Anyone for Rugby?
Loughborough University will be streaming a live broadcast of their renowned Rugby Varsity on 30th April in a battle of the Universities!
The event, entitled the REAL Varsity will take place at 17:15 (UK time), when Loughborough Men and Womens 1st XVs will take on Bath's 1st XVs at Loughborough's 1st team pitch. The event is now in its fourth year, and is bigger and better than ever; there will be live music and entertainment including an appearance by the Skydiving Club to kick off proceedings and deliver the match ball.
LSUTV (Loughborough’s student TV) and Loughborough University's IT and Media Services departments are collaborating to broadcast both matches with live commentary, interviews and analysis.
“I've been working with our student TV station, LSUTV, for the last few months to put this event together; we have lots of exciting things happening before and during the event," says Gary Parker, IT Services Specialist, Network & Security Team at Loughborough University. “Everyone involved has worked hard to make this happen and I'm confident it's going to be a huge success.”
The live matches will be streamed over JANET through two unicast Quicktime MPEG4 streams (768kb/s and 1.5Mb/s) and a single 3Mb/s H.264 multicast stream, for those who are multicast enabled. The multicast stream will be available to view in the free VLC media player and is also being carried on Inuk's Freewire IPTV service, channel 106.
Says Roger Bolam, Content Delivery Group Manager at JANET(UK), “It is great to see this type of activity demonstrating the capability of JANET. The network provides an ideal delivery infrastructure for JANET-connected sites to push real-time content to a wider audience. IPTV and student TV are rapidly developing application areas that JANET(UK) is keen to support across JANET and we hope to see more inspiring activities like this in the future.”
Derek Wyatt MP, former England and Barbarians winger said, "JANET, the UK's research and educations network is a real asset for every aspect of contemporary student life. I am delighted that through the power of the internet it is now giving the opportunity for coverage of premium student sport as never before."
To see the event live you can visit: http://lsutv.co.uk/varsity/streams/varsity_mcast.mov
To find out more, take a look at the students in action:
http://www.lsutv.co.uk/varsity/promo/varsity_hi.mov