Chess on Ice Online: Telestream Wirecast Pro and Matrox VS4 Live Stream Curling Championship

Expanding the Broadcast

The curling club’s original intention was to only broadcast one game a day, but the Matrox/Telestream solution proved so efficient that, with two cameramen and a third person switching the gear, they decided to shoot three games a day. The only hitch they encountered was when a remote viewer of the live feed called and asked for the “lady with the big hat” to be moved away from one of the cameras – she was blocking the view of the game! “We knew then that we had an audience,” laughs McAteer.

By the end of the week, the competition was pulling in more than 300 viewers per game – very good numbers for an amateur sports event. The biggest impact of live streaming the tournament however came from the reactions the friends and family of players who were able to watch the event from locations across Canada. Tournament organizers received a wave of comments expressing their appreciation. 

Archiving and Editing the Footage

After the event finished, another of the Matrox VS4 features was appreciated. While the cameras were providing a live feed for Wirecast Pro to stream, the ISO recording feature of Matrox VS4 was continuously recording the output from all cameras to hard disk. Adobe Premiere Pro was able to natively read the video files into the editing suite. Once the live event concluded, the ISO files were immediately accessible for editing.

“It’s a great timesaver when software and hardware are closely integrated as they are with the Wirecast/Matrox solution,” says McAteer, “Scrubbing through the 500 gigabytes of video from the camera feeds that we collected in a week is challenging enough without having to jump through hoops to properly read the files.”

“The Wirecast/Matrox VS4 solution exceeded our expectations during the tournament and proved to us that you don’t have to spend a fortune these days to get into the broadcast game,” comments McAteer.