International Java Jazz Festival Broadcasts Beyond the Stage With NewTek

The 11th Jakarta International Java Jazz Festival saw more than 130,000 people turn out to listen to some of the biggest names in music, including Bobby McFerrin, Jessie J, and Christina Perri. For the fourth straight year, NewTek technology helped make the festival a roaring success. 

Last year, three TriCaster 8000s along with two TriCaster 460s and one TriCaster 410 helped the Java Jazz Festival stream to more than 100,000 people a day on various YouTube channels. This year, the festival added three more 8000s, which enabled the festival to run three pairs of TriCaster 8000s in redundant mode, covering the four stages.

Also, for the first time, Java Jazz made use of the 3Play system, which is typically used for instant replay in sports but proved to be a critical asset for the festival.

“Sometimes an artist or band will finish their scheduled show late due to a delayed sound check or interaction with the audience during the show,” said Djundi Karjadi, Technical Director of Java Jazz Festival. “This, in turn, creates scheduling issues as the next act takes another stage. Using 3Play gives us the ability to “time-shift” any of the performances for a continuous, uninterrupted broadcast. If a stage is running long, we just broadcast it until it ends and cue up the next show on 3Play and start it when the other show is finished. I don’t have to cut anything.”

For the latest Java Jazz Festival 2015, four of the TriCaster 8000s were located in the Main Broadcast Room. The other two were at the D1 stage, where a fiber connection lets them record directly to the ProMAX storage via the network-attached storage server (NAS). AJA FiDO optical fiber converters are used for fiber transfer from one stage to another. Meanwhile, a fiber network connects the TriCaster pairs for backup purposes.

The extra TriCaster 8000 streams directly to YouTube servers (main and backup per channel).

As for the other equipment, one of the TriCaster 460s acts as a local master control for the MixHD Channel output to the two HD Channels and they have the freedom to air any of the four stages, along with their own bumpers and logos, separate from the Java Jazz Festival YouTube channels. The other 460 was used in a small studio where a local station conducted artist interviews.

In terms of features, the group used TriCasters to handle animated logos, animated store transitions, animated lower thirds using frame buffers, and GFX to insert Twitter comments into the video. They also used TalkShow VS-100, a new offering from NewTek for broadcast-quality live Skype interviews to show live audience reactions.

”We solved the scheduling issues with 3Play and the recording challenge using double TriCasters, a solution that proved both economical and effective,” Karjadi says.  “I believe I wouldn’t get the same great result even if I used equipment that costs three to four times more.”