Telestream Wirecast Enables Live Polar Bear Broadcast From The Arctic Tundra to Classrooms Around the World
Students interact with scientists and get up close and personal with polar bears from the comfort of their classrooms
Nevada City, Calif., January 15, 2015 – Telestream®, the leading provider of digital media tools and workflow solutions, today announced that Wirecast, its popular live streaming software, was instrumental to another successful season of Polar Bear International’s (PBI) Tundra Connections show. For the past six years, BJ Kirschhoffer, director of field operations for PBI, has produced the live program for thousands of classrooms all over the world studying conservation and climate change. Targeted at schools, universities and community organizations, the main objective is to give people experience with polar bears in their natural habitat, while learning from climate and animal experts.
Every year in the late fall, polar bears congregate on the shore of Hudson Bay in Manitoba, Canada and wait for it to freeze so they can venture off on the ice to hunt for their primary food source, ringed seals. While they are waiting, Kirschhoffer and the PBI crew have an excellent opportunity to get up close and personal with the bears and create a series of live educational shows, featuring different experts such as scientists, polar bear biologists, climatologists, educators and of course, polar bears.
The challenge of streaming a live show to thousands of classrooms from this remote location next to the bears themselves is a big one, but thanks to state of the art equipment, the 2014 season was again a great success. The operation centers on the remote town of Churchill, Manitoba, 1000 miles north of Minneapolis on the shores of Hudson Bay. A community of around 900 people, Churchill is only accessible by plane or rail, and only a few years ago finally received cellular phone service. The team makes use of a custom designed "Tundra Buggy®" supplied by Frontiers North Adventures, the polar bear tourist vehicle of choice, which resembles a bus sized monster truck. For 4 weeks at the end of October, PBI turns the Tundra Buggy into a high-tech mobile broadcast studio and classroom.
To create the sophisticated broadcast studio, Kirschhoffer has assembled state of the art, reliable equipment to get the job done. At the center of the production is Telestream’s Wirecast live streaming production software running on a Mac workstation. Wirecast captures camera feeds and audio, displays graphics and titles, and creates the finished program stream feed that populates the Tundra Connections web page as well as Explore.org and other sponsors. There are various video capture devices that grab streams from both internal cameras as well as external cameras on the buggy. All cameras have PTZ (pan, tilt, zoom) with joystick control. Depending on the age group they’re talking to, different topics are covered such as "what do polar bears do?" and "why do they act they way they do?" Kirschhoffer can at any time drop from the internal conversation and switch to the outside cameras using the PIP (picture in picture) feature within Wirecast or switch to full frame and have the specialists talk about what’s happening outside right now with the polar bears, what they are doing, and why. Easily inserting graphics, pictures and footage supplied by the panel on the fly is important to convey information about where they are, how the ice is changing, and resultant polar bear behavior.
For the viewers, there is a chat window in the web interface where participants can send questions or they can submit them via email. PBI volunteer staff from all over the US monitor these questions, pick the best and insert them into a Google doc that the panel can access on the buggy.
The evolution over the last 6 years from what started as purely point-to-point video conferencing to these sophisticated webcasts made with Telestream Wirecast has grown the viewership exponentially. "We had a day this year where we had almost 17,000 computers connected. If we figure most of those were classrooms, we could estimate ¼ to ½ million students watching our program. It’s really been exciting to take this from basic videoconferencing to where we are now," says Kirschhoffer. As the polar ice patterns continue to change and impact these amazing animals, building awareness of the cause and effects of climate change has never been more important for Kirschhoffer and the PBI team.
Wirecast at FETC 2015
Wirecast will be demonstrated on the Telestream booth #167 at the FETC Show Jan 21-23, 2015 in Orlando, Florida. Visitors to the Telestream booth will be able to enter a #FlipYourSchool contest to win a bundle of 25 licenses of Wirecast and ScreenFlow.
About Wirecast
Wirecast is the only cross-platform, all-in-one live streaming production software that enables capture, live production, and encoding of live streams for broadcast to multiple servers and platforms simultaneously. Wirecast is ideal for streaming or recording live internet shows, broadcasting breaking news and sports, streaming live concerts and games, transmitting church services, corporate meetings, lectures and more. Pro production features include live scoreboards, 3D virtual sets, chroma key support, advanced audio controls and more.
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