Our CEO, Igor Krol, caught up with Ben Chung, volunteer Video Chair of the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Programming Languages (ACM SIGPLAN), to learn more about a recent project in which Veset Nimbus was used to create several pop-up TV channels for the 2021 SPLASH conference.
Q1. Can you tell us a bit more about the SPLASH conference?
SPLASH is an annual conference on Systems, Programming, Languages, and Applications: Software for Humanity. Each year, ACM SIGPLAN organises a premier conference and various workshops for those interested in programming language research.
SPLASH embraces all aspects of software construction and delivery, to make it the premier conference on the applications of programming languages—at the intersection of programming languages and software engineering. The event provides opportunities for researchers, developers, and students to present their latest research and developments.
Q2. What was the goal of the project and were there any challenges?
SPLASH is held in different cities each year, with Chicago selected to host the 2021 event. With the restrictions of Covid-19 still in place, the organisers wanted to offer virtual attendance options for those who were not yet fully vaccinated or did not want to be present among so many people.
We wanted an easy-to-use SaaS channel playout platform to create multiple scheduled linear channels to enable remote attendees to view various live streams during the conference. We needed a solution that could deliver these sessions over three channels during a 6-day period. Additionally, we only needed the platform for a short timeframe, so we didn’t want to invest in costly infrastructure or be tied to a long contract. The prior solutions which were put together using AWS mediatoolkit were not really scalable and we wanted a specialized product for this year’s event, so we knew we had to look for an alternative solution that could handle our requirements.
Q3. How did Veset help and what was the outcome?
After researching cloud playout companies and trialing Veset, it came as a compelling choice for our use case. Not only did it offer an economically attractive and flexible business model, but it was able to integrate well into our video contributions and distribution workflows.
Using Veset Nimbus, we were able to spin linear channels consisting of on-site live events from Chicago, streams from cloud services, and pre-recorded content that was replayed for 8-10 hours a day. We had a small team of live production specialists on hand to manage the channels and Nimbus made it simple to quickly manage and respond to last-minute schedule changes. The combination of captioning support as well as the schedule editor made the project much more efficient. The live sessions were distributed to YouTube via AWS MediaLive using RTMP contribution.
We look forward to leveraging Veset’s cloud-based playout platform going forward.
SPLASH is an annual conference on Systems, Programming, Languages, and Applications: Software for Humanity. Each year, ACM SIGPLAN organises a premier conference and various workshops for those interested in programming language research.
