Munich-based commercial travel channel sonnenklar.TV delivers around 60 hours of live broadcasts per week to viewers via cable and satellite as well as a live stream on its website.
Among its recent productions, a live broadcast of the wedding celebration of one of Germany’s top TV hosts, Harry Wijnvoord and his wife Iris in March 2022. The couple, who had already married in a civil
ceremony in 2021, were remarried aboard the nickoSPIRIT, while the luxury ship cruised down the Rhine.
The three-day event, featuring 170 celebrities and other guests, was reported live by sonnenklar.TV – no easy feat from a moving ship, which made conditions extremely challenging for the production team.
As Patrick Schmidt, Technical Director at sonnenklar.TV explains, “Along the cruise route, we had to frequently switch between different cellular network providers, making the transmission a technical challenge. The network coverage along the Rhine to Koblenz varies hugely between 0G, 4G and 5G.”
Alongside the typical technical planning that goes into a production, the sonnenklar.TV team spent several months in planning and preparation, speaking to different shipping companies and researching network coverage. It was vital to ensure seamless transitions between cellular networks and that the audience didn’t miss any part of the celebration. Enter Intinor’s Direkt series.
The Direkt link encoded the video and audio feeds directly from the cameras and sent them over the nearest cellular network to the sonnenklar.TV production hub in Munich where a Direkt router is placed.
Intinor’s unique transport protocol, Bifrost, which incorporates forward error correction, re-sending (ARQ) and adaptive bitrate as well as network bonding, ensured that data uploads were intelligently and skilfully handled for great sound and picture quality throughout.
“The Intinor was ready for operation at all times, even in places where individual providers did not offer
coverage, so even when some guests had no mobile phone reception, we were able to keep transmission going,” said Schmidt. “Thanks to the combination of Intinor’s excellent technology and the sonnenklar.TV team, we overcame the challenges. We are grateful to the Intinor team who actively supported and stood by us before and during the project.”
Following its success with Intinor technology, sonnenklar.TV invested in its own Intinor system in August 2022. Patrick Schmidt comments, “We are enthusiastic about Intinor and their technology, both in terms of the weight of the hardware, the effort involved in transporting it on location, the on-site assembly, the handling of the system and last but not least the support that Intinor provides; all this together convinced us completely.”
