University of Oregon Promotes Tennis Program With Wowza Streaming Cloud

Case Study Snapshot

Industry
Education	Live Sports
Products/Services
Wowza Streaming Cloud™
Use Case
Live sports streaming

In 2015, the University of Oregon initiated a live video streaming program—powered by the Wowza Streaming Cloud™ service—for its state-of-the-art Student Tennis Center. By live streaming matches, the tennis program increases visibility to its wide-reaching audience of international fans, family members and prospective team members.

University Struggles to Balance Cost-Effectiveness and Quality

The university wanted to institute top-notch live streaming to highlight its premier tennis program, thereby helping recruit top-tier athletes and enabling the players’ families to watch from anywhere in the world. But this came with challenges:

• Finding and implementing a cost-effective plug-and-play solution on a very tight time frame.
• Providing high-definition video from tennis venues without the expense of additional infrastructure or the expert staff to manage it.
• Meeting the technological requirements of the Pac-12 to deliver a live stream to the Pac-12 TV Network website, as well as to the Pac-12 video player on the University of Oregon’s official athletic website, goducks.com.

The university’s previous solution required its staff to operate individual cameras and stream the video to distinct on-site computers, creating a cost burden while stretching their personnel thin.

The Solution: Wowza Streaming Cloud With IP Camera Integration

To solve these issues, the university installed six HD network (IP) cameras with onboard encoders—one camera per court—and six microphones. The Wowza Streaming Cloud service provides the ability to aggregate streams from multiple cameras in one intuitive interface, reducing hardware requirements and eliminating complexity in the workflow. Wowza Streaming Cloud then delivers the video stream to the Pac-12 player, which is also embedded at goducks.com for playback on the University of Oregon’s dedicated tennis page.

• Simple delivery to any device: The video and audio are captured by each court’s network camera and microphone and sent directly to Wowza Streaming Cloud over the university’s network—eliminating the need for an on-site computer. The cloud service ingests the RSTP stream from the network camera, transcodes the high-quality video to several bitrates and resolutions and enables adaptive bitrate delivery via HTTP streaming protocols, such as Apple HLS, that enable the video and audio to play perfectly on any Internet-enabled device.
• Motion-detection recording: Network cameras are set up for motion-detection capture so they record anything that happens on the court, and transmit the content directly to Wowza Streaming Cloud. This means there’s no need to staff up with specialized camera operators, enabling the university to live stream events with less expense.
  

The Wowza Streaming Cloud/University of Oregon workflow

Wowza Offers Affordable, Future-Proof Streaming at Scale

The university has successfully streamed approximately 40 home tennis matches, with each stream lasting up to six hours. But the successes don’t stop there. Here are some additional benefits the university is receiving from this solution:

• Cost savings: Being able to spin up the Wowza Streaming Cloud service on a seasonal basis is very cost-effective. The university would pay much more to staff an in-house streaming operation than it does, saving on the bottom line.
• Future-proof technology: Deploying a streaming project with Wowza Streaming Cloud means there’s very little infrastructure to manage, and no worry about keeping up with new codecs and hardware advances. Wowza takes care of keeping everything current, which helps ensure that viewers can watch the matches on any device, anywhere.
• Automatic scaling: Whether the university has 10 viewers or 10,000, Wowza Streaming Cloud leverages the power of a global CDN, allowing the solution to scale as needed and for the university to pay for only what it uses.
• Streaming directly from network cameras: With network cameras, streaming requires just a mouse click in the Wowza Streaming Cloud interface—there’s no need to be onsite at the venue, and no separate encoding step, so the university’s technology team can focus on other matters.

“We’re blowing people away with the quality of the streams, and they’re so easy to manage. We push all of our cameras to one place instead of needing multiple computers and video experts onsite. For next season we’re rolling out even more streaming features on our website to display
the tennis live streams effectively.”— Scott LaBounty, director video production, University of Oregon