Mediapro deploys Makito X4 from Haivision to produce the Canadian Premier League

The Haivision Makito X4s have helped Mediapro Canada’s engineering team optimise its coverage of Canada’s professional Premier League football league.

Equipped with a fleet of seven 4K UHD and HD-ready OB trucks travelling coast-to-coast across Canada, two studios and multiple editing suites, Mediapro Canada covered 165 football matches this season in the very short period of six and a half months. Nine Makito X4 encoders and seven Makito X4 decoders played a key role in these broadcasts, to the point where all of Mediapro Canada’s live multi-camera productions now exclusively use Haivision.

Haivision’s Makito X4s are used to send video over an IP network back to the production studio in Mississauga. Edgar Cameron, broadcast engineer at Mediapro Canada, explains that the switch to Haivision’s solutions has been a big improvement over what they were using before: “We’ve never been happier with the IP transmission using Haivision encoders and SRT, both from the quality and reliability standpoint. We’ve tried other products in the past and the quality just didn’t look as good, and the streams were not as reliable. We’ve never had any issues with the Makitos, which is fantastic for us.”

On the distribution side, Mediapro Canada uses its Makito X4s to send content to rights holders via IP networks and the cloud. The ease of use offered by the Makito makes it easy to distribute to each rights holder with the right codec and configuration, explains Cameron: “With the Makito X4, as soon as we plug it in, we’re up and running and we can give them whatever custom settings they need. Some of them require video in H.264, some of them need H.265 and, from an engineering standpoint it’s super simple to change anything that they need.”

“In the past, we had issues with latency and trucks not being able to see what the graphics are or hear what the commentary is,” said Edgar Cameron. “The Makito X4 has really helped when it comes to return feeds from trucks for graphics and commentary, which we do in studio and not on location,” says Cameron, who points to the quarter-second latency these solutions offer.