The Fijian Parliament gives constituents real-time access to live government proceedings using the Dante AV networking standard to connect and monitor essential video and audio systems.
Over the last 10 years, governments in many areas have responded to their voting constituents’ interest in national and local proceedings by implementing dedicated, on-campus live broadcast production facilities. But given the rapid evolution in media distribution, many government bodies have had to upgrade those facilities. This time, the focus is on switching from traditional baseband video and audio to IP, which can increase scalability and flexibility, helping them to operate more resource efficiently even as conditions change.
One of the governments recently making that change to their operations is the Parliament of the Republic of Fiji, transitioning their legacy audio distribution system from analogue to digital and baseband to IP. Working with systems integrator Gencom Technology in New Zealand, the Parliament has based its new system on the Dante AV-over-IP platform.
Live Streaming Pipeline
The upgrade is part of a wider plan to build a live streaming pipeline featuring real-time captioning and multi-language transmission. It also includes the development of a new campus-wide video monitoring distribution system, with 12G-SDI and HDMI 2.0 conversion to and/or from Dante AV networking standard.
Using Dante AV for signal routing in audio, video and ancillary channels is very flexible. Installed on standard 1 GbE networking, users only need a single tool, Dante Controller, for configuration and routing of all audio and video devices – performed in one step. System maintenance, security and support are also simplified by using Dante Domain Manager or Dante Director.
Three Languages
The Fijian Parliament first worked with Gencom six years ago to build a video production and delivery infrastructure from the ground up that would support free to air public broadcasts of general and committee sessions. Since then, Gencom's team has continued to support and make technology recommendations to the legislative body.
Due to those ongoing assessments, both sides readily recognised when the time came to upgrade the infrastructure to support new trends in broadcast and live streaming, and growth in video-on-demand. As a first step, they opted to replace the facility's original analogue audio distribution system with a digital solution that could support real-time translation and captioning.
Translation is important because Fijians speak three different languages – English, Fijian and Fiji Hindi – and all are used during proceedings, which can make inclusivity and accessibility difficult. Gencom Director Keith Bremner looked for a way to help the Fijian Parliament's team transcribe and translate those languages into live captions, so that officials could speak direcly in their native tongue.
"We would need to replace the campus' legacy analogue audio distribution system with a digital, more scalable alternative. Dante Audio – the digital audio networking standard used and supported almost everywhere, including by many manufacturers – was a natural fit. Its performance is also top notch," Keith said.
"Since the translators and captioners also needed to be able to monitor video, Dante AV and AJA's Dante AV 4K products were an ideal complement. They have made it easy to move audio and video from the broadcast facilities into the transcription and captioning booths, and anywhere on campus, over the IP network."
Fibre Network
Gencom’s first move established a new fibre backbone on campus to carry the Parliament's IP network and support audio and video distribution across buildings. The team then built a protected, resilient red and blue Dante AV network on top of it.
Such infrastructures often have two separate networks, one (blue) with public internet access where front-end systems like web pages and services are hosted, and another without internet access, and another (red) where databases and other private backend services are hosted and protected. Red network configurations such as routers and firewalls prevent requests from travelling directly from the public internet to the red network without first passing through the blue front-end network as protection.
Multi-lingual Parliament Chamber Production
All the new technology was integrated with the existing production infrastructure comprising several PTZ cameras that capture legislative activities live within the Parliament Chamber and committee rooms.
The camera feeds are transmitted to separate control rooms, including a production control centre, and cut into one main program feed that incorporates graphics overlays and sign language insertion. From there, they are fed through to AJA Dante AV 4K-T transmitters for distribution across the campus-wide network.
AJA Dante AV 4K-R receivers receive those feeds, located where operators, translators, sign language professionals and captioners can access them. Each translation or captioning booth houses two people who watch and listen to what's being said on the floor and complete the translations. The translated feeds are then pushed out to displays on the parliament floor and via a public broadcast.
"Having a live visualisation of what's happening on the floor is key to the translation and captioning process, and that's where AJA's Dante AV products are helpful. They make it easy and cost-efficient for the Fijian Parliament to distribute the video signals to different locations across campus using Dante infrastructure," Keith noted. "Being able to integrate Dante Control systems into their existing control systems lets us create simple, big-button interfaces to help the operators and even non-technical operators."
With the first stage of the upgrade complete, Gencom and the Fijian Parliament are focusing next on unlocking live streaming and simulcast capabilities and ensuring proper support to build out a VOD catalogue. Meanwhile, the systems integrator will be busy with several other IP projects in progress and demand for similar upgrades looks unlikely to slow down. www.aja.com
