International. CP Communications and its subsidiary Red House Streaming have gradually turned their St. Petersburg, Florida, headquarters into a specialized broadcast and production center that even produces and broadcasts original programming around the world for local and remote talent.
The media and entertainment company has now deployed a varied network infrastructure of 1Gb and 10Gb pipelines that interact with its two homegrown RHS studios and the new RHS-36 truck, allowing the company to seamlessly manage live content that arrives and heads anywhere in the world without leaving the property, and without leaving the IP domain if desired.
These advancements, along with customers' ability to bring their own production trucks to interact directly with the IP network infrastructure, have inspired CP and RHS to formally rename the facility as red House Streaming Production Center. The facility has already hosted several REMI productions, including the Bermuda Athletics Championships and two ACC Golf Championship events.
"We differentiate ourselves from conventional production sites because we offer a true all-IP production ecosystem," said Kurt Heitmann, CEO of CP Communications and Red House Streaming. "We offer multiple levels of professional production using traditional studio or control room workflows. Regardless of the production service used, we acquire in IP, produce in IP and distribute in IP. We can keep everything on IP with our vMix workflows, or also decode content for a traditional SDI workflow built into RHS-36. Then we can re-encode it in IP for distribution."
As Heitmann explains, Red House Streaming Production Center uses Internet Protocol compression standards in a way that allows customers to capture, edit, process, and deliver programming in their preferred formats. "We work in compressed environments, rather than moving uncompressed content around the installation on the network cable," Heitmann said. "Working in compressed environments is what gives our customers the freedom to manage content to and from anywhere in the world over IP in a variety of formats, including RTMP, RTSP, SRT and NDI."
Red House Streaming Production Center's first REMI production project of 2022 was the Bermuda Track and Field Championship for Carr-Hughes Productions (CHP) which aired on NBC Sports. This project used CHP's High Rock mobile truck. Red House Streaming designed a Layer 2 network that carried eight video signals with 32 channels of audio, RVON communications, control data for cameras, return video and qualification data to and from Bermuda. "Basically, we extended the truck networks and production centers to Bermuda," Heitmann said. "The NBC announcers were in RHS Studio A and the international commentator was in RHS Studio B, and it was like they were on the spot."
CP's RHS-36 mobile unit was later incorporated into the ACC Women's Golf Championship, which took place on Pawley's Island, South Carolina. CP and RHS acquired eight linked cellular signals from reserve Golf Club and natively placed them in the traditional control room workflow aboard the RHS-36 at the Red House Transmission Production Center. Content was managed and processed aboard the RHS-36 in a traditional SDI video workflow, including a Ross Video Carbonite switch, Ross Xpression graphics, Evertz Dreamcatcher playback systems, and Yamaha audio mixing, before being distributed via IP to the web. A similar project for the men's ACC Golf Championship event live from Panama City, Florida, followed a week later.
While RHS-36 offers a more traditional control room environment, RHS Studios A and B offer true studio workflow environments for customers who really want to keep everything on IP. "We are using our vMix studio switching workflows in the two RHS studios, which keep everything on native IP," he said.
Heitmann adds that the company's new FastReturn system brings another important differentiating layer to the company's REMI production arsenal. FastReturn can ingest any H.264 basic profile RTMP stream, supporting HD resolution and 128 kbit stereo audio with bitrates up to 10 MBps with less than 400 ms latency, and then place content purchased live from the cloud directly into the IP of The Red House Broadcast Production Center. the network. CP and RHS technicians designed the IP network infrastructure to optimize redundancy and failover, and added an enterprise broadband channel to support future high-bandwidth 4K, 8K, and similar productions.
