TVU Networks Powers TV Azteca’s Remote Production of the Annual Hollywood Awards Show

TVU Networks, the global technology and innovation leader in live IP solutions, today announced that TV Azteca, one of Mexico’s largest media companies, produced its coverage of Hollywood’s most prestigious awards show held annually in February with the company’s innovative TVU Remote Production System (TVU RPS). TVU RPS was used to transmit video footage from TV Azteca’s mobile unit at the venue in Los Angeles to a remote studio set up in a nearby hotel. A small stage on the terrace of the hotel suite served as a makeshift talk show set for commentary from the hosts during the live broadcast.

With director Alfonso Cuarón taking home three statuettes that night for “Roma,” the critically acclaimed drama set in Mexico, this year’s award celebration was of considerable regional interest to TV Azteca viewers. It was the first Mexican film to win the “Best Foreign Language” category.

“This was likely the most watched this presentation has ever been in Mexico,” said José Vera, Especial Events Technical Director, TV Azteca. “We needed to create a broadcast for our audience that looked great, included a lot of live interaction with our hosts, but didn’t add a ton of cost. TVU RPS maintained extremely high video quality video as it traveled from the hotel to the production unit and back. It allowed us to reliably transport video from one location to another, yielding professional-level results while still making economic sense.”

TVU RPS allows broadcasters to leverage an existing studio control room infrastructure and a public Internet connection from any venue to deliver frame accurate, genlocked and synchronized multi-camera remote production. The product consists of one rack-mount transmitter (encoder) and one rack-mount receiver (decoder).

TV Azteca installed the RPS encoder at the hotel and the RPS decoder at the mobile unit as a backup solution. The networks successfully sent three high-quality streams from the hotel terrace to the parked mobile unit at the theatre, as well as a return feed from the mobile unit back to the hotel.

“They were looking for something with rock-solid reliability and no degradation during transmission that was also cost-effective,” said Rafael Castillo, General Manager of Latin America, TVU Networks. “RPS was an ideal solution for them. With RPS, there is zero video degradation, no matter the transmission distance. I’m thrilled we were able to help TV Azteca produce such dynamic coverage of a very important live event.”

RPS performed so well during the event, that TV Azteca plans to extend its use to coverage of sporting events, including football matches.

TVU RPS provides a lower cost alternative for live remote synchronized multi-camera coverage for news and sports. With RPS, broadcasters no longer need to rely on production trucks and large production crews. It features an easy-to-use web interface for monitoring and controlling all aspects of the transmission, including real-time previews of all-six channels, current bit-rate, and latency. The TVU RPS transmitter can encode up to six synchronized SDI sources and transmit high quality and low latency IP video to the TVU receiver, which in turn outputs six synchronized SDI outputs.

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