Those who follow our updates, already know very well that Vivivaldy has piled up many collaborations in very important contexts: from international song festivals to the inaugural ceremony of the European football championships, from live events to musical productions, from conferences to radio shows. Wherever there is a need to transport, through an ordinary high-speed Internet connection (with no LAN or dedicated cable connection involved), audio in the highest quality among remote locations, without any data loss, Vivivaldy is up to the challenge.
The latest of these collaborations took place on the occasion of the Superbowl final, last Valentine’s Day (February 14, 2022), thanks to our good friends at Protostream, a US company that specializes in broadcasting live events and in remote mixing for live and studio recordings, using Vivivaldy hardware for their audio over WAN solutions.
In the case of the Superbowl event, Aram Richard and Alex Gray, who are Protostream’s two founders, created the service for two special customers: Viva Creative and Letshang.live.
Viva Creative develops and produces some of the most impactful events in the United States, from political conventions to presentations of the world’s leading commercial brands. Viva Creative’s mission – bringing people together by creating extraordinary experiences – was born in the aftermath of 9/11, when the first restrictions on movement began and it registered an unprecedented development during the pandemic emergency.
Letshang.live, instead, is an American start-up that has specialized in commenting on major sporting events, using great stars of the past, hall-of-famers, and influencers, in this specific case coming from or related to the NFL (National Football League) championship.
Letshang.live usually gathers its commentators in a location physically close to the venue of the event and then broadcasts their views and opinions live as the contenders compete for victory on the pitch.
For the latest Superbowl final, which has been contended by the Los Angeles Rams and the Cincinnati Bengals, the live broadcast was held in a Los Angeles mansion in the Beverly Hills neighborhood, and the guests were all American football bigwigs: Andre Reed (ex Buffalo Bills and hall-of-famer) Deebo Samuel (San Francisco 49ers receiver), Trevon Diggs (Dallas Cowboys cornerback), Austin Ekeler (former running-back of the Los Angeles Chargers), Shannon Sharpe (also hall-of-famer, former player of the Denver Broncos) and Michael Strahan (formerly of the New York Giants, who is still the “sack” record-holder in the NFL). In addition to these oval ball gurus, there was just one single “intruder”: the influencer Johnny Bananas.
It is therefore easy to understand the responsibility that Aram and Alex, at Protostream, had to manage in creating the infrastructure that would allow Letshang to broadcast their live event.
In this case, our team created a triangulation between Los Angeles, the venue of the event, Washington DC, the customer’s site, from which the stage announce, IFB talkover, monitoring feeds, and main intercom channels departed and returned (carrying the instructions of the Event Director to the participants and vice versa) and Atlanta, where Protostream headquarters are and where Aram, Alex, and their team took care of mixing and monitoring all the sources.
«The nice thing is that, despite all the turns that the audio signals made, no one noticed our work, they all operated as if they were together in the same room, giving for granted that the audio signals traveled smoothly and that they were synchronized with pictures. So I would say that it couldn’t have turned out any better than this» commented Aram, delighted with the performance of the Vivivaldy hardware.
«What impressed me most about the experience was what we managed to do with a very limited Internet connection: despite being in Beverly Hills, the location had just 10 Mbit per second in upload and we couldn’t even use them all, since over half of that traffic had to be dedicated to the streaming of video. Despite this, we managed to have no latency mixing the 32 audio channels into a stereo feed transmitted via Vivivaldy and using less than 3 Mb/s of the available bandwidth» concluded Aram.
There is also another thing to note: even though it was an exclusively Web event, it was rewarded with great success, reaching peaks of 30,000 users connected at the same time.
«And it was the first time that Protostream worked with Vivivaldy on 3 different locations at the same time, yet everything was quite easy to setup and worked perfectly as usual» added Alex.