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July 2010 Digital Rapids Encoders Power Live Streams from Rhianna to Red Love for Streaming Tank
www.streamingtank.com
by Chris Dabbs, Group Account Director, Streaming Tank
The Challenge: Live encoding and streaming of several events with 100% reliability and high quality across multiple formats
The Solution: StreamZ
The Benefits: "Our reputation as a company depends on flawless execution. We always know we can count on Digital Rapids."
 Streaming Tank, part of the Creative Tank Group logistics and digital marketing agency, specializes in advanced live and on-demand video streaming. Digital Rapids is Streaming Tank's main hardware supplier for all their streaming and encoding requirements. Recently Streaming Tank has used Digital Rapids StreamZ encoders for a wide variety of projects with one common theme: the need for absolute reliability.
Starbucks Red Love Project
Streaming Tank was approached by London-based production company Gorgeous and BBDO New York to handle the logistics and technical requirements of a project for the Starbucks-sponsored Red Love Charity for AIDS Awareness. The project was a global "one world" event - to break the Guinness world record for "Most Nations in an Online Sing Along" by streaming live as many countries as possible simultaneously singing the Beatles' song 'All You Need Is Love'. With participants from solo artists to full choirs, 156 countries took part, smashing the previous world record.
An eight-camera crew was involved in vision mixing audio and video from 156 screens at the O2 in London, which was chosen as the venue because it has enough Internet bandwidth (250 Meg inbound, 10 Meg outbound) to handle the event. Incoming video delivered to multiple screens at 'Matter', a club attached to the O2 venue, was streamed live to the world through a specially constructed Starbucks website via Digital Rapids' StreamZ systems. The outgoing streams were encoded at four different bit rates in H.264 video with AAC audio for viewing through Adobe Flash.
The logistical demands for a project like this were enormous. Over two weeks preparation for a live event lasting 2 1/2 minutes meant that the StreamZ encoders had to be absolutely reliable or the entire exercise would have been pointless. We use Digital Rapids because we know we can depend on them to deliver.
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