Abu Dhabi Media uses Dejero’s Smart Blending to set up uninterrupted connectivity between production crews, on-site studios and their HQ for live broadcasts from Expo 2020 in Dubai.
Abu Dhabi Media is covering Expo 2020, hosted in Dubai until the end of March 2022. With the slogan ‘Connecting Minds, Creating the Future through sustainability, mobility and opportunity’, Expo 2020 is the first international Expo to be held in the Middle East, Africa and South Asia region in its 170-year history. A total of 192 countries are represented at dedicated pavilions around the Exhibition Centre, located in a new purpose-built ‘city’ in Dubai that measures twice the size of Monaco, and where 25 million visitors have attended over 6 months.
Local systems integrator, Ideal Systems, was commissioned to build Abu Dhabi Media’s purpose-built camera studio and gallery at the Expo 2020 site, where five wireless cameras are being used to capture content from the pavilions.
Abu Dhabi Media’s production crew uses four Dejero EnGo mobile transmitters to send live footage and interviews from the Expo’s Exhibition Centre pavilions to a Dejero WayPoint 104 receiver located at the on-site studio. The EnGo transmitters also allow real-time voice communication to enable the director in the studio to talk to the presenter on the ground.
A further ten EnGo transmitters are streaming two daily live shows, from the studio in Dubai, to three more WayPoint 104 receivers at Abu Dhabi Media’s headquarters in Abu Dhabi where the receivers reconstruct the feeds, decode the HEVC and output for broadcast and redistribution worldwide.
Jean Claude Rahme, Head of OB at Live HD, a government media entity supporting Abu Dhabi Media’s coverage of Expo 2020, talked about how the use of Dejero’s transmitters is saving the organisation time and resources. “The Expo 2020 exhibition area is huge at 45,000 sqm, which means the logistics of running fibre lines from location to location, or installing antennas for satellite connectivity within a building of this size would have taken up huge resources in terms of installation, maintenance and cost.
“With EnGo, connectivity is very straightforward. We regularly encode at up to 20 Mbps from the pavilions because we are able to use six point-to-point SIM cards to aggregate IAD (Integrated Access Device) connections from Etisalat cellular networks and achieve full coverage inside the building. Because we use EnGo mobile transmitters, we don’t have the usual line-of-sight limitations for the satellite antennas nor do we have to rely on a single private network.”
The Dejero EnGo uses Dejero’s Smart Blending Technology to create a resilient internet connection by aggregating multiple networks into a single service. This allows the transmission of high-quality live video with camera to screen latency as low as 0.5 seconds over the bonded cellular connections.
“In effect, Dejero’s system is replacing the need for ENG satellites,” said Jean Claude. “Not only is it more flexible and mobile for our production crew on site, it also gives us reliable connectivity – both to our studio at the Expo and our headquarters in Abu Dhabi – which is crucial to the speed at which we can gather the content in order to build and deliver our daily morning and evening programmes.” www.dejero.com
