How ALP Delivers Hundreds of Live Global Events from a Software-Defined NOC

About ALP

ALP is a global live event production company producing and distributing coverage of music, sports, and fashion for audiences around the world. The company’s Network Operations Center (NOC) is a live event and remote broadcast production facility where in-house engineers and producers handle REMI productions, multiplatform encoding, and global distribution for some of the industry’s most demanding events.

The Challenge

Over the past decade, live broadcasting has shifted fast — legacy platforms giving way to streaming on phones, connected TVs, and set-top boxes, while social media has pushed clients to get content onto as many platforms as possible, as quickly as possible. Keeping pace means ALP’s technology stack has to adapt as fast as the demands change.

Previously, the team relied on dedicated recordings at each editorial station to clip and post moments in near real time — the industry-standard alternatives were either cost-prohibitive or too rigid in the file types they’d accept. At the same time, ALP was fielding a growing number of requests to livestream previously recorded material, another need existing solutions couldn’t address easily and fluidly.

The Solution

ALP began with a proof of concept for Softron’s OnTheAir Video as a backup playback system. Its reliability, ease of use, and tight integration with the rest of ALP’s macOS-based toolset moved it from backup to primary quickly — it has since played out hundreds of events flawlessly.

That success led to a second proof of concept, this time to solve pain points in the recording workflow. ALP was capturing camera ISOs and program feeds to solid-state drives, then spending hours after every event copying data to primary and backup RAIDs before the gear could be cleared for the next day.

Softron MovieRecorder — recording straight to multiple drives — quickly became ALP’s primary system of choice. Its arrival lined up with a surge in client requests for social media clips, and because MovieRecorder let ALP’s editorial team edit while ingesting on network attached storage, clips could be cut and delivered mid-event from multiple workstations using industry standard NLE tools.

As requests to time-shift live events became more frequent, Softron had an answer again: M|Replay. What started as a secondary time-delay tool quickly became ALP’s primary solution once again.

The Results

Softron has easily scaled ALP’s operation at every step — from a single backup system to the backbone of playout, ingest, and time-shifting across the NOC. OnTheAir Video has played out hundreds of live events without an on-air failure. MovieRecorder’s direct-to-drive and network attached storage recording has cut hours of backup time out of the daily turnaround. Because editing can start the moment ingest does, ALP has been able to deliver social clips during live events — for its own team and its clients’ editors alike.

Implementation of SCTE triggering embedded in the transport stream and synchronized, multi-lingual, and highly formatted embedded text data are now routine.

Looking Ahead

The livestream broadcast industry will continue to change, but ALP no longer has to rethink its workflows every time it does. With Softron as the foundation of its livestream playback solution, the team can continue expanding, adapting, and delivering for clients with confidence.

“Softron’s motto — easy, affordable, dependable — has proven true in every interaction we’ve had with their team.”