Net Insight’s cloud solution helped SRF to power FIS Alpine Ski World Championship 2021

From 7-21 February 2021, Cortina in Italy hosted the FIS Alpine World Ski Championships, and during the 14 days around 600 athletes from 71 nations participated and 13 World Champions titles were won. 700 volunteers and 550 media professionals were also part of the large winter sports event.

SRF (Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen), the Swiss broadcaster and business unit of SRG SSR, had originally planned to have 80 people onsite during the event but had to change their plans last minute due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

SRF had tested Net Insight’s cloud-based Nimbra Edge solution for some time and went live using it for three unilateral mix-zone production feeds during the FIS Ski World Cup Women in Crans-Montana in January. One week later the government decided to name the region of Veneto a risk zone and SRG couldn’t send 80 employees to Cortina.

SRF decided to change the concept and sent only a project manager and 12 journalists to Cortina, without any technical staff at all. As the field test in Crans-Montana was successful they were confident about Net Insight’s solution and decided to select Nimbra Edge to broadcast the Alpine Ski World Championship in Cortina.

“The solution had to be “plug-and-pray” but with Nimbra Edge we didn’t have to pray. Everything worked perfect while broadcasting four channels to Zurich,” says Antoine Niedbalski, Head of CSM at SRF. “We were very confident with Nimbra Edge throughout the Championship, as Nimbra stands for highest quality and reliability, and we had no stream outage at all.”

“We have since then used the Nimbra Edge in combination with 3rd party encoders and decoders for the finals of the Alpine Ski World Cup in Lenzerheide during March,” adds Antoine Niedbalski.

More about Nimbra Edge:

• Nimbra Edge is a fully open, intelligent platform for ingesting, delivering, and distributing any live media IP stream to multiple destinations across different IP networks.
• The platform supports natively all major retransmission protocols (RIST, SRT, Zixi) and ensures full end-to-end encryption from the source all the way to the destination appliances. Nimbra Edge is cloud-agnostic and it can be deployed on any public cloud provider, on-prem data centers, as well as on hybrid cloud setups.
• This flexibility, in combination with a seamless integration of appliance ecosystems from different vendors, expand the possibilities to monetize the existing investments. Nimbra Edge is focused at its core on reliability and performance, where usability plays an important role to ensure minimal operational time.
• The platform includes a service overview with a graphical visualization of the full live media routing workflow from the source to all connected destination appliances. This visualization service overview is complemented with individual live transport monitoring metrics per node and an alarm system that reduces substantially the troubleshooting time for an operator.
• Nimbra Edge also adopts the concept of multi-region, where regions can be created based on geographical locations to minimize intra-regional routing traffic while optimizing communication for regional destination appliances.
• Interoperability with media management solutions is also possible thanks to a consolidated reference API.

Overall, Nimbra Edge is a powerful service that excels the capabilities of a traditional online video distribution delivery platforms.