Live Streaming - Horse Racing

We've been doing streaming of normal playout channels for ages but with new partnerships opening up we've started to move heavily into the live sports field and on Sunday 23rd we streamed out 3rd live horse racing event.  The event was Arabian Horse Racing from Royal Windsor Racecourse and this was one of our events with one of our newer partners Racetech.  Neither WRN Broadcast nor Racetech's business's have any real overlap areas so where they are heavy and excellent on the OB side we can compliment that with both live and multi-platform delivery.

Typically some racecourses don't have great connectivity available hence we are using solutions delivering the video back over either bonded 3G/4G to Ka-Sat backhaul solutions.  We then decode this at our London HQ and process through our streaming platform and deliver into the CDN.  We then give Arabian Racing Organisation(ARO) a weblink.  They publish this link behind a button on their webpage and it's a simple click through and the members of ARO can watch their horses compete from anywhere in the world.

This has gone down fantastically with the members and offers them an easy way to view their favourite racing without the need to travel the often long distance to a course.

The Windsor event was a little different as it was being often to a 3rd party for live transmission onto TurfTV.  This meant the added complication of sending our pictures and audio to an uplink trunk.  The truck was provided by Globecast and was on-site way before us.  The uplinks engineer was great and really flexible which was good as often is the case the uplink truck was across the car park from the OB and the tie lines between the 2 parking spots were a little thin on the ground and all unlabelled.  It took some time of trial and error with signal generators and monitors figuring out the various video and audio tie lines we needed.  Luckily we didn't need many just a pair of SDI feeds and 4 mono audios, a pair for programme audio and a pair for Talkback RX and TX.

Having the uplink was useful as it meant that at our London NOC we could simply downlink the feed rather than use the 3G/4G solution.  This wasn't because we don't trust the 3G/4G feeds it's simply easier to use a satellite feed if it's available.  So on Friday we got all the Globecast call sheet with the downlink parameters and booked our steerable dish and one of our satellite receivers as took the racing feed that way.

This was a bigger than usual ARO meeting.  ARO meetings are usually performed with the Mercedes-Benz Sprinter truck that was built especially for ARO meetings.  It has limited cameras installed as ARO typically only use a single camera.  As this meeting was a bigger meeting it included 4 camera's and photo finish so a bigger Racetech truck was onsite, MCRSD11.  This truck can easily handle the day as it's typically used on big meetings.  It's the last Standard Definition (SD) truck built by Racetech as all subsequent trucks are High Definition (HD).

As expected the day went without any technical hitches at all.

Next Streaming events for ARO are

Sunday 7th September - Hereford
Sunday 28th September - Wolverhampton

WRN Broadcast and Racetech Live Arabian Racing Streaming