John Brown University Celebrates Centennial with Matrox Monarch HDX

To cover the broadcast of the numerous events that will be held this year, three Monarch HDX encoders have been incorporated into the AV infrastructure.. One is part of a flypack and the other two are mounted on a fixed rack, in a server room.

John Brown University (JBU) celebrates its centenary this year and, with this reason, A season has begun in which live events will take place on campus. As part of your school experience you offer more than 40 areas of study along with a wide variety of sporting activities, cultural and spiritual.

The audio support team, visual and lighting (AVL) from JBU, a division within Information Technology Services (ITS) from the university, generally participates each year in the production and live broadcast of more than 650 events that take place on campus and it is expected that this year there will be many more.

The AVL department advises more than 30 work-study students in producing smooth, subtle technical support for large-scale events, from soccer games, basketball and volleyball to special events such as ceremonies, musical performances, plays and seminars.

Darren Gould, AVL specialist at JBU, who is mainly in charge of the design, the purchase and system installation of the majority of video infrastructure used on campus, experienced a series of computer failures when trying to transmit. "Then, we were using encryption software installed on computers with third party I/O cards. And it started to fail”.

This is why they decided to look for a solution that would allow campus events to be broadcast so that the family, friends and alumni could enjoy themselves when they couldn't be there. Dual channel encoder Matrox Monarch HDX was the chosen option.

JBU purchased three Monarch HDX encoders. A unit is part of a flypack that is used to broadcast various events across campus. It is equipped with everything the AVL team needs to produce and transmit high-quality video..

The other two Monarch HDX devices are mounted in a fixed rack in a server room, along with a video router, connected by fiber optic cable to three of the most used locations on campus and to the university's television studio.

Fixed installations (Bill George Arena, Cathedral of the Ozarks and Berry Performing Arts Center) are equipped with multiple HD-SDI cameras, video switchers and audio consoles. Configuration and equipment vary depending on location.

For live streaming events, The university uses the two Monarch HDX encoding channels to simultaneously transmit in RTMP to different destinations, providing viewers with a variety of viewing options.

For example, a basketball game would be sent to two main destinations, one of which is the content delivery network (CDN) Stretch Internet de la National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) and the other to a Wowza Media Server, locally installed on the network.

For the latter, once the stream is sent to Wowza, the streaming engine distributes games with a live graphics overlay to a series of digital signage displays throughout campus and to other destinations such as Facebook Live.

Athletic games are broadcast off campus more frequently, while worship services are held on campus three times a week. Other events, like conferences, musical performances and plays, they happen regularly, but not at a fixed time. Since the university is equipped with several Monarch HDX encoders, no problem if two of the three fixed locations hold the events at the same time.

AVL team uses Monarch HDX profile and presets to configure all encoding parameters, including resolution and bitrate for each destination.

These settings are saved on all Monarch HDX devices for redundancy, in case it is ever needed to use it as a backup. Depending on the place, transmission parameters vary between 1,280x720p to 59,94 fps o 1.920×1.080i a 29,97 fps.

Operations for all fixed installations are controlled through the Monarch HDX Command Center, while for the flypack configuration, Monarch HDX device buttons are used to start and stop video streams.

Given the results achieved, university plans to add a fourth fixed location to its fiber optic network with another Monarch HDX unit. This will allow you to stream up to four different events simultaneously or use the units to record them to a network attached storage device.. Monarch HDX also has the ability to save files locally to an SD card or USB drive.