Jennie Allen and the Gather25 team brought Sardius Media in to help orchestrate the monumental live stream task. Sardius Media’s team immediately saw the opportunity to achieve this by leveraging AWS’s new Elemental MediaLive Anywhere product in its first large-scale deployment. The team collaborated closely with the AWS team to ensure that this would work and that it could maintain a flawless performance for 25 straight hours.
Along with the technical aspects of the broadcast, they partnered with Future City Now to develop a global design aesthetic for the event. This incorporated complex workflows to seamlessly deliver the right content to the right audience in real time.
Jason Shore, co-founder of Sardius Media, said of the massive project, “Gather25 pushed the boundaries of what’s possible in live streaming. Our team’s ability to adapt, innovate, and deliver under pressure made this a defining moment — not just for us, but for the global Church.”
Complications
While the Sardius Media team’s plan was a good one, every live-stream event comes with its unique challenges. In this case, there were multiple physical and digital issues that presented themselves in the lead-up to and during the Gather25 event.
Physical Complications
One of these took place less than 24 hours before the event started when the main fiber circuit into the studio master control was severed by an unexpected car accident. The Sardius Media team’s response demonstrated its event coordinating experience. They swiftly coordinated with various partners, secured alternate internet solutions, and rerouted encoder traffic before the event began, ensuring the stream was ready on time.
Viewership Complications
Another unexpected complexity arose when the popular Bible App YouVersion notified 36 million users to join the event. This led to a robust and unexpected response that stressed the live-streaming system to the max. Despite the added pressure, the AWS-powered Sardius Platform managed the surge in traffic without skipping a beat, continuing to deliver a resilient, scalable live stream as it carried the hope-filled message of Gather25 to every corner of the earth.
Technical Complications
A final technical hurdle worth pointing out came in the form of the deletion of the pre-event DVR file. This knocked the language VTT file out of sync. It was discovered after the event began and normally would have required relaunching the entire live stream. However, the onsite Sardius team was able to dynamically update VTT files to clip the archive mid-stream— all without restarting. This was a rare feat in live streaming that preserved the event’s integrity and avoided an unwanted interruption in the broadcast.
