KBS Advances Remote Broadcast Transmission with AJA BRIDGE LIVE

Korean Broadcasting System (KBS), Korea’s largest public broadcaster, delights audiences across the region with a broad range of content, including live coverage of international sporting competitions. As it began preparations to relay a high-profile global sporting event held in Beijing, China, in March 2022, pandemic-era challenges prompted KBS to rethink its traditional production approach. Rather than rely on dispatching local crews and broadcast facilities as it had in the past, KBS leveraged a cloud-based broadcasting system to enable remote production. To bolster monitoring and return signal configuration for the transmission, the company established a workflow comprising an AJA BRIDGE LIVE multi-channel live video solution for remote production, contribution, collaboration, streaming, and delivery.  

Previously, KBS leveraged an SRT-equipped workstation or IP equipment to support monitoring and return signal configuration for remote broadcasts. This approach, however, resulted in less than desirable picture and sound quality. In exploring alternatives, bandwidth proved a key consideration for the KBS team, as moving to the cloud would require a stable receivable bandwidth of at least 100Mbps. 

Offering encoding and decoding of H.264, H.265, MPEG-2, JPEG-2000, and NDI codecs up to UltraHD 60p, AJA BRIDGE LIVE is able to easily manage the bandwidth required for a live cloud signal. Park Kwon-Soon, technical director, broadcast systems department, KBS, shared, “BRIDGE LIVE provides incredibly stable network bandwidth for our workflow, which is essential in live broadcasting environments. It’s durable and delivers truly exceptional performance, unlike anything we’ve seen before.”