BirdDog Stories: ICC Belfast

Belfast International Convention Centre is a state-of-the-art, purpose-built conference facility in the heart of Northern Ireland’s capital city. As well as a 2200-seat auditorium the venue boasts two large multipurpose halls, plus meeting rooms catering from 10 to 200 delegates. Like all live venues, the pandemic has forced Belfast ICC to think outside the box.

Dave Young, Head of Technical Production, has extensive experience working in live events and had already been thinking about hybrid events – seamlessly connecting an audience on site with remote viewers.

We needed to find new tools, new platforms to make sure that the delegates here in person have a wonderful experience, as well as interacting with the remote delegates, said Dave.

We looked across the entire market of streaming equipment, cameras and encoders. When we found NDI and BirdDog we just knew we’d found the right gear, added Dave. We’re now using NDI across the venue and as well as attaching BirdDog NDI encoders to our existing cameras, we are also using the 4K P400 PTZ cameras.

The flexibility of BirdDog and NDI has been a runaway success for the venue, allowing many different types of equipment to come together in a unified NDI world. Existing studio cameras are NDI enabled using BirdDog Studio or Mini NDI encoders and used in conjunction with the native NDI BirdDog PTZs. BirdDog NDI Decoders are also used to get the NDI content onto screens for confidence monitoring for the on-air delegates.

Each meeting room is equipped with a P400 4K PTZ camera, with some halls having multiple cameras.

NDI means we can share presentations, video, live camera feeds and incoming camera feeds across the entire building and easily access it all from anywhere on the network. It’s an incredibly powerful technology, commented Dave.

At the heart of each hybrid production is vMix, which allows an external audience to attend over the internet, be mixed with in-venue delegates, and streamed live using the Glisser platform.

We would recommend BirdDog equipment because it just works perfectly straight out of the box. Just plug it in and away you go.

The gear:

• 11x P400 4K PTZ Cameras
• 2x P100 HD PTZ Cameras
• 2x PTZ Keyboard Controllers
• 3x Studio NDI Encoder/Decoder
• 5x Mini NDI Encoder/Decoder
• Comms Pro Audio Intercom Software
• Central Pro NDI Routing Software