Leaving home to go to university and adapting to student life are huge adjustments.
For student athletes in particular, looking up at the stands and not seeing a familiar face can be disheartening.
At the University of Dallas, the Sports Information team recognized that families and fans wanted to show their support despite the distance and found a way for everyone to watch games live and on demand.
Recently, the university added a Matrox Monarch HD encoder to their video production set-up and partnered with College TV Ticket, a webcasting service for NCAA sports, to live stream games. Now, viewers in state, out of state and around the world are able to view the majority of home events for baseball, softball, basketball, lacrosse, soccer and volleyball live online by subscribing to the service.
Going Digital
Before adopting Monarch HD, events were recorded on videotape in camera and later digitized. The tapes had to be changed periodically during the event and there was a risk of accidently overwriting previous footage.
Video quality was not optimal and the delay in creating digital files meant that footage could not be immediately shared.
As host to almost 100 sporting events throughout the year, the university felt it was imperative to update their setup and find a reliable device to initiate the stream to College TV Ticket and to record high-quality footage.
“With everything going digital, we needed a device that could record video in a format that didn’t require conversion,” says Nathan Yacovissi, Sports Information Manager at the University of Dallas.
Two Workflows with One Device
The athletics department decided on the Matrox Monarch HD H.264 encoder for its ability to stream and record simultaneously and for its affordable price point. With its ability to record digital files directly, Monarch HD alleviated the concern about overwriting content.
Monarch HD is now used to stream to College TV Ticket and at the same time to record video files locally on an SD card as back-up, and for coaches to access for training purposes.
Matrox Monarch HD gives the option of recording high quality H.264 video files in MP4 or MOV format, which offers maximum versatility for use in any content creation application such as those from Adobe, Apple and Avid, without transcoding.
It also means that the recorded files can play back using free media players such as VideoLAN’s VLC Player and Apple QuickTime. The back-up recording could also be used in the case of a stream interruption due to network issues. In that case, the Sports Information team could simply upload the recorded video to College TV Ticket as the archive file.
“Monarch HD gives us two options by being able to access a stream point and record to a memory device, such as an SD card,” says Yacovissi. “Being able to utilize both gives us the advantage of streaming live games to our audience, while also having a back-up recorded if the internet network fails.”
If you enjoyed this article and want to receive more valuable industry content like this, click here to sign up for our digital newsletters!
Leave a Reply