control provides automated source switching for backup encoder systems. Enabling fully automated operations, Broadcast Manager also features e-mail and SNMP alerting, with logging of all operational events.
