The world’s most powerful leaders, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and media convene each November for the Conference of the Parties (COP), an annual two-week event held by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). There, representatives from participating countries discuss climate change progress, negotiate, and set new goals. To ensure attendees on-site and those joining from afar could participate in the 28th COP (COP28), event organizers enlisted the expertise of UK-based event production outfit Ghostline Productions. 

The Ghostline team assembled an impressive remote production pipeline, with gear provided by Blue Elephant, which enabled authorized participants to watch and participate in meetings live. With hundreds of endpoints, simultaneous global sessions, and tight security protocols, Ghostline turned to AJA IP video solutions BRIDGE LIVE and BRIDGE NDI 3G to streamline its video contribution and streaming infrastructure. 

Designing a pipeline for scale 
Each COP is packed with back-to-back discussions, negotiations, and events held in various meeting rooms across the chosen event venue of the year. Held in Dubai in 2023, COP28 presented a unique scalability challenge for Ghostline because the venue, Expo City Dubai, sits on a thousand acres. The team also had to be able to capture, distribute, and stream more than 400 video feeds daily. Having supported COP26 in 2021, Ghostline Production Director Bradley Rumball closely examined the challenges of the previous workflow and optimized it for COP 28 through automation.

One area where he saw room for improvement was in the topic of stream keys, which had previously been done through manual copy and paste by senior engineers. Leaning on his background in APIs and software development, Rumball envisioned a remote pipeline built with AJA BRIDGE LIVE and BRIDGE NDI 3G devices, among other technologies, to automate this process for COP28 in just six months. His team developed a set of schematics and a solution that integrated into the United Nations’ digital platform, where all content would be accessible for authorized participants to watch.

The pipeline would need to span 60 buildings, each with a designated engineer assigned to the space to facilitate camera maneuvering and the integration of hybrid participants. All kit was designed for control via an in-room Stream Deck, although the Ghostline team could remote into any meeting room rack to take over if a problem arose or an engineer had to leave. This was paramount in the design, as the equipment ran 24/7, with some meetings taking place around the clock to accommodate international time zones. 

“We looked at how we could pull all the available data from COP’s master scheduling tool across buildings and use it to pre-program 18 BRIDGE LIVE units,” Rumball explained. “This way, we knew our engineers could take over any session remotely without wasting time copying and pasting stream keys. This was crucial to our design, because it could take 40 minutes to physically travel to a room if a problem came up.”

Inside each meeting room, Ghostline also used BRIDGE NDI 3G gateway devices to take variable numbers of PINs from Microsoft Teams and other remote contribution endpoints and convert them to SDI for a frame-locked output that could be sent through other production equipment. “BRIDGE NDI 3G is a really robust piece of AJA kit with incredible SDI channel density that works hand-in-hand with BRIDGE LIVE; they play off each other very nicely,” added Rumball. 

Advance preparations and training 
Given the scale of the event production, Ghostline ran a series of tests prior to the event. They had to ensure the infrastructure, which comprised BRIDGE LIVEs and an Azure ingest server, could support more than the maximum stream capacity required for the event ahead of time. Ghostline built it based on Docker containers and QNS clusters, which they quickly found allowed the team to dynamically scale up its streaming ingest points. 

During early testing, Rumball managed to pump 80 streams out of one BRIDGE LIVE device and ingested them all at 1080 25p. “Every streaming endpoint distributed from the US through to EMEA and Asia was framed perfectly, and we didn't run into a single issue with BRIDGE LIVE running 80 streams in one day," he noted. “That’s when we knew we had a safe setup.”

All engineers had to be able to confidently run the kit, so Ghostline prioritized training in advance of the production. “Getting the team up to speed was so easy because the setup was so intuitive and automated, which meant less stressed engineers,” Rumball commented. “Being able to automate processes using products like BRIDGE LIVE freed up so much time. And the feedback we got from the core crew was largely that this was one of the best projects they’ve worked on; I don't think that kind of feedback would have been possible without this team and technology like BRIDGE LIVE.”

