Achieving low latency in live sporting events

An interview with Michael Burns from SVG Europe about recent projects, industry trends - including cloud, IP, remote production and sustainability - and future plans. 

"Our development work on our proprietary transport protocol that is aptly called Caton Transport Protocols (CTP) is now widely recognised and adopted for use in live sporting events to ensure broadcasters achieve the ultra-low latency that is required," says Caton senior vice president, global operations Gerald Wong. "At IBC 2022, we introduced enhancements to CTP with multipathing to enable a new way of IP transmission. By using AI and machine learning, automatic traffic rebalancing on every path ensures that even the most challenged internet connectivity becomes highly reliable. Unlike a simple network bonding designed to increase bandwidth, CTP Multipathing reacts to all possible traffic reshaping to derive the best performance. With this new multipathing feature, live sporting events can be contributed and distributed in a more efficient, reliable and economical way."

Last December, Caton worked with Relevent Sports Group to provide coverage of the Women's International Champions Cup (WICC) to audiences throughout China. "With 100% successful transmission, coverage of the WICC 2021 Final was efficiently transported from BT Tower in London to Sina Weibo, the leading Chinese social media platform, quickly and securely," says Wong. "In utilising Caton Technology, the content was delivered in the lowest latency, resulting in exceptional coverage across the Sina Weibo platform, exceeding viewers' expectations. 

During the Tokyo Olympics, Caton and China Unicom jointly designed an integrated solution to securely and reliably transmit live HD video from Tokyo to Beijing. Caton was selected by Momenta as the solution and service partner to deliver high-quality, low latency content to live video platforms such as Migu, Tencent Video, Kuai Shou and more. Caton mobile encoders (LiveCast Pro) were deployed in Tokyo to provide real-time HD video transmission through multiple 4G networks, while journalists were able to use Caton's Cydex platform to transport large files during the event. 

More recently, Caton has been transmitting NBA and MLB to TV operators and OTT from the US to Asian countries. Caton was awarded a five-year contract to deliver Nippon Professional Baseball (NBP) live coverage from Japan to Taiwan, using Caton's CTP, CVP and Network Monitoring System (NMS) to allow Eleven Sports Taiwan to deliver high value content with ultra-low latency.