Piksel Launches Live Streaming and Monitoring Center Dedicated to Online Video

Piksel launches its Live Streaming and Monitoring Center at Piksel’s Atlanta office, which will be dedicated entirely to live-streaming video. At the center, a team of Piksel experts will monitor live streams 24 hours a day to support its clients who are broadcasting content including live streamed events on a regular basis.

Research has shown that viewers abandon a video if it takes more than 2 seconds to start, reflecting the high expectations of the modern day viewer. No longer are people likely to tolerate production glitches or buffering delays – they expect a near flawless experience every time, and will happily move elsewhere if this isn’t what they’re getting. For live broadcasters, having a team of experts monitoring streams 24 hours a day means that issues will be resolved in near real time to avoid compromising the viewer experiences – as well as broadcasters’ reputation and revenues.

Sian Hodgson, SVP Global Infrastructure Services at Piksel, explained: “We want to make sure that our clients never have to interrupt a broadcast to resolve a technical issue and that they don’t need to invest excessive resources into making their live streams run smoothly. Our extensive experience working with tier one broadcasters has made us aware that small glitches can snowball if they’re not addressed quickly, and has taught us that constant monitoring is essential for this industry.”

The Ocean Exploration Trust (OET), founded by Titanic-discoverer and famed ocean explorer Dr. Robert Ballard, has been working with Piksel for 5 years to deliver footage of deep-sea exploration from its vessel the E/V Nautilus to science teams on shore and the wider public. Through its website nautiluslive.org, OET broadcasts real-time action in high definition video, 24 hours a day. Selecting from up to 15 source camera feeds both on the ship and unmanned submersibles exploring the ocean floor, Nautilus Live streams three distinct channels to the website. OET is seeing record traffic to its website for its current expedition in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea (June-Oct, 2014), and with Piksel’s support, maintained near one hundred percent up time on the live feeds. The focus of the 2014 expedition ranges from studying the long-term impacts of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010, to the investigations of shipwrecks in the Gulf of Mexico and geologic activity in the Caribbean Sea, including Kick ‘em Jenny, the only active submarine volcano in the Caribbean.

Susan Poulton from the Ocean Exploration Trust commented, “Stable and dependable streaming video is critical to fulfilling the telepresence, remote science, and public outreach components of our mission. The online stream is our science team’s ‘eyes in the field’ and we require a partner who can not only support our 24 hours a day expedition schedule, but deliver high resolution broadcast quality images back to shore. Piksel exceeded their commitment to providing this and became our go-to streaming provider.”

The Piksel Live Streaming and Monitoring Centerwill have capacity to monitor up to 128 source streams, and is predicted to monitor around 60,000 live event broadcasts per year.