Background
Intra- and inter-school sports days are part of the culture of schools in Hong Kong, including Cheung Sha Wan Catholic Secondary School (CSWCSS). But CSWCSS is no ordinary school. Because it always keeps abreast of the latest global trend in education, it is well aware of the power of technology in realising “five ways of life”, i.e. attaining all-round development in the domains of ethics, intellect, physique, social skills and aesthetics. The school anticipates that, with the aid of technology, it sports days can drive deeper participation, thus taking the education aims of “physique” and “social skills” to a higher level. In addition, it looks forward to creating more opportunities of learning Liberal Studies for students outside of the track and field. Essentially, the school bets on technology to maximise its limited resources.
Challenges
It is not uncommon for sports day organisers to come across the difficulties occasioned by insufficient seats at sports stadiums. They have no choice but to turn away some students from being onsite audience, creating much disappointment and a sense of alienation. Moreover, a commonality among conventional, boring sports days is a higher-than-normal absence rate. The schools may use administrative means to force presence, but this is a palliative rather than a cure. After all, students can only get the most of these outside-the-classroom activities when they participate wholeheartedly rather than just showing up at the events. If the teachers and school staff in charge of sports days want to see real happy faces, fun is the answer. But this is easier said than done. Given their heavy workload, they can hardly allocate time and resources to revolutionise the formats and contents of the sports days they used to have.
In hopes of resolving the issue brought about by lack of seats, some schools are turning to streaming technology to do live broadcast of their sports days. To facilitate real-time viewing by students and teachers staying at the campus, stringent technical requirements must be met. Although free of charge, the speed-restricted and unstable WiFi connection provided by HKSAR Government is definitely not up to standard when it comes to live streaming. And organisers cannot count on the one-way, low quality streaming solutions offered by incompetent technical service providers either - the viewers not only have to suffer from the choppy screens but also are not able to interact with their schoolmates or cheer on the athletes on the spot. After juxtaposing different live streaming solutions in the marketplace, the organisers at CSWCSS went for the best option available: the speedy, two-way outdoor live streaming solutions from UDomain. 4G
Our Solutions
4G Uplink Networking Technology + Detailed Professional Service + SaaS Payment Model
Always backed up by a robust infrastructure, an experienced technical team providing 24-hour support, a professional customer service team and a proprietary multiple 4G Uplink networking technology offering high availability (HA), we are fully capable of delivering premium streaming services from a technical point of view. But what really sets us apart from the competition and earns us the reputation as the top network service provider in Greater China is our vision of going further to provide our clients with all-round business strategies. Having said that, we made ourselves responsible for building a complete solution around the best interest of the students and staff of CSWCSS, thus facilitating the achievement of the aforementioned education aims.
Technology is to be applied, not supplied
Technology is nothing if it cannot be smartly applied and made useful to people. That is why we take pride in our technological leadership which enables us to comfortably leverage the flexibility offered by streaming technology and come up with useful applications. Specifically for CSWCSS, we focused on opening up more opportunities in which students could experience Liberal Studies in real settings. For instance, instead of just being part of the audience, students could seize the chance to become anchors and reporters of the live broadcast. Such hands-on experiences were great supplements to textbook knowledge. And the broadcast contents such as athlete interviews and event updates were of high entertainment value to both onsite and offsite participants. What’s more, instead of just viewing on the screen and feeling disconnected, offsite participants could have real-time interactions with friends and athletes at the stadium with the aid of our ultrafast, two-way streaming technology. These are good examples of how we put ourselves into clients’ shoes, strategically apply technology and translate our capabilities into practical solutions.
As soon as this customized solution was finalised, the school started the recruitment of broadcast staff and the preparation of the event contents while UDomain called on our full team to formulate a detailed implementation plan. The goal was to ensure flawless execution throughout the live broadcast of the outdoor sports day. The highlights of our technical plan are as follows:
- Multiple 4G Uplink networking technology for speedy and smooth broadcast: This home-grown 4G wireless technology is designed for streamlined broadcast even in the absence of LAN internet connection. It is of high bandwidth and low latency, thus achieving high availability in data streaming. And thanks to its wireless nature, clients are able to save on cabling costs and effort. It also makes it a lot more flexible in placing technical workstations and control panels at the venue. Furthermore, our cloud streaming server, 10G bandwidth and other sophisticated hardware and software are made integral parts of our technical plan. All in all, we are fully capable of handling heavy simultaneous traffic coming from PCs, tablets, smartphones and other devices during a live broadcast.
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Detailed technical rehearsals and onsite testing:
To ensure everything could go as smooth as possible, we dedicated a technical team to the school, the stadium and our data center respectively. 3 parties collaborated in real-time in multiple rehearsals and onsite testing and took every opportunity to finetune every technical detail. As part of our services, we also offered to identify the best locations for cameras and to take charge of the installation and cabling tasks. As such, the school was happy that much time and manpower was saved. -
High cost-efficiency attained by our Software-as-a-Service model:
CSWCSS was the very first customer to take advantage of our pioneering SaaS payment model. By now SaaS is common among cloud service providers but we are the first of our kind to introduce such flexible and cost-efficient approach to the market. Under this “pay as you go” pricing scheme, our clients are able to, without the need for investing in dedicated hardware and software, drastically bring down their operating costs and TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) while flexibly enjoying our enterprise-class services.
Key Takeaways
As a result of our extensive efforts in the strategy formulation and technical preparation, the live broadcast of CSWCSS Sports Day was a great success. The content-rich and interactive event was well received by the school staff and students who expressed that the streaming quality was simply comparable to the live sports events on TV. Without our pioneering streaming technology which was well executed by our professional IT team and the insights offered by our CS team, this exceptional school event could not have been nailed as a success story in the education field in Hong Kong.
