Aquatic athletes from all corners of the globe gathered in South Korea this summer to compete in a series of diving, swimming and water polo matches, each in hopes of taking home a FINA World Masters Championships 2019 title. From the first leap off the starting block to the last twisting dive, all of the action was made available live on FINA’s YouTube Channel. Seoul-based broadcaster MBC tapped a team of 50 to produce each YouTube stream, leaning on a simple setup comprising three OB vans, ten HD cameras and five AJA HELO H.264 encoding, recording and streaming devices. 

Cameras located throughout the various competition spaces captured footage of each event, including synchronized swimming, water polo, diving, open water swimming and stroke competitions. HELO was used to stream each discipline directly to FINA’s YouTube channel in 1080p at 10Mbps. Sunho Kim, the technical manager responsible for designing and managing the entire project, chose HELO to ensure the highest quality stream without signal interference or delays. 

“In live streaming you only get one chance to get it right, and with so many viewers tuning into the streams, we knew we’d need reliable technology that could deliver the caliber of video quality befitting a Masters competition,” said Kim. “HELO is one of the most affordable high quality HD encoding tools out there, and it’s so easy to configure, setup and run that anyone can use it. It performed flawlessly throughout the entire event and was vital to the success of the production.”

About HELO 
AJA HELO allows users to simultaneously stream video signals to Web Content Delivery Networks while encoding and recording H.264 files to SD cards, USB storage or network-based storage with the push of a button. Supporting a range of professional workflows, the H.264 streaming, recording and encoding device includes 3G-SDI and HDMI inputs and outputs and the power to handle up to 1080p recording formats among other features. www.aja.com/products/helo 

About AJA Video Systems, Inc.
Since 1993, AJA Video has been a leading manufacturer of video interface technologies, converters, digital video recording solutions and professional cameras, bringing high quality, cost effective products to the professional, broadcast and postproduction markets. 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.