Video: Fiber vs. Satellite for Streaming Large-Scale Events
Fiber transmission presents a cost-effective alternative to using a traditional satellite truck for live transmission of large-scale live event streams, as Peter Hartz of The Switch and Corey Behnke from Live X argue in this excerpt from their panel at the 2015 Live Streaming Summit. The challenge is advance setup time; all the more reason to bring transmission details into discussions with clients as soon as possible.
Learn more about live event streaming at scale at Streaming Media West.
Read the transcript of this clip:
Peter Hartz: Fibre is very present, very available, and really should be looked at as a first solution. It's typically less expensive than if you had to bring a sat truck to a Microsoft event. They want belt and suspenders, so they've got the fibre and they've got the sat truck. There's a whole range of transmission opportunities. The type of transmission you can do could be straight broadcast quality video that you're acquiring, it could be that you're encoding in some way and you want to send Ethernet point-to-point to your vendor. There's a lot of ways to connect from the remote location to your encoding vendor, who is going to then up to your CDNs.
Corey Behnke: It is very economical. That's one of my things when I first ... About 4 years ago, when I was at Livestream, we actually put a switch connection into our control center, and it's only $1000 a month for ... In New York. I don't know what it is everywhere. If you price that over the year ... It's really reliable, too, that's my favorite thing about it. You can send it anywhere. I could send a feed we were doing and send it to Los Angeles and it was economical to do so. I definitely highly recommend fibre.
The problem that most of us in this room probably have is that our client doesn't get to us until a week before, and so we can't really get fibre and turn on fibre in the time that it takes. I've been really excited that ... If we could just have fibre in more places, the world would be a better place for myself and for a lot of people in this room.
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