CP Communications Smart car content acquisition for NYC marathon
Live event production company CP Communications, launched its Red House Streaming business unit and took to the streets of New York City on November 4 to manage end-to-end content acquisition for the TCS New York City Marathon. The crew achieved 100 percent video and audio coverage of the men’s and women’s races across all five boroughs, using an IP and bonded cellular network across the 26.2-mile race course for what CP says is the first time.
The IP content acquisition strategy employed four Smart® cars, four motorcycles, and other special motorized systems (including two POV wheelchairs) outfitted with cameras and mobile viewpoint bonded cell solutions. These were networked for transport to CP Communications’ HD-21 RF truck. All signals were received and processed on HD-21 before being passed to the broadcast trucks at the finish line, which produced world feed uplinks as well as local and national television feeds.
The system combines several 3G/4G/LTE modems into a single, robust internet connection for deploying live video. According to CP Communications CEO Kurt Heitmann, his team took into consideration areas with cell coverage challenges along the course, particularly where large spectator crowds could potentially overtax cell networks.
“We used nearly 600 unique IP addresses from Brooklyn through the Bronx coupled with a MIMO mesh network across the Verrazano Bridge to backfeed internet to our Smart® cars and deliver intercom as well as other services,” said Heitmann. “We added COFDM traditional microwave receivers to get the coverage we needed off of the bridge, due to the limited cellular coverage, and deployed COFDM near the finish line for the same reason. That safeguarded our operation for the first and last mile of the race, in the event that limited cell coverage caused the signals to drop.” Comments? Email us.
November 29, 2018
