Today Rambla is hosting "the Non-Stop Rap", a 16-hour non stop live stream of personalized "raps". The campaign promotes upgraded bandwidth capacity for Telenet's so called "Fibrenet" offering. Telenet is the second largest telco operator in Belgium, providing internet over cable to households and business clients.

At 8 am this morning the home page of news site "Het Nieuwsblad" was taken over by hip hop musicians and singers, among them well known artists such as Brahim, Leki and De Jeugd Van Tegenwoordig. After clicking on the banner, a viewer lands on the "homie page" where he can enter a friend's name plus a number of keywords, which will then become the subject of a one-minute freestyle "rap". Only seconds later, the video recording of this personalized rap is available in the gallery for on demand viewing.

Advertising agency These Days, who devised this original campaign, and production company MoJuice asked Rambla to take care of the live stream and, more challenging, the real time recording functionality. As one rap is directly followed by another - leaving no time for manual editing and uploading - we came up with a web service which allows a client application to directly record the incoming stream on the Wowza origin server, through simple start and stop commands. As soon as the recording is finished, a second web service pushes the video file to the CDN. In the meantime, our RATS transcoding service generates a couple of thumbnails for the gallery.

For one week, commuters driving along the busy Avenue General Jacques in Brussels could witness a real life billboard with, behind the glass wall, a living room that was being redesigned in a different style every day. At the same time the billboard, part of a promotional campaign for AXA Bank's renovation loan, could be viewed as a livestream in banner commercials and on the AXA campaign site.

Rambla was asked to produce and manage the livestream by communications agency Duval Guillaume Modem. We set up a HD Axis IP camera to film the billboard, with a second one serving as a hot swappable backup. Each camera was configured to broadcast two separate live streams; one high-quality stream for the campaign site and another low-bitrate one to be embedded in various banner ads. Both streams were delivered through our CDN, with load-balancing servers distributing end-user requests to ensure reliability of the livestreams under peak traffic conditions. In addition, the cameras were configured to upload snapshots at regular time intervals, from which a time-lapse video was distilled by our encoding service at the end of each day.

Below is an impression of the campaign, courtesy of tvbrussel :