Electronic Arts regularly organizes streaming of e-sports tournaments and events onto various OTT platforms such as YouTube and Twitch. To accurately capture errors in real time for troubleshooting during live broadcast and production and to analyze its compressed media, EA has integrated Boro monitoring system and StreamEye Studio analyzers into its live production process.

Ben Bradshaw, Manager of EA Broadcast Network Operations, said: “We face problems daily implementing a fully virtualized live production. Elecard Boro has been an integral part allowing visibility within our network, enabling us to correct problems before they become visible and to make key decisions when there is no time to spare.”

Elecard Boro is a client-server application consisting of two parts: software Boro probes and a server designed to collect and process statistics. It is used to simultaneously monitor 50 UDP or HLS streams. Boro probes were installed on cloud platforms after encoders to immediately monitor live streams being used in production within Virtual Private Clouds around the world. These probes validate and monitor any anomalies in the virtual production environment, enabling broadcast engineers to make more informed, confident decisions regarding what to use on air. Also, Boro probes were installed in partner CDNs to monitor content delivery and regional ad insertion. 

“If we see anomalies, macro blocking, degraded picture, we can methodically trace which cycle is the most problematic and execute a plan for corrective actions. We are very pleased to have this amount of granularity in evaluating the integrity of our compression and decompression techniques and equipment,” commented Bradshaw.

Elecard StreamEye Studio is a set of software tools for video quality analysis designed for professional use in video compression, processing, communication and streaming media industries. StreamEye is used to validate and ensure the highest quality of MPEG-2, AVC and HEVC compressed media. In fully remote, fully virtualized cloud production, there are cases when it is necessary to compress and decompress video multiple times prior to distribution. StreamEye helps to accurately qualify each cycle and measure the visual picture quality of the decoded frames.