del9.3 - broadcasting astronomical events report · d9.3 – november 29th, 2013 del9.3 -...

GLORIA is funded by the European Union 7th Framework Programme

(FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement n° 283783

DEL9.3 - Broadcasting Astronomical Events Report

CODE: DEL-077

VERSION: 01.A

DATE: November 29th, 2013

Authors: Urko SERRANO (UPM)

Collaborators:

Revised by: Raquel CEDAZO (UPM)

Approved by: Francisco Manuel SANCHEZ (UPM)

Distribution List:

Name Affiliation DateUrko SERRANO UPM November 1st, 2013

Raquel CEDAZO UPM November 1st, 2013

Francisco Manuel SANCHEZ UPM November 1st, 2013

D9.3 – November 29th, 2013 DEL9.3 - Broadcasting Astronomical Events Report

Change Control

Issue Date Section Page Change Description01.A 29/11/2013 All All First version

Reference Documents

Nº Document Name Code Version

http://gloria-project.eu 3/13


Index1. Overview...................................................................................................................................................................52. Location....................................................................................................................................................................53. Broadcasting infrastructure.......................................................................................................................................64. Technical deployment...............................................................................................................................................75. Backend.....................................................................................................................................................................96. Results.....................................................................................................................................................................10

6.1. Website...........................................................................................................................................................106.2. Live video.......................................................................................................................................................12

Figures IndexFigure 1: The path of totality during the Total Solar Eclipse.......................................................................................5Figure 2: Setup of the satellite communications..........................................................................................................6Figure 3: Technical coordination point.........................................................................................................................6Figure 4: Live media broadcasting infrastructure........................................................................................................6Figure 5: Media production overview...........................................................................................................................7Figure 6: Live webcast of the Total Solar Eclipse........................................................................................................7Figure 7: Live media production studio.......................................................................................................................8Figure 8: Backend solution...........................................................................................................................................9Figure 9: Statistical results of the website..................................................................................................................10Figure 10: Statistical results of the YouTube channel................................................................................................11Figure 11: Statistics based on geographical results....................................................................................................11Figure 12: Live video statistics...................................................................................................................................12Figure 13: Concurrent viewers of the live webcast....................................................................................................12



1. Overview

The following document is a technical report regarding the live broadcasting of the Total Solar Eclipse on November 3 2013 from Kenya, as part of the EU-funded project GLORIA. The main purpose of this report is to describe, analyse and measure the procedure followed during the deployment phase of this particular live broadcasting.

The outline of this report is as follows: the first section explains the infrastructure and equipment used by the technical team as well as the live production deployment. The second section covers the results obtained both for the live broadcasting and the access to the GLORIA website.

All the content have been elaborated by the partners of the GLORIA project, which means “GLObal Robotic- telescopes Intelligent Array for e-Science”. This project is funded by the European Union 7th Framework Programme FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement no. 283783.

2. Location

In order to broadcast the astronomical event, a GLORIA team of five engineers deployed the technical infrastructure on site during the live webcast to provide satellite communication and the media production.A second team was responsible for the backend media solution and the content delivery network.

Figure 1: The path of totality during the Total Solar Eclipse.



3. Broadcasting infrastructure

The design and deployment of the infrastructure was focused on providing a single live video stream of the Total Solar Eclipse on November 3 2013 from the coordination point situated in lake Turkana, Kenya. Several media resources were used to generate the live video stream: a Canon 5D DSLR camera along with a DBK camera attached to a telescope, a high definition compact camera for the presenter, and a wireless microphone.

Figure 2: Setup of the satellite communications.

This section explains the solution adopted for the media production in order to distribute the live stream through the content delivery network. For more information regarding the content delivery deployment, please refer to DEL2.14. The infrastructure behind the live broadcast is organized into two main solutions as depicted in Figure 4. The deployment of the media solution was made with the collaboration of the Spanish Terrestrial Army from Canary Islands, Ministry of Defense, and Systemagic.

Figure 3: Technical coordination point.

Figure 4: Live media broadcasting infrastructure.



The media production setup allows the GLORIA team to coordinate the local media resources in order to generate a the final stream. The final stream is provided to the GLORIA users by the content delivery network that combines a cloud-based solution using a pool of streaming servers and an external live media infrastructure provided by YouTube live.

Figure 5: Media production overview.

The media production is organized in three main steps as shown in the figure above. The first area defines the media sources available and their setup. The second step includes the broadcasting software for live production along with the encoding tool that generates the final output stream. The third area covers the Internet equipment that provides access to the content delivery infrastructure during the expedition.

Figure 6: Live webcast of the Total Solar Eclipse.

4. Technical deployment

In order to deploy the infrastructure on-site, the GLORIA team configured a variety of equipment both for media production and communications as shown in the tables below. The media equipment consisted of telescope-mounted cameras, a HD camera, wireless microphones and a weather station. For the communications, three satellite terminals were used to provide live streaming bandwidth, automatic updates of images of the Total Solar Eclipse, and the live feedback on-site from the GLORIA website.



