ABtv: Live Concerts from the Ancienne Belgique
The Ancienne Belgique (AB) is a well known concert venue for contemporary music in Brussels, Belgium. The AB manages two concert halls, which are both furnished with state of the art audio- and video-recording equipment. This allows the AB to make a high-quality recording of every on-stage performance. In 2005, the AB decided that they wanted to enrich their website's content with live and on-demand streams. Rambla provided them with an all-in solution that automated their workflow process and reduced infrastructure planning.
At the AB site, we installed our Rambla Broadcaster, developed in-house as a live encoding and broadcasting solution, offering both stability and high performance. Additionally, it has the ability to store the complete live-recording on disc in DVCam quality and encode it afterwards to multiple selected formats, which are automatically published to Rambla's Content Delivery Network (CDN) for immediate on-demand viewing. To this end, the Rambla Broadcaster contains a local version of our Rambla Transcoding Service (RATS), which also allows the AB staff to launch any number of custom encodings at any time and get them published automatically using the RATS web-interface. Finally, Rambla is able to remotely monitor and upgrade all broadcasting and encoding software, allowing us to add new encoding formats or algorithms on the fly and leaving the AB staff free from worry.
Over the last five years, the AB and Rambla have streamed more than 500 live concerts - including almost all top Belgian bands and international acts by the likes of Moby, Bloc Party, Squarepusher and Norah Jones - either through the ABtv website or through the sites of the Ancienne Belgique's partners, like Belgian newspaper De Standaard. Since the size of a live-stream audience can differ widely depending on the featured artist, the AB is glad that it can rely on our CDN's ability to scale dynamically, relative to consumer demand. Furthermore, Rambla meets the AB’s criteria for a safely backed-up online video archive, an efficient streaming delivery and a high level of support. And thanks to Rambla’s online Control Panel and monitoring tools, the AB and its partners are able to assess the results of their media campaigns, as well as user preferences and behaviors.
The end result: Rambla's all-in solution allows the AB and its partners to successfully enrich their sites with high-quality streams that provide compelling user-experiences.
