Live Events

Owned by alon.men@zixi.com
Last updated: 29 Sept 2024 by Alon Men
3 min read

Zen Master Live Events feature provides users with the ability to schedule, run, and manage, workflows for occasional-use deliveries such as sporting events, press conference, news events, live production, and other real-time events. 

Users can create and schedule streaming events with defined start and duration times, control redundant pre-configured failover channels, and define slate sources for slating content across multiple stages of the event life cycle (e.g., pre-live, live, and post-live). It is also possible to monitor multiple autonomous live or upcoming events in parallel, or view individual events via the Live Event Dashboard screen. The Live Event Dashboard screen also provides manual override controls for full control over stage transitions.

The Live Events feature supports any live event workflow with your own custom stages. A typical workflow may include the following stages:

  1. Planning and scheduling – in this stage, which occurs before the event (typically weeks before the event), the event is planned and scheduled. When creating a Live Event in Zen Master, you set when the event begins, its duration, and the duration of pre/post live stages.
  2. Pre live – in this stage the systems are deployed in the venue. The cameras and microphones could be on and could potentially stream video and audio, but you may not want viewers to be able to view what is going on. To avoid this, Live Events allows you to configure a Failover Channel that includes a Slate source, which will be streamed during this stage. The event starts by entering the Pre-Live stage. In this stage the channel is activated, and the event dashboard will update to report status and thumbnails of the underlying channels and streaming components. Sources are expected to be active, but the channel will output slate to the corresponding targets.
  3. Live – this is the live event stage, the match itself, the speech, etc. The live event can begin automatically according to the set schedule. At this point the Failover channel will automatically failover to the Preferred source, which streams the live event. If the event begins before schedule or is prolonged after the set duration, it is possible to take over manual control and begin earlier or extend the duration. When the event advances to the live stage, slate is dropped automatically and the channel, or redundant channels, controlled by the event manager will output live content to the attached targets.  
  4. Post live – When the live stage ends, the event advances to the post-live stage. the event controller updates the channel/s and once again outputs slate. This allows systems to continue to deliver a video feed while post event checks or archival workflows are completed. The post live stage can be a live stream coming from the studio (e.g., after game commentary), a pre-recorded stream with credits, a slate, etc. It is possible to configure Live Events to failover to another specific source at the post live stage or manually enable the source.
  5. Completed - finally the event advances to completed, the channel is disabled, targets are no longer delivering streams, and the event is over.


Promo Clips

It is possible to add promo clips to be played out automatically during stage transitions or manually. The promo clip can be any  external URL that points to a .TS transport stream file. For example, the URL of a TS file that is hosted on an S3 bucket.