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June 2009 Digital Rapids Powers Live Streaming of Hundreds of Events Annually for World Sport Group
www.worldsportgroup.com
by James Leow, Head of Digital Media, World Sport Group
"It is essential for us that all the equipment is robust and reliable and the StreamZ encoders deliver on all counts, with Broadcast Manager making the management of multiple streams really easy."
"The introduction of the Digital Rapids equipment has helped to open up new revenue streams for our company, giving us a great return on our investment."
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Headquartered in Singapore, World Sport Group (www.worldsportgroup.com) is Asia’s leading sports marketing, event management and media company. We have been at the forefront of Asian sports since 1992, producing over 600 days of sports events and more than 1,000 hours of sports programming annually, across more than 30 countries in the region. World Sport Group is the exclusive marketing partner of the Asian Football Confederation (AFC, www.the-afc.tv) and the ASEAN Football Federation (AFF), and is a major stake-holder in Asian golf as the organiser of the Barclays Singapore Open, Hero Honda Indian Open, the SAIL Open Golf Championship, Thailand Open, Volvo Masters of Asia, the Mercedes-Benz Tour and the Omega China Tour.
 The Group, in partnership with Sony Corporation, was awarded the global media rights for the Indian Premier League, the new Twenty20 cricket competition. This 10-year deal is valued at over US$1 billion. World Sport Group is a member of the Consortium that will build, manage and operate the Singapore Sports Hub.
World Sport Group holds the digital rights for the continent's leading club and national team football competitions, including the AFC Champions League (the premier club team tournament in Asia); FIFA World Cup 2010 Asian qualifying rounds; AFC Asian Cup 2011 (the marquee national team event); the Asian football qualifying rounds for the 2012 Olympic Games; and more. To facilitate the huge volume of live streaming to exploit these rights, we sought a robust streaming solution that could be easily managed.
We consulted with our partners at Perform Group, the global digital sport and entertainment specialist, who introduced us to the Digital Rapids product line. Finding the Digital Rapids solutions well-suited for our needs, we purchased eight StreamZ encoding systems with the Digital Rapids Broadcast Manager multi-encoder management software. The systems were supplied by Digital Rapids reseller Sebastian Ang of Mediamatic Systems International Pte Ltd.
The Workflow
We chose the 1400xs model of StreamZ, which comes equipped with an SDI interface for video and embedded audio. This allowed us to seamlessly integrate the encoders into our existing SDI routing infrastructure. Live satellite feeds are sent to the StreamZ encoders as SDI video, with either embedded SDI audio or analog audio. The input sources are encoded into the On2 VP6 format for viewing through Adobe Flash, with the encoded output streamed live over a 10Mbps “pipe” to our chosen Content Delivery Network, Akamai, for distribution.
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