Ghost written for Jeff Sobel, Chief Engineer, The John Lennon Educational Tour Bus

The Challenge: High quality, multi-bitrate, live web streaming from traveling mobile studio

The Solution: StreamZHD

The Benefits: “StreamZHD has given us multi-stream encoding functionality…resulting in more people viewing our productions in the best quality possible. It has also increased stream reliability, which has fostered greater confidence in our productions.”

The John Lennon Educational Tour Bus is a non-profit organization that serves as a living legacy to John Lennon by providing young people across the US and Canada free access to hands-on music and video creation. On the bus is a state-of-the-art, mobile audio and HD video recording and production facility and now in its sixteenth year, it continues to provide students and emerging artists alike with studio tours and participation in free song-writing and multimedia production workshops. With the assistance and guidance of professional engineers on board the bus, students learn how to write, perform, record, and produce original songs; produce and shoot music videos and documentaries; and create complete broadcast quality music video deliverables.

The Bus is highly adaptable. It has been designed to provide students, schools and their communities with performances, demonstrations, remote recordings, and studio sessions customized for their needs, levels of experience and interest. The Bus is able to produce live multi-camera video productions streamed to the web in real time. All projects created on board are available for viewing on our website (lennonbus.org), YouTube, and Facebook.

The Lennon Bus provides a variety of creative technical opportunities for students. Several of our workshops include live web streams produced in the Bus’s studios. These live web programs frequently include celebrity guests and live music performances. Student producers need reliable tools so their learning experience is productive, efficient, and reflects real world broadcast scenarios with industry-standard equipment. We want our students to get hands-on experience with the same equipment they’ll encounter in professional studios should they enter the industry. And since we are often producing shows featuring A-list celebrities, quality and reliability are critically important.

We also needed to be able to stream multi-bitrate video with state-of- the-art codecs and have complete control over the streams’ specifications. The StreamZHD from Digital Rapids was by far the best solution that fit our application. Its availability in a 1RU size is unprecedented in a unit this powerful and reliable. Digital Rapids has a reputation for quality and reliability. Our streaming infrastructure partner, TodoCast, emphatically recommended a Digital Rapids encoder as the best solution for us. The StreamZHD allowed TodoCast to configure the streams to exactly the specifications at which their infrastructure works best.

The StreamZHD is mounted in a sound-isolated compartment. It receives digital video input over HD-SDI, typically from a NewTek TriCaster 855 integrated multi-channel production system during live shows. The StreamZHD encodes and outputs multiple web and mobile streams transmitted over a TodoCast/GlobeComm satellite with 2Mbps uplink. From the 1080i HD-SDI input, the StreamZHD encodes and outputs multiple concurrent H.264 streams ranging from HD to mobile resolutions.

Adding the StreamZHD has given us multi-stream encoding functionality that allows viewers to watch the stream in a quality that better suits their capabilities, resulting in more people viewing our productions in the best quality possible. It has also increased stream reliability, which has fostered greater confidence in our productions.

We also recently launched the John Lennon Educational Tour Bus in Europe. A completely new, custom designed vehicle was unveiled in Liverpool in the United Kingdom on May 8, 2013. We are looking forward to bringing the Digital Rapids encoding quality and reliability to our European vehicle in our live streaming programs there.