How SRT Streamlines In-Person and REMI Production

Learn more about SRT and REMI production at Streaming Media East 2022.

Read the complete transcript of this clip:

Chris Steblay: We have an interesting perspective because we do a lot less virtual production. When we do live sports, obviously all our cameras and all our participants are there in one place. So we don't really have as big of a virtual workflow. You know, we're not tapping into vMix, but we're bringing in trucks to our productions and things like that. But to your point on logistics and budgets as well, I do think these things are changing. When we look at some of the projects we're working on, developing a live show out of a glacier in Alaska, we can't bring a hundred people like our normal productions to these glaciers. We have to figure out how to do these remotely. Now we have all sorts of bandwidth issues and transmission issues. So I think that when we look at the future of thesen technologies, it's gonna allow us to go to really interesting places to do these shows that we typically need larger infrastructure and to do them virtually and remotely.

REMI production is big in the industry we work in, but even going a step further and breaking out those REMIs to all the seats, the being at home, rather than in a unified location. As far as directors, TDS audio mixers, all that stuff, being able to work remotely can open the door for a ton of creativity because you can now take those resources and put 'em onto location. We definitely have defined budgets to work within, and they're not always the largest budgets, but they're not always the smallest, but we're trying to squeeze as much out of them as we can. So, moving from the traditional satellite transmission model to an SRT delivery model for end-to-end distribution, there's tons of savings there that really add up for small broadcasters that not having to do satellite booking times and just being able to turn stuff on and get it to where you need to go.

I think that allows for flexibility, but the cost savings for a small production adds up big time. And we can reallocate that to what new toys can we put in the field rather than in the backend where, at the end of the day, consumers might not know how you're getting the pictures to them. They care more about how you're getting those pictures. So it all works together for sure, but a lot of times we can reallocate from the kind of unseen backend and put it into the front end, and add more toys to the camera tools that we have. Different production workflow, for sure, from our perspective; we're not doing it like in esports where everyone's at home, or the talk shows at home. So we're trying to figure out how to utilize these technologies more with in-person production.