The First Live Internet TV commercial!
Sunday 9 February 2003

Still shivering from the excitement, Antfarm/ UUNET / MNET / Sorcery and Foghound have together run the world's first Live Internet TV commercial from Johannesburg South Africa. The advert went out live over DSTV's Supersport channel today, to millions of viewers tuned in to the first match of the Cricket World Cup played in Capetown.

The implementation consists of four live WM9 encoders fed by MiniDV camera's, which the worker Ants installed at UUNET's offices in Johanesburg, Capetown, Gabarone (Botswana) and Windhoek (Namibia). The high bitrate encoded streams are pushed to a server housed at UUNET Johannesburg, using UUNET's high availability IP network. A WMP9 decoder housed at MNET in Randburg, pulls the streams over a 2Mb/s line for rendering. A PAL standard composite signal of the live feed is then run through a live text overlay engine and then straight out to DSTV's satellite broadcast system, for airing on DSTV's Supersport channel.

The witty advertising campaign relies on the lightning reflex of Flash and Phil Mailer, in prompting the remote centers for the various scripted actions - to co-ordinate an exciting live experience. The PAL output of the decoder is fed into Foghound's Inscriber system, which generates text and image overlays scripted for each event.

UUNET's network and bandwidth capacity is put to real test in this project - which aims to showcase exactly this factor to the larger public. The campaign is still to flight 107 ads over the duration of the ICC World Cup Cricket.

The wizardry of combining the divergent (and now hopefully convergent) broadcast elements and personnel, comes from the management skills of Sorcery, in the capable hands of Shauneen Procter.

This project bridges the age-old divide between Internet/IP and traditional broadcast industries - and proves without a shadow of doubt, the power, potential ad reliability of streaming video over IP using Microsoft's Windows Media Technologies.

Another first for the Antfarm!