Executing a smarter encoding and streaming workflow
Ghostline engineered the workflow so that it could use BRIDGE LIVE’s API to control the hardware with a bespoke solution. When it was time for a stream to go live, Ghostline’s custom backend delivered stream keys to each BRIDGE LIVE endpoint and communicated those back to the right engineer. An NDI pipe a kilometer away provided all the stream information to program the BRIDGE LIVEs in Ghostline’s event operation center, so that its engineers didn't have to copy and paste stream keys.

As soon as a meeting was planned for a room, Ghostline’s team got a time reference and all the stream endpoints. They could then take that into their custom application, which presented all the information in the event booking platform so that engineers working in individual rooms could access it via their phones on the endpoint that they were using. 

“The platform we built on the backend would automatically see the meetings scheduled, take all the stream keys out of the meeting booking system, and program them directly into our BRIDGE LIVE, which was incredible,” said Rumball. “BRIDGE LIVE has such a robust API that we could build our architecture around; it's a really solid, high-density solution, which made it a perfect fit for this kind of application. And no one ever had to really touch it; all the streams were programmed to go live automatically.”

Rumball and the team primarily leveraged the BRIDGE LIVE units to stream out final broadcast feeds, feeding SDI signals into them for RTMP output to its cloud endpoints. They also used the device’s ten GigE ports to connect to a fiber network so that they could easily ingest incoming NDI or SRT sources, and other protocols coming in on SEI. 

"The flexibility and instant feedback our BRIDGE LIVEs provided gave us really great visibility into stream performance; they're game-changing products in terms of streaming and encoding capabilities," shared Rumball. “I don’t think there’s another piece of kit that could have taken their position with the density we were looking for. We needed something that could support at least two SDI feeds, and the fact that BRIDGE LIVE could do it with four inputs in one unit was phenomenal.” 

Planning for the future 
With COP28 and a host of other projects successfully wrapped, Ghostline is now focused on how it can continue to use emerging technologies to unlock new possibilities in live event production. Rumball sees IP playing a crucial role, especially as the learning curve grows less steep. “It’s an exciting time for IP. We’re seeing a lot of hybrid systems that leverage baseband SDI and IP, which present an opportunity to pick up those skills and get ahead of the curve. IP is the direction this industry is moving, and products like BRIDGE LIVE and BRIDGE NDI 3G are a great way to dive in and learn,” he concluded.

About AJA BRIDGE LIVE 
BRIDGE LIVE is the broadcast quality, low latency turnkey system for REMI, Synchronous Multi-Channel Video Contribution, Remote Collaboration, Direct to Audience Streaming, and Multi Bit Rate/Format Delivery. BRIDGE LIVE was developed as a collaboration between AJA and Comprimato to deliver the performance, reliability, and ease of use needed for critical live encode, decode, or transcode needs. www.aja.com/bridge-live

About BRIDGE NDI 3G
BRIDGE NDI 3G is a 1RU gateway offering high density conversion from 3G-SDI to NDI, and NDI to 3G-SDI for both multi-channel HD and 4K/UltraHD. Designed to drop into any existing NDI or SDI workflow as a plug and play appliance, BRIDGE NDI 3G brings immense conversion power and flexibility, fully controllable remotely for AV use, security and surveillance, broadcast, eSports, entertainment venues, and a wide range of other facilities needing high quality, efficient NDI encode and decode. www.aja.com/bridge-ndi-3g

About AJA Video Systems
Since 1993, AJA Video Systems has been a leading manufacturer of cutting-edge technology for the broadcast, cinema, proAV, and post production markets. The company develops a range of flexible baseband and IP video/audio interface and conversion technologies, digital video recording solutions, and color management, streaming, and remote production tools. All AJA products are designed and manufactured at our facilities in Grass Valley, California, and sold through an extensive sales channel of resellers and systems integrators around the world. For further information, please see our website at www.aja.com.

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