For years the Harvard Athletic Department has made sure that streaming and archived video of its most popular sports — football, basketball and hockey — are available for students, family and fans to access online. Lately, “as the costs of equipment have gone down, there’s really been a trend toward streaming non-ticketed Olympic sports like tennis,” says Imry Halevi, Harvard’s director of multimedia and production for the AD.
Halevi recently researched and rolled out a video streaming solution for Harvard tennis that allows matches to be streamed and archived on the Ivy League Digital Network. He did so despite not expecting a large audience.
“Harvard football, Harvard basketball—they have a big audience, a lot of people watching online. Harvard tennis, even if they don’t have a lot of people watching online or even if the interest is limited to parents of current athletes and alums of the program the cost of the equipment allows us to set that up in a very reasonable way.”
The solution Halevi rolled out for the tennis program includes six Blackmagic Design ATEM 1 M/E Production Studio 4K switchers, which complement other Blackmagic products including the Compact Videohub, Micro Videohub, ATEM Television Studio and several Mini Converters. There’s an ATEM 1 M/E Production Studio 4K installed at each of the six indoor tennis courts located at Harvard.
“Our goal with this project was to provide a cost-effective, easy solution for streaming tennis at Harvard, specifically the six in-door courts, and I was looking for something that would be easily controlled remotely while also staying within our budget,” Halevi says.
“The Blackmagic switchers provided the best solution on the market. They’re not that expensive. They provide a whole host of inputs and outputs that we can use for our cameras and streaming and DVR and allowed us to put them all in a very small space.”
Each of the six tennis courts has a camera at one end for a wide angle shot, which is fed into an ATEM 1 M/E Production Studio 4K. Audio input for the commentators’ feed is fed into the switchers, as well as a second video input for a shot of the scoreboard, which is then used in the wide angle shot for the DVE effect.
Harvard’s tennis streaming solution is “very powerful and has a lot of scalability,” Halevi adds. Right now it doesn’t leverage the Blackmagic Design ATEM 1 M/E Production Studio 4K switchers’ Ultra HD capabilities, but he says the plan is to stream in 4K at some point. “I’m excited to expand on what we are doing now.
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Video: Imry Halevi, Harvard’s athletic department director of multimedia and production, explains why video streaming is in such high demand:
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