News

Haivision powers live video streaming for international ballet festival

May 2, 2013

Ballet dancers on location in Toronto will be joined by dancers in Amsterdam for a performance that will be live-streamed over the Internet with help from Haivision, which provides technology for streaming, recording, managing and distributing secure IP video and interactive media.

According to a news release, the May 3 and 4 performances of the original work, "Stream," part of Assemblée International in Toronto, will be carried live over the Internet. The week-long festival, hosted by the Canadian National Ballet School, brings together students and artistic staff from 11 countries and 18 international professional ballet schools, including The Juilliard School, Cuba's National Ballet School, Paris Opera Ballet School and the San Francisco Ballet School, for classes, performances, forums and professional development.

"Stream," a new work from Canadian National Ballet School choreographer Shaun Amyot in collaboration with Amsterdam-based choreographer Michael Schumacher, explores the use of new technologies in dance, according to the release. It will be danced by students in Toronto, who will be joined virtually, through live video streaming, by dancers from the Dutch National Ballet Academy in Amsterdam.

The Global Campus Network is coordinating the event, the release said, using Haivision Mako, a high performance, low-latency video codec technology designed for interactive communications. The platform will bi-directionally stream live video and audio of the Dutch dancers onto onstage screens in Toronto. And Haivision KulaByte, an Internet encoder/transcoder, will live stream the events to the festival's Web site.  

"Usually when ballet students are brought together, it is for competition, but the Assemblée Internationale festival (is) focused on collaboration," Amyot said in the release. "It provides our students with a real opportunity to network with their peers, meet with artistic directors from other ballet schools and become stronger dancers by working together. Haivision's video streaming technology is helping us realize the goal of bringing our dancers closer together, both on the stage and online."

According to Richard Grunberg, director of Ryerson Digital Cinema and the Advanced Visualization Lab and Global Campus Network, the Global Campus Network is an alliance focused on developing new methods of creating live interactive and culturally diverse media across the world's universities and colleges.

"We partnered with Haivision to leverage online video solutions that were reliable, ultra low latency and high quality to make the (performance) a reality," he said in the release.

JoAnne Gaudreau, vice president of marketing at Haivision, said melding performances in two locations requires the lowest latency video stream possible, and added that the company's codec technology will help broadcast the performance in real-time.

"When art and technology come together, you're creating something truly innovative and demonstrating the power of video to drive collaboration," she said, "whether it be in a learning or enterprise environment."

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