Equipment Media output

Canon EOS 5D Mark II USB

Imaging Source DBK USB USB

GoPro Hero 3 + Teradek Cube 220 WiFi / Ethernet

Wireless microphone + Zoom H4n recorder 5mm. audio jack

Equipment Media output Bandwidth Usage

BGAN Explorer 700 WiFi / Ethernet 492 kbps. Live webcast

BGAN Explorer 500 WiFi 464 kbps. Telescope images

Thuraya IP WiFi 444 kbps. Monitoring + Backup

The broadcasting software used for this live broadcast was CamTwist Studio. It is essentially a live video switcher that allows the media producer to control the current output stream in real time while adding effects, transitions, and other external resources. A set of cameras were recording the astronomical phenomenon while professional astronomers were giving explanations to the audience helped by graphical resources as shown in the figure below.

Figure 7: Live media production studio.

The output stream from the broadcasting software has to be encoded along with the audio channel. The live stream is transformed in a specific web media container. This media container includes all the metadata needed for the media player embedded in the GLORIA website. The quality of the video stream is chosen according to the current available bandwidth and the network congestion. In addition, a live translation of the event in spanish was made from the Observatorio del Teide in Tenerife.



The Flash Media Live Encoder is a free encoding tool used during the live production. It provides professional settings for adaptive video quality, such as dynamic bit-rate or auto frames dropping. This tool is in charge of generating the final video output stream that will be distributed through the content delivery network. The following table includes the codec information used to generate the final stream:

Codec information Value

Display resolution 320x240

Frame rate 15fps

Video codec H.264 L5 @ 350Kbps.

Audio codec Mono MP3 @ 22Khz.

5. Backend

The backend side of the media infrastructure corresponds to the content delivery network. For this particular live event, a hybrid solution has been adopted. The architecture is as follows:

- The root node (R) receives the live stream from the coordination point in Kenya.- The root node forwards the live stream to a pool of cloud-based live streaming servers (L).- A load balancer (B) spreads out the requests among all the servers.- The root node sends the live stream to a content delivery network of peers (P) such as YouTube Live.

Once the live stream is available in the media backend, the users are able to start playing the content:

- The users load a website that contains an embedded media player (M).- The media player can be configured to select a certain live media source from a source switcher (S).

- The source could be the pool of live streaming servers or the content delivery network.

Figure 8: Backend solution.



On the other hand, the web hosting of the main GLORIA webpage was designed to handle several thousands of user requests concurrently. In this sense, the web infrastructure was designed with a pool of web servers geographically spread and controlled by a load balancer. The web page was minimized to have a lightweight footprint and hence optimize the amount of parallel requests. A static proxy was deployed to minimize the user requests against the GLORIA webpage. An ongoing research will introduce a dynamic proxy for the next astronomical events.

6. Results

The results of the The Total Solar Eclipse webcast have been collected according to the number of visitors to the websites and the viewers of the live event through the official GLORIA website, YouTube GLORIA channel and other collaborators.

6.1. Website

According to the web statistics collected with AWStats from all web hosting nodes between the 3rd and 5th of November, the GLORIA website ( live.gloria-project.eu ) obtained 62.348 visits and 311.576 page views which generated a traffic overhead of 8,63 GB of data.

Figure 9: Statistical results of the website.

On the GLORIA YouTube channel, 121.211 viewers accessed the website mainly from Poland, United States and Spanish-speaking countries. In terms of playback locations, 53.6% viewers were coming from external websites, mainly from news media websites such as the largest spanish newspaper ( elpais.com ). Regarding devices, 74.6% of the viewers were using laptops and 17% mobile phones to watch the event.



Figure 10: Statistical results of the YouTube channel.

Figure 11: Statistics based on geographical results.



6.2. Live video

The results from the live webcast concluded that the GLORIA YouTube channel obtained more than 84% of the concurrent viewers during the astronomical event with a total of 26.859 viewers and a peak of 11.298 concurrent users watching the live event.

Figure 12: Live video statistics.

The following chart represents the statistics of the live webcast from the YouTube channel. The two peaks represent the first and second connection of the broadcasting were only in the YouTube channel there were 26.296 playbacks and 7.305 concurrent viewers.

Figure 13: Concurrent viewers of the live webcast.



GLORIA Partners

UPMUniversidad Politécnica de MadridSPAIN

AUAVAstronomical Institute, Academy of Sciences of the Czech RepublicCZECH REPUBLIC

CSICConsejo Superior de Investigaciones CientíficasSPAIN

INAT & CVUTCzech Technical University in PragueCZECH REPUBLIC

IP-ASCRInstitute of Physics of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech RepublicCZECH REPUBLIC

IACInstituto de Astrofísica de CanariasSPAIN

INAFIstituto Nazionale di AstrofisicaITALY

SAOSpecial Astrophysical Observatory of Russian Academy of SciencesRUSSIA

UCDNUIDUniversity College DublinIRELAND

UCUniversity of ChileCHILE

UMAUniversity of MalagaSPAIN

UOXFUniversity of OxfordUNITED KINGDOM

UNIWARSAWUniwersytet Warszawski POLAND
