Caton collaborates with China Unicom and Momenta to deliver immersive live viewing experience of the Olympics
In the current landscape, media producers are constantly looking for innovative ways to deliver high-quality live broadcasts to their viewers at anytime and anywhere. Consumers expect live events to be broadcast in real-time and at a high quality but without higher tariffs. As a result, content providers and media companies are constantly facing the pressure of delivering live events and field event reporting to create an immersive viewing experience for their audiences, while keeping operational costs down.
During the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games, Caton was selected by Momenta to deliver high-quality, low-latency content to live video platforms such as Migu, Tencent Video, Kuai Shou and many more. In order to deliver high-quality live streaming of the games to its viewers in Beijing, Momenta selected the CatonNet Video Platform (CVP) with Caton Transport Protocols (CTP). In addition to mitigating the issues that typically arise from bandwidth challenges, the CVP and CTP solution resulted in lower operating costs while enhancing the user experience of Momenta’s viewers.
The requirement was for multi-perspective content transmission, with multi-terminals connection, including field reporting teams, Main Press Centre (MPC) and mobile vehicle studios, for a comprehensive presentation of the Olympic Games in Tokyo.
The quality of transmissions also had to be monitored and controlled, requiring technical expertise in managing the distributed devices and end-to-end transmission process for efficiency and stability.
High-quality real-time broadcast over IP was also a must to deliver high performance and reliable trans-national streams back to Beijing.
Caton and China Unicom jointly designed an integrated solution to securely and reliably transmit live HD video from Tokyo to Beijing.
Recognising the need to supplement the broadcasting teams with agility and efficiency, Caton mobile encoders (Live Cast Pro) were deployed in Tokyo to provide real-time HD video transmission through multiple 4G networks. The additional features that come with Caton mobile encoders, such as multiple network bonding and inbuilt Cydex client for fast file transfer, provided the broadcasting teams with extra speed in file transfers and high network availability in all transmissions.
To enhance the transmission performance from Tokyo to Beijing, all Caton encoders and the SVN platform provided by China Unicom were connected to CatonNet Video Platform, a global network managed service powered by CTP. With over 30 algorithms in-built, CTP leverages deep learning approaches that work to smooth and mitigate network challenges, coupled with patented dynamic error corrections to recover from data loss. As a result, the quality and performance of the received transmission to Caton decoders situated in Beijing were significantly improved. This specially designed transmission ecosystem also featured active remote monitoring and management of network status by the Caton technical support team.
To facilitate workflow efficiency, Caton deployed Cydex, an enterprise-class file transfer management platform. Journalists were able to use Cydex to transport large files during the event.
After several months of multi-party co-operation, Caton withstood varying degrees of tests in relation to technical support, operation and maintenance, as well as management and service capabilities, to fulfil all of the customer’s requirements.