Streaming live to CCTV setup

First of all hello to everyone here, I did a bit of browsing about and it seems like there are a lot of helpful folks here. I work for a non-profit children's hospital and my child life group is looking to do some live productions. I'm an AV geek and I'm comfortable with most of the equipment but some of the broadcast stuff is new to me so please bear with me.

We already have an RF cable network in the building already. Unfortunately all of our modulators are currently standard def analog (I'm working on figuring out the upgrade to digital but that's another story). Wired into this, in addition to the cable channels we transmit from cox, I have a number of media servers recently purchased from Swank. These devices each came with a Blackmagic Design Intensity pro that we are using to output video to the modulators. This part works great but Swank's software is all centered around prerecorded video.

What I want to do is use the same media servers to pick up live broadcasts. Ideally I think what will happen is we'll have a camera in the field hooked up to some sort of video streaming device that can connect to our wired or wireless network. That will communicate back to the media server which will be able to send the video out to the Intensity Pro and ultimately onto our cable network.

What software will I need to get on the media server to output to the Intensity? I notice it doesn't show as a standard windows output.

What hardware (camera and encoder) should i have at the field end of the equation? Is wifi a reasonable option if we're running N? Since our cable is analog resolution doesn't mean much right now but I'll want to be capable of going HD in the future.

Hi John,

I actually don't understand your configuration.
You want to Ingest what kind of camera?? HDMI, cvbs or IP....
I understand that you distribute over analog RF, do you have a video mixer??

maybe a Atem switcher is interesting for you???

Do you need a wireless link for video???


give us more informations please....

best regards Nils

Absolutely.

We have a few things but aren't locked into anything for the camera side yet, that's mostly why I'm here.

I'm envisioning it will probably be a standard video camera, likely outputting HDMI. That would connect downstream to some sort of encoder that would allow us to send the video over IP, across our network, to the datacenter where the RF distribution head end is. We could pick up the stream with the server we have which houses an Intensity Pro decoder and outputs through composite to our RF modulators.

Again, that's just a sort of guess. I don't know what would do the encoding at the camera end. I don't know what software we would need on the server side to pick up the stream and direct it to the Intensity Pro's output.

Hm....

Can I ASK what the maximum budget is.....?

I have some ideas, One of them is teradek! Take a Look to http://www.teradek.com/
Anotherone is to use a Atem switches with USB, there is a Tool for Windows, to stream from the Internat Atem h.264 Encoder....i will hiev you the Adress if will find. The Software is about 200 Euros....

Does ist have to be cheaper?

Regards nils

I think you posted to the wrong toppic?

Regards Nils

One option. Use the analog NTSC output from a ATEM 1/ME. You can choose to center cut (4:3 from 16:9) or letterbox to feed your analog modulator.

When you go digital, you need to know if your tv sets can handle MPEG2 only or H264.
Blonder Tongue is a good manufacturer of cable headend gear. So are VideoPropulsion
and Toner.