ICC (International Convention Centre) Belfast is a 7,000m2 purpose-built conference facility in the heart of Belfast featuring multiple halls with flexible configurations, meeting rooms catering from 10 to 200 delegates, bar areas, outside terraces, and a 2200-person auditorium as the centerpiece of the facility.
When the pandemic hit, Dave Young, Head of Technical Production at ICC Belfast | Waterfront Hall | Ulster Hall, knew it was time to start thinking differently about how to host events with delegates on location, as well as externally at multiple remote locations. It was a technical problem that Dave set his mind to solving.
“The challenges of a hybrid event are that we wanted to join up the audiences here in person and remote,” said Dave. “We needed to find new tools and new platforms to make sure that the delegates here in person have a wonderful experience, as well as interacting with the remote delegates.”
The search for the solution began. Many long hours were spent on researching products, platforms, companies, and technologies that would enable ICC to continue to deliver world-class events.
“We looked across the entire market of streaming equipment, cameras, and encoders, and when we found NDI and BirdDog, we just knew we’d found the right gear to help solve this challenge. We’re now using NDI across the venue and along with attaching BirdDog NDI encoders to our existing cameras, we are also using the 4K P400 PTZ cameras.”
The flexibility of BirdDog and NDI has been a runaway success for ICC allowing for a combination of different equipment to come together into a unified NDI world. Existing studio cameras are NDI enabled using BirdDog Studio or Mini NDI encoders, and then used in conjunction with the native NDI BirdDog PTZ’s. BirdDog NDI Decoders are also used to get the NDI content onto screens for confidence monitoring for the on-air delegates.
BirdDog cameras are now installed across the entire venue with every meeting room’s being equipped with P400’s, and with some halls having multiple cameras.
“NDI means we can share presentations, content videos, live camera feeds, and incoming camera feeds across the entire building and easily access it all from anywhere on the network. It’s an incredibly powerful technology.”
At the heart of the hybrid productions is vMix which allows for external callers to be brought in over the internet, mixed with the in-venue delegates, and then streamed back out live to the Glisser platform.
“We would recommend BirdDog equipment because it just works perfectly straight out of the box. Just plug it in and away you go.”
The gear:
11x P400 4K PTZ Cameras
2x P100 HD PTZ Cameras
2x PTZ Keyboard (Controllers)
3x Studio NDI
5x Mini
Comms Pro (Audio Intercom Software)
Central Pro (NDI Routing Software)
To learn more about ICC Belfast please visit iccbelfast.com
