SPLASH 2021 conference uses Veset playout to broadcast multiple channels

Igor Krol, then CEO of Veset, spoke with Ben Chung, volunteer Video Chair of the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Programming Languages (ACM SIGPLAN), about how Veset Nimbus was used to create pop-up TV channels for the 2021 SPLASH conference.

Can you tell us about the SPLASH conference?

SPLASH is an annual conference on Systems, Programming, Languages, and Applications: Software for Humanity. Each year, ACM SIGPLAN organises a conference and workshops for people interested in programming language research.

SPLASH covers all aspects of software construction and delivery, at the intersection of programming languages and software engineering, and gives researchers, developers and students a place to present their latest work.

What was the goal of the project, and were there any challenges?

SPLASH is held in a different city each year, and Chicago hosted the 2021 event. With Covid-19 restrictions still in place, the organisers wanted to offer virtual attendance for people who weren’t yet fully vaccinated or didn’t want to be among so many people.

We wanted an easy-to-use SaaS playout platform to create several scheduled linear channels, so remote attendees could follow the live streams during the conference. We needed to deliver the sessions over three channels for six days. We only needed the platform for a short time, so we didn’t want to invest in infrastructure or sign a long contract. Our earlier setups, put together from AWS media services, didn’t scale well, and we wanted a specialised product this year.

How did Veset help, and what was the outcome?

After researching cloud playout companies and trialling Veset, it was a compelling choice for our use case. The business model was flexible and affordable, and it fitted well into our video contribution and distribution workflows.

With Veset Nimbus we built linear channels from on-site live events in Chicago, streams from cloud services, and recorded content replayed 8-10 hours a day. A small team of live production specialists ran the channels, and Nimbus made it simple to handle last-minute schedule changes. Captioning support and the schedule editor made the project much more efficient. The live sessions went to YouTube through AWS MediaLive over RTMP.

The setup

Item	Detail
Delivery	HLS
Distribution	OTT
Live events	Multiple live sessions

What mattered to SPLASH

• Simple management of several channels
• Live and recorded content in one 24/7 stream
• Multiple live contributions
• Scaling up and down