Summer Universiade Games play out in Taipei with Apantac multiviewers

Apantac’s Mi-16 series of multiviewers is being used in the master playout centre for the Summer Universiade Games in Taipei, Taiwan. Universiade is considered the Olympic Games for college and university students all over the world and the XXIX Summer Universiade and is held from August 19 to 30 2017 with venues located in Taipei City, New Taipei city, Taoyuan City, Hsinchu County, Hsinchu City and other neighboring counties.

The Universiade covers 12 days of sporting competition and involves a total of 22 sports and 270 gold medal events. More than 150 countries are expected to participate in the Summer Universiade, making it a major media event.

Due to time challenges, a key goal for the Universiade International Broadcasting Centre (IBC) was to find solutions that were easy to install and configure. In order to ensure redundancy, the IBC was designed to receive the feeds from all the venues with both IP and fibre transport. Thus, there are twice as many video streams to be monitored. Apantac worked with chief consultant Mr. Cloudy Chen to deliver a plug-and-play solution to the Universiade IBC that addressed their multi-image monitoring requirements within a specified budget.

The technical team at the International Broadcasting Centre has installed Apantac’s Mi-16 video multiviewers to monitor all the camera feeds from a total of 79 venues (38 competition venues and 41 training venues), including the opening and closing ceremony, which are held at the Taipei Stadium. Twelve Mi-16 Multiviewers, each configured to 16 images, will feed multiple displays in the International Broadcasting Center’s master playout room.

One of the unique features of the Mi-16 series was a clear choice for the technology team; its 3G passive loop outs. This proprietary technology developed by Apantac means that a source will never be lost, even if the multiviewer is turned off or goes down.

Another key feature that made the Apantac Mi-16 multiviewers particularly attractive for this project was its source duplicating function and internal routing. This eliminates the need for external routers, which is a feature only found in expensive multiviewers.