iFAST TV
1,400 SqFt, Multi Set, 4K, NDI® Studio and Production facility.
iFAST Corporation is a wealth management fintech platform headquartered in Singapore and listed on the Singapore stock exchange. iFAST had a large conference and training room that had been laid idle by Covid-19 social distancing restrictions and came to Ideal Systems to turn the room into a high quality TV studio and a production facility from which they could launch iFAST TV and live stream high-quality productions directly to their App and Website.
Now iFAST TV provides unprecedented communications channel to produce and live-stream high quality 4K professional television programming and provide a content library to its customers which include over 520 companies with more than 10,000 wealth advisers currently using their B2B platforms.
For the iFAST TV studio we based the whole video production architecture on NDI® infrastructure and used a Vizrt TriCaster® 2 Elite as the heart of the production system. The system supports end-to-end 4K over IP from the cameras through production and live streamed securely up to 4K to iFAST’s viewers. We fully utilized NDI® and the Live Call Connect function within the Vizrt TriCaster® 2 Elite to dramatically reduce the complexity of the solution architecture to allow for technically complex productions such as featuring multiple video calls with differing resolutions from platforms like Zoom® and Microsoft® Teams in live interviews on the LED Video Wall or in Virtual Space in the Chroma set.
For the iFAST TV studios, we pushed the boundaries of what is possible in native NDI® systems, to the extent that there is zero legacy SDI equipment or cabling used in the entire facility. Ideal deployed the world’s first NDI® native teleprompter and world’s first NDI® native studio monitors from Telescript. We also used the Live Story Creator functionality in the TriCaster® 2 Elite for the teleprompter which is a revolutionary new approach to production automation using Microsoft Word. Content creators can write a script in Microsoft Word and use Word’s comments to trigger actions on the TriCaster as the presenter reads from the teleprompter. This is done by simply loading the word document directly into TriCaster and it does the rest, so things like picture and picture, graphics and switching can be fully automated live by the script, again making the production operators job easier.
Along with Native NDI PTZ cameras and BirdDog NDI converters for the camcorders all of the feeds from the studio are on standard ethernet cables. The NDI cameras also use power over ethernet so there is a dramatic reduction in the number of cables required in the studio because each ethernet cable for the PTZ is effectively a 5-in-1 cable providing power, control, tally, video and audio.
Other major iFAST TV operational functions that have been condensed into the TriCaster® 2 Elite include the Virtual Sets which allow iFAST unlimited flexibility in terms of the production format and look for different shows. The TriCaster® also provides the video feed to the 5M LED wall in one of the sets, which can incorporate video, graphics and video conferencing. The TriCaster® even provides the encoding for the output to the CDN and on to iFAST’s App with a spare encoder available if simultaneous steaming to social media is required.