Providing reliable live TV broadcast

Service providers

Digi Sport, Hungary

An essential part of the requirements was to offer high stability and throughput with a nearly 0% packet loss and very low latency, because the link provided the backhaul for a live TV broadcast. The InfiNet Wireless link could easily handle all these requirements.We had maximum 1-2 hours to test and deploy the link, and it performed flawlessly during the 3 days of the event.

László Sánta Lead Engineer of Digi Sport TV channel

Introduction

Digi Sport is a premier sports channel broadcaster in Hungary and part of the Digi TV group: a leading broadcast, cable and internet provider offering nationwide TV, internet, VoIP and 3G services across a number of Eastern European countries.

As part of its mandate to provide coverage of national as well as international sporting events, Digi Sport identified a requirement to provide live broadcast coverage of a national volleyball event taking place at the Sportmax Arena in Budapest, Hungary.

The Sportmax Arena is some 3km distant from DigiSport’s closest optical transmission node, and typically live event broadcasts of this nature would be conducted through satellite uplink transmission, in order to avoid issues of reliability and to provide continuous live streaming of the event. However, this form of live video distribution can be expensive – with costs including the lease of fully-equipped broadcast vehicles, staff and satellite uplink charges – and so DigiSport took the decision to broadcast the competition across a high-frequency, high-bandwidth wireless link between the Sportmax venue and its optical transmission node.

Objectives

To provide a reliable, high bandwidth wireless link suitable for live TV transmission;
To operate the link across an urban landscape with significant line-of-sight challenges and obstacles;
To provide high capacity and consistent throughput with near-zero packet loss for error-free TV transmission.