Long known for its powerful software and hardware product designs, AJA is opening up endless production and streaming possibilities for houses of worship with the addition of AJA BRIDGE LIVE.
With AJA BRIDGE NDI 3G or AJA BRIDGE LIVE, churches now have a choice of pathways to “bridge” their existing SDI infrastructure to NDI via IP and to streaming. These tools create a powerful production and streaming solution that will be both intuitive to use, and affordable.
More importantly, however, AJA BRIDGE LIVE will now enable churches to grow and share their services to a larger audience by delivering their content to multiple streaming services.
So, What Is AJA BRIDGE LIVE?
With the variety of production tools being utilized in today's houses of worship, BRIDGE LIVE allows for expanded remote production (REMI), contribution, collaboration, streaming, and finally delivery.
Houses of worship can now create a manageable hybrid production environment with available NDI-compatible hardware and software.
From an even more technical perspective, one can also control, route, and specify encodings, decodings to/from SDI, and set up transcodes.
BRIDGE LIVE can be rack-mounted in a 1RU space, so it won’t take up any of your limited rack space. In addition, BRIDGE LIVE is a game changer for productions working with both equipment already on-site, legacy, and future upgrades when moving to newer cameras and presentation sources. After the initial setup, BRIDGE LIVE has an intuitive web-based browser interface with available presets to make production day easier for worship teams or volunteers. In addition, BRIDGE LIVE can be managed and controlled remotely, as needed, via a laptop. This is good news for worship directors that are responsible for multiple worship locations.
After the initial setup, BRIDGE LIVE has an intuitive web-based browser interface with available presets to make production day easier for worship teams or volunteers.
Defining New Production and Distribution Challenges for Houses of Worship
From a technical standpoint, one of the many challenges facing churches today is how to leverage an existing legacy SDI infrastructure investment and pair it with newer production tools such as PTZ cameras, laptops, cell phones, and other mobile devices like iPads via a HTTP Live Streaming (HLS).
Protocols such as Network Device Interface (NDI) from Newtek are being adopted at a very fast rate. The question for many houses of worship is how do they take existing camera (or audio) signals, or anything else for that matter, and convert it to NDI while also using an existing IP structure in-house. Some churches may also want to stream via a Secure Reliable Transport (SRT) to a public network like Facebook or YouTube without compromising quality. Additionally, as previously mentioned, churches may have a remote satellite campus that they will want to include in the production. The question then being asked is, how do churches get all of their sources, both audio and video, into a nice, neat controllable package? And then also, how do they interconnect all of their worship technologies without compromise?
Bryce Button, director of product development for AJA, says BRIDGE LIVE offers many benefits to churches when they incorporate the technology into an existing church Infrastructure. “We basically built the BRIDGE LIVE so it could accept multiple channels and multiple protocols. But perhaps even more importantly, it allows churches to deliver content to a number of protocols and platforms, because people have their favorites.”
“We feel that our warranties are a way of expressing two different messages. One is our confidence in what we're producing. And secondly, to take away the worry, especially for entities where a capital investment like this is reasonably significant.”
Bryce Button, Director of Product Development, AJA Video Systems
Button adds, “We realize we're a little bit ahead of that curve of where some of the churches are with their current processes, but we are seeing that bigger organizations may need to share signals backwards and forwards from different locations. The good news is the interface is pretty intuitive. We spent a lot of time on interface work.”
Closing the IP and SDI Gap with AJA BRIDGE LIVE
Network connectivity is available via two 10G Ethernet ports, one for GUI access and control, the other for media content itself. When it comes to moving a church’s content, BRIDGE LIVE also supports the following protocols: RTMP; RTMPS; RTP; UDP; SRT (plus encryption); Ladder Profiles, and MPEG Transport Stream. Handling for codecs for encoding include H.265; H.264; H.262 (MPEG2-TS); and an optional JPEG 2000. There are so many ways churches can configure BRIDGE LIVE to get the most out of their investments.
Following is feedback from AJA customers on the BRIDGE LIVE:
For Spiritland Co-Founding Director Antony Shaw, the production was more straightforward with BRIDGE LIVE than he ever could have imagined. He shares, “Having never used BRIDGE LIVE before, and only reading the instructions to find the password to unlock it, I was impressed by how easy it was to get up and running. In just five minutes, all our SRT streams were ready to go, and the unit continued to impress throughout the shoot, never skipping a beat. We also loved how quiet it was compared to alternate solutions and how seamlessly it fit into our rack, not to mention [that] the power redundancy it provided was fantastic.”
FHNW University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland Head of Media and Broadcast Infrastructure Suresh Surenthiran shared some thoughts, as well, noting, "For live venue content in particular, BRIDGE LIVE is great in that it allows us to manage four parallel HD video streams in different languages. We’ve found overall that it solves a lot of pains. Its UI is robust yet easy to navigate, and it optimizes resources while offering unprecedented redundancy and a solid power supply.”
Network connectivity is available via two Ten 10G Ethernet ports, one for GUI access and control, the other for media content itself. When it comes to moving a church’s content, BRIDGE LIVE also supports the following protocols: RTMP; RTMPS; RTP; UDP; SRT (plus encryption); Ladder Profiles, and MPEG Transport Stream.
Button shares additional thoughts for church tech leaders who are purchasing and installing new gear into their production workflows—important things in understanding the technology’s available bandwidth, product training, and warranties.
“Well, the first thing you're going to figure out is what kind of bandwidth does that church actually have available? Right? And then if you're going to multiple platforms where you should cap your compression, that kind of thing,” he notes. “And so our guys can show them how to settle that. You might decide that, oh, the majority of our congregants like to watch on YouTube, so we're going to do seven, eight megabits per second for that.”
Button continues, “On the Facebook live platform, we know 10% of our audience tends to go there. And maybe you throttle that down to three megabits per second and you're perfectly okay with four or something like that. Our guys will guide you through how you set up all those configurations to make it easier. We basically have a pretty good understanding through experience of what's going to work well for the different environments. And that's where I think, again, just ask for and book a live demo even before the box arrives so that you can know where you're likely to go and then you can figure out all integrations.”
Warranties, too, are very important to AJA. “One of the reasons AJA is basically almost 30 years old is [that] right from the beginning, reliability is part of our entire ethos. We've had to be reliable. We feel that our warranties are a way of expressing two different messages. One is our confidence in what we're producing. And secondly, to take away the worry, especially for entities where a capital investment like this is reasonably significant, and if they're going to move forward, they need to feel confident that in two, three years’ time, they aren't regretting it. You've got full three-year warranties here,” Button closes.
Closing Thoughts
AJA has certainly lived up to its well-earned reputation as a company that puts a great deal of thought and work into products before sending them out the door. AJA BRIDGE LIVE is just one of the company's latest entries that fits right in that mold. For some, price may be a concern, but do the math. With reliability and ease of use after the initial setup, BRIDGE LIVE answers the hybrid bell for SDI to NDI and for the future needs of the worship AV team.
