1.1 billion people worldwide lack sanitation. This is something the people at Domestos and renowned agency Lean Mean Fighting Machine want to change by celebrating the yearly World Toilet Day. This year, a statue is set up on the front lawn of the London mayor’s office in central London. The statue portrays a person defecating. The face of the statue is made up of screens, for eyes, nose and mouth, where Facebook users can upload short video clips of themselves that are broken up into the facial features and displayed on the statue. The idea is to create consciousness about the plight of the people that don’t have sanitation.
On-location live recording with 2 cameras, encoding and streaming during 5 days, 24 hrs. per day in an exterior location near the Tower Bridge, London. (Technical description below)
What Rackfish did
At the site, an Axis P3344-VE camera and an Axis Q6035-E PTZ camera were mounted on trees in the park.
Video clips of visitors faces, captured by World Toilet Day’s Facebook application, were captured and recorded by Rackfish before being made available for Lean Mean Fighting Machine for display on the statue’s face screens.
Specially developed software controlled both the display of pre-recorded user video as well as communicating with the live streaming servers to start recording each visitors 10 seconds of fame. Each visitor was also alerted via mail before their clip came up, to be able to watch it live, and was given access to the recorded material.
Agency: Lean Mean Fighting Machine
Client: Domestos (Unilever)
Supporting: World Toilet Day
November 2012
Technical description
The on-location cameras fed h.264 rtsp streams through a two-way satellite internet connection provided by Ethnet to Rackfish datacenter.
Rackfish provided a total of five Wowza Media servers for various tasks: three in Sweden and two in the Amazon AWS cloud in Ireland.
The primary server in Sweden was used to live-transcode the streams from the cameras, adapting them on the fly for various screens such as iPhone and other IOS-units using Apple HSL as well as Flash-clients, with adaptive bandwidth suitable for various connection speeds. This server acted as origin server for the converted live material, as well as delivering prerecorded user content as video-on-demand.
A recording server was setup to record content from the users cameras captured by a Facebook application, which was then made available for moderation and finally sent to the statue in Potters Fields Park.
A third server acted, load-balanced with the two servers in Ireland, as streaming edges, providing a combined capacity for around 2000 simultaneous users, with an easy upgrade path for more capacity.
Rackfish also integrated Wowza Media Server and a recording interface towards Lean Mean Fighting Machines MQTT server, handling the communication between different parts of the solution.
