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Case Study

Plum Case Helps KSWO TV Broadcast on Game Day

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Overview

When more than 80,000 fans pack a stadium, cellular networks buckle under the load. KSWO-TV needed a way to broadcast live HD video from that congested environment, and the Plum Case gave them a reliable signal to cover game day.

About

KSWO News is Texoma’s home for news across Southwest Oklahoma and North Texas. The region includes the University of Oklahoma Sooners, whose Big 12 Conference football games draw crowds of more than 80,000 people.

Challenge

When that many people gather in one place, cellular towers can become congested, sharply reducing network capability. For fans in the stands, it’s a minor inconvenience. For the broadcasters covering the game, it’s a serious problem. The Sooners’ opening day game gave KSWO the chance to test how the Plum Case would perform in that congested environment.

KSWO runs a robust Live View Platform to broadcast live video, aggregating wireless signals from up to six SIM cards. But on a congested network, the bandwidth available across all six carrier connections wasn’t enough to broadcast.

Even with our six SIM cards, we were only getting around one MB per second of data. HD video takes more than five or six MB, which we were able to achieve with the Plum Case. We simply connected the Plum Case to our camera system via ethernet cable and we could reliably push out HD video. After this test, the team at KSWO had zero doubts about the Plum Case.
Justin Williamson, Chief Engineer, KSWO-TV

Solution

KSWO used a Plum Case to reach beyond the network congestion and pull in a strong, reliable signal. The setup was simple: connect the Plum Case to the camera system with an ethernet cable and push out HD video. With the push of a button, the team had a secure, powerful network in an environment where six carrier connections alone had fallen short.

Outcome

The Plum Case covered the game reliably, and the KSWO team came away with full confidence in the device.

That confidence paid off again when the station hit an unrelated network problem. A fiber line was inadvertently cut at KSWO’s local ISP. The station didn’t lose internet entirely, but speeds dropped too low to run planned programming.

“The internet connection at the television station was useless, which is a problem since most of our syndicated programs get delivered over IP. Due to the network issue, we were unable to download the shows for that evening’s broadcast. The estimated download time for a single show was 48 hours. I fired up our Plum Case and we were able to download the shows and get them aired that evening.”
— Justin Williamson, Chief Engineer, KSWO-TV

For a broadcaster dealing with high-traffic events and unexpected outages, the Plum Case delivers peace of mind. It works as a network in the field and as a reliable backup for the station, ready at the push of a button.