"Blok party": cross-media webcam streaming on prime time radio and TV

Belgian national broadcaster VRT is airing an interactive show geared towards students, offering them brief relief from exam stress through a virtual party. The show can be followed live on VRT's recently launched youth TV channel Op12 and radio station Studio Brussel, which is hugely popular among students and teenagers.

The concept is fairly straightforward: every weekday in June a well-known band and a DJ are invited in the studio to play a short set for a small crowd of student invitees. At the same time, viewers and listeners at home are encouraged to participate through their webcam. A matrix of 12 webcam live streams is mixed in the live feed from the studio, while show host Stijn Vandevoorde talks to this virtual guests in a chat roulette fashion.

Production company Sylvester Productions, who came up with the idea for the show, asked interactive developer GriN and Rambla to take care of the online implementation. GriN built a solid Flash application with three interfaces: one for the students to dial in, one for a moderator in the studio to manage the queue, and a touch screen interface for the show's presenters which allows them to switch between the different webcams for one-to-one or even multi-user chats.

The streaming back-end consists of a set of low latency live streaming applications. The webcam queue and user data are are stored in remote (Flash) Shared Objects on our Wowza servers. Failover is ensured through a second, hot swappable Wowza setup.

Should you be interested in a similar (and if needed tailored) setup, contact Rambla sales.