Koala Cam

3 Month 2200 hour continuous live streaming

Synergy Video are use to long streams, we successfully do full extended day live streaming and webcasting events, it was a surprise and a welcome challenge when the NRMA approached us to do a 3 Month Live Stream, 24 Hours a day, 7 days a week.

The subject matter wasn't a conference but Koalas. Thankfully for us it meant that we could do a bit of predictability planning.

The Goal of the NRMA was to raise the profile of Koalas whilst selling home loan products and as part of the plan they wanted to show a real koala live, so viewers could see it at any time. They partnered with Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary for the live stream for access to Koala in an enclosure.

In planning for this stream, we had a few elements to consider

- Being a 24hrs Stream we needed cameras that could work both during the night and day
- Cameras needed to be weatherproof
- The whole setup needed to be self-sufficient as it was in the middle of the park with no access to internet or a locked-up area
- It needed to be multi camera to accommodate the flexibility of the animals
- It needed to have a backup stream ready in case of koala needs as the welfare of the animals was to be paramount
- And it had to be operator less and only be accessed offsite for any problems and live mixing

After a bit of planning a system was designed that worked well with a range of redundancies.

After a few tweaks in the testing week we were off and running. Our 3-camera system with offsite mixing and control worked well, admittedly there were a few hiccups along the way that meant we needed to jump to the backup stream (Gotta love forced windows updates and Telstra outages).

Overall the stream proved a success, with minimal downtime, great coverage and 2200hrs of continuous live multicamera streaming and the biggest surprise of the whole experience, average viewer time was over 8min with one viewer watching for 2hrs 20 min (they must love Koalas).