THE CUSTOMER: Since 1882 Kiel Week has been celebrated annually in northern Germany. The event started as a sailing regatta with 20 boats on the Kiel Fjord. This small race of naval officers and merchants has grown to become the largest sailing event in the world with more than 5,000 sailors from more than 50 nations and three million visitors. "Kieler Woche TV," powered by AUDI, is now broadcasted over nine days with live shows, studio events and interviews.

THE CHALLENGE: Even with modern media technology, it is a big challenge to bring the regatta’s excitement and emotions from the water to a growing number of visitors and TV spectators in real- time. The overall challenge was to provide a way communicate the complexity of a sailing race, coming from the many participants, the wide regatta field and dependency on wind and waves, so that it is understandable to the audience and offers the spectators a good view of the racing action. The major technical challenge was the processing of many different input signals (mobile cameras, drones camera, and pre-prepared material from the Proxsys system), as well as the various required playout targets which included presentations on big screens throughout the race venue and the transmission stream to the live Web TV platform. In addition to those playout targets, it was a key requirement from the RealTV Group to make all content available via mobile devices (iPhone, iPad, Android devices) for the visitors of the Kiel Week.

THE SOLUTION: To meet these challenges, RealTV Group chose the combination of the NewTek’s TriCaster 8000 and VITEC’s Proxsys Media Asset Management Solution. The TriCaster offers live mixer functionality and many more features, such as two built-in hard disk player devices that allow the system to merge external clips directly into the program. The external clips are supplied by the Proxsys Media Asset Management system while the TriCaster handles the internet streaming in the background. In order to provide a guaranteed secure satellite bandwidth, Eutelsat Kasat provided an upload bandwidth of up to 10 Mbps with an antenna of only 77cm.

The bandwidth was reserved exclusively for the Kiel Week and could not be used by other customers. The Proxsys PX -Series Media Asset Management system was used for the Kiel Week to provide an efficient and safe archive, and to make the valuable media assets available to viewers as Video on Demand (VOD) files from anywhere, at anytime, and through multiple playout targets such as large presentation screens, live web TV platforms and social media platforms ( Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo, YouTube, …). Integrated into the TriCaster workflow, Proxsys provided all the required functionalities and features to ingest, manage and utilize all Kiel Week videos in high and low resolution, as well as audio files, metadata and all related content.