Rambla streams live to primetime VRT program

'Peter Live' is a weekly TV show in primetime on Eén, the largest channel of Flemish public broadcasting company VRT. A new section in this year's program series was 'Iedereen Live' ('Everybody Live'), in which viewers were invited to share personal news and experiences live on air using their webcam.

For this purpose, VRT built a web-application that could maintain a queue of hundreds of simultaneous webcam connections and randomly pick any of them to join the TV show. The application back-end also allowed the show's director and crew to chat with participants before putting them live on air.

To handle the live streaming functionality, VRT decided to contact Rambla. The setup required all streams to be delivered at high speed and with very low latency - making it possible for the show's host to chat with viewers in real-time - while preserving sufficient video and audio quality for transmission on TV. Another key issue was reliability, since all live streams needed to be kept available until the program ended.

Rambla worked together with VRT to configure and tune a dedicated Wowza application on our CDN and integrate it with the web-application. During each episode of 'Peter Live', Rambla engineers provided monitoring services to make sure that everything worked as planned. This also allowed us to assure the reliability of the live streams. If a connection problem with a streaming server were to arise, the web-application's connections could be made to failover immediately to another geographical location.

The end result was a successful integration of web 2.0 functionality into a mainstream television program, without any of the glitches that are often associated with live streaming video over the internet.