Crocmedia’s Off The Bench radio show in Australia has travelled to relay live coverage from the Super Bowl since 2012, pitching up in Minnesota to broadcast in the lead-up to the game in 2018.

‘This is regular gig for us and, in the past, we used Tieline i-Mix G3 codecs to broadcast live audio back to Australia over ISDN,’ says Crocmedia IT Broadcast Engineering Director, George Biagioni.

The operation has now moved to Tieline’s ViA over IP, however: ‘We have purchased five Tieline ViA remote codecs and a Genie Distribution codec for our AFL nation show, which is syndicated nationally across Australia,’ Biagioni confirms. ‘We used one codec to go live from radio row in Minnesota, and we also used it to call the game itself.

‘Craig Hutchison and Gerard Whateley were on the ground in Minnesota, and announcer Liam ‘Pickers’ Pickering and Dr Turf were at our Melbourne studio each day for the show in the lead up to the big game. Audio from the guys in Minnesota was mixed with Pickers’ audio in Melbourne, so we needed very low latency audio communications between Melbourne and Minnesota to make it work.

‘The ViA codec connected flawlessly to our Genie Distribution codec in Melbourne and delivered very low latency audio between 60ms and 100ms, for several hours of broadcasting each day over IP. It never missed a beat which was impressive.

‘Gerard also called the big game live back to Australia using the ViA,’ Biagioni contines. ‘We had been supplied an ISDN codec for play-by-play coverage, but we just couldn’t get it to reliably connect to our ISDN codec back in Australia. Luckily we had our Tieline ViA with us and it saved the day. We connected for four hours live over IP at 128kbps using Music Plus encoding and it worked a treat.’

‘We are constantly doing live remote broadcasts and ViA offers the flexibility we require to stream from dozens of locations across Australia,’ he adds. ‘The Australian Football League season starts again in March and ViA will be at the front line of our national coverage. ViA’s internal battery means we can broadcast from virtually anywhere for hours and we can stream using USB modems, Wi-Fi or Ethernet connections, so every option is covered.’

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