Connections

How Dolby.io Helps Enable Remote Production Workflows

Dolby used its webinar “How to Master Remote Production” on March 14 to explain how its Dolby.io developer platform can help enable remote production workflows.

Whether an organisation is doing remote post production with a dispersed team or remotely producing a live event, Dolby.io real-time streaming enables workflows with sub-500ms latency, “broadcast quality, remote monitoring, and a host of other features to ensure seamless collaboration,” according to the company.

Tucker Kelly, senior technical product marketing manager at Dolby.io, started the presentation by introducing Ryan Jespersen, director of product strategy at Dolby.io, who Kelly said would explain how their company’s  real time streaming product enables remote production workflows.

“What Dolby.io is,” according to Jespersen, “is a high fidelity platform for media communications streaming” [that] can make your audio and video content sound its best, add interactivity with ultra-low latency, forecast quality streaming in the web browser, and allow you to build kind of immersive applications,” That, he said, “could be like multi-party video chat and embed that with this linear real-time streaming channel that we’re going to show today to create these remote production workflows.”

So “what differentiates Dolby io?” he asked rhetorically. For one thing, he said: “I think Dolby’s a household name; people around the globe know that brand.” And “what Dolby.io was built for is to kind of give you access through the cloud and through a developer platform to all this Dolby innovation – 60 years of Dolby innovation in immersive video and audio – and make that available through the web browser and through these cloud workflows,” he explained.

The company “built a lot of these tools to enable a plug-and-play, seamless workflow, and I’m going to be showing that kind of plug-and-play approach with some of these workflows today” during a demo, he said.

Among the things that Dolby focused on” were obviously security, reliability and scalability,” he said, adding: “As we build these solutions into the cloud, security is top of mind for people in the broadcast and post production space.”

He went on to talk about Remote Integration Model/remote production (REMI), noting he came from startup Millicast, a WebRTC-based real-time streaming service that was acquired by Dolby over a year ago. “We had built a production suite specific for remote post production and live REMI production to enable live remote collaboration through the web browser,” he said.

“We had a simple approach,” he said, adding: “We’re going to get broadcast quality video and audio and make it playable in the web browser in under a second around the globe. And we exceeded that expectation and now we can get up to a couple hundred milliseconds roundtrip, glass to glass anywhere in the world.”

Dolby.io customers have included the National Football League  (NFL), which used it to produce the Super Bowl the last three years, and NBC, which needed rooms “built to protocol … during the pandemic,” he said, adding: “They needed to enable remote collaboration.” There are hundreds of cameras that are used to produce the Super Bowl and “our technology allows [for] those real time feeds,” he said.

Another customer has been CBS Studios, who he said wanted to enable “live remote cameras from their studios in Hollywood so that people can see the live feed while they’re doing a production on a commercial or a TV show or a movie.”

Also, he said: “NASA has used us to do remote production for producing the Mars Rover events and making that video content available to news agencies around the world. And then, with [Amazon] Prime Video, we worked with MSNBC on the production” of the Association of Volleyball Professionals  (AVP) volleyball tournament that he said “enabled a super small team to be able to go on premises to an AVP event and still produce an event.”

Dolby.io’s technology is “less expensive” than rival tech and “improves the reach because you use a web browser to make that available for customers and the production team working on the project, and obviously these are easier workflows for remote talent that maybe also needs to come on air,” he added.

One product that Dolby.io has built is a REMI multi-viewer that he said “allows you to … pull in multiple video feeds from a live event inside the web browser natively.” That, he said, is “very different than trying to send SRT streams or NDI locally” in a network and “you can make this available through the cloud to a production team that’s based anywhere in the world and allow the switching of this content through this multi-viewer.” He went on to provide a demo.

The company also built a Dolby.io stream monitor for Apple TV, iPhone and iPad that he said uses a free app that can pull up the “real time stream and share that in real time.”

Also taking part in the webinar were executives from two companies that are building remote production experiences using Dolby.io: Sean Wybourn, SVP of engineering at Broadcast Management Group, and Ian Smith, co-founder of Studiobox.