Blackbird’s Cloud Video Platform Picked by MSG Digital

Madison Square Garden, often known as MSG Digital, is a large arena venue hosting numerous live events from sports to concerts. MSG uses the Blackbird cloud video platform to create branded event highlights packages with closed captioning deployed to their website and social media outlets.

For seasonal live sports events, MSG Digital needed to create fast turnaround highlights from up to twelve 1080i high bit rate SDI feeds. To meet new accessibility regulations, live closed captioning was required during gameplay. This posed a challenge on MSG Digital’s current workflow as it was dependent on a video source ingest to be completed prior to the captioning process, therefore causing delays. MSG Digital needed an affordable and efficient workflow solution which could easily integrate and scale with their existing team and infrastructure.

Streamlined functionality: The Blackbird integration into MSG’s existing workflow enabled the digital team to accelerate their turnaround of creating high quality sports highlights

Live ingest: The high-bit-rate SDI sources are transcoded in real time into our Blackbird codec and displayed in the editor as proxy video, audio and closed captioning.

No need for rendering: All proxy work created in the Blackbird platform conformed against the the high bit-rate mezzanine media stored on MSG’s Blackbird Edge servers to create full resolution edits.

Integrated closed captions: Closed captions embedded in the baseband SDI feed are decoded in Blackbird Edit and displayed on 1 of multiple closed caption data tracks on the timeline. This allows concurrent editing of closed caption, video and audio tracks.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        

Personalized publishing: Edits were delivered in seconds to collaborative publishing tools such as AWS Elemental by a simple drag-and-drop interface. In addition to a high bit-rate delivery, Blackbird incorporated unique metadata compiled by MSG. No changes to the infrastructure: Blackbird Edit runs on the internet supporting any operating systems without any demand for extra hardware.

Professional editing: Blackbird provides a fully functional editing platform for creating branded video packages, covering simple clipping to advanced editorial tasks graphic overlays and multi-track audio.

Collaborative setup process: The Blackbird and MSG Digital teams were able to collaborate on new features and inventions to the platform to meet the requirements of time critical workflows.

Unlocking the value of video: Blackbird’s flexibility and digital support for MSG in their live environment was the key to the success of the project.

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