Vualto Provides Live Streaming Services for the 2012 Hi-Fi Klubben Scandinavian Movie Competition

18 Teams, 18 live streams, 43 films and over 90 hours without sleep... the 2012 Hi-Fi Klubben Competition breaks all boundaries and provides the ultimate road test for the Vualto infrastructure.

Plymouth(22 Nov 2012)

When presented with a brief to run 18 live streams of people watching films but without actually displaying the films themselves the Vualto team were unsurprisingly a bit confused – who would actually want to see this and what was the purpose of this seemingly bizarre request? However, it wasn’t long before opinions changed – teams of dedicated competitors from across Scandinavia were to be watching films solidly until they are the last ones that can stay awake. With the added challenge looming over them to beat the 3.5 day record set last year, all of a sudden this seemingly odd Big Brother scenario was transformed into a display of determination as challengers defy all odds to fight sleep deprivation and the strange effects that come along with it.

After day 1 the Vualto team and some 34,000 unique online viewers were hooked. From the exercise bike and balloons employed by team Koge to the animal thongs displayed by team Stavanger – it was impossible to tell what each team would resort to next in their mission to keep themselves from falling asleep. All it took was for one team member to falter – even for a few seconds – and the competition would be over for them. The lure of a brand new Home Cinema Set-up and a trip to Hollywood was enough to keep spirits high and determination prevailed. 8 teams smashed the record set by last year’s victors but it was Team Oslo that eventually took this years crown a grueling 90 hours and 43 films later.

The Vualto solution for this event comprised of streaming all 18 locations for the full duration of the event in HDS format with HLS fallback for iOS devices. The HLS streams also offered a 60 minute DVR which the judges found useful for re-winding to double check any contenders that looked like they may have briefly faltered. In addition to this, a daily server side archive of all locations was supplied for review and highlights material alongside detailed analytics tracking how many people were viewing, where they were coming from and more importantly which was the most viewed team (it looks like the animal thongs won that one for team Stavanger!). The event was underpinned in its entirety by the Vualto infrastructure harnessing the power of our cloud-based Wowza solution. For more information on this, check out the following link: http://www.vualto.com/news/vualto-launches-integrated-wowzalevel3-cdn-delivery-for-all-core-streaming-services/

The solution request came through Norwegian webTV company Smartcom:tv, who’ve been employing Vualto’s solutions for a number of previous events targeting both Flash player and iOS. Smartcom:tv handled local encoder setup packages, and delivered a custom video navigation that integrated the Vualto players with Hi-Fi Klubben’s Facebook comment section for each team. As teams were forced to withdraw from the competition, a simple administration interface provided Hi-Fi Klubben with the means to deactivate streams and post the total score for each team.