From the Pacific to Your Screen: The Tech Behind Livestreaming The Ocean Cleanup
Stream My Event was tasked by The Ocean Cleanup to tackle the ambitious challenge of livestreaming an ocean plastic extraction—taking viewers to the heart of their mission in the Pacific. Here’s how we made it happen.
Introduction
Early 2022, we were asked by The Ocean Cleanup to start thinking about a way to livestream an extraction of plastic from the Pacific Ocean.
The Ocean Cleanup had recently completed oceanic trials of the new System 002 used to collect plastic from the ocean, and had transitioned into regular operation of the system at sea to continue collecting data and experience, as steps were being taken to prepare for the next upgrade of the system. Since their inception, The Ocean Cleanup has been at the forefront of self-documenting their mission in great detail, and livestreaming an extraction would be the ultimate demonstration of transparency and community engagement. However, such an endeavor would come with significant challenges, both from the environment itself, the technology required and logistics, requiring a reliable partner.
Stream My Event, a long-time supporter of The Ocean Cleanup’s mission and a pioneer in delivering solutions for similarly complex operations, was selected for the task. It took almost two years to bring the livestream to fruition, taking us from a first technical proof of concept through technical innovation and culminating in a full-on 3-hour live production live from the Stream My Event Studio.
This case study goes into technical detail on the project. We also created a video that shows unique behind the scenes footage of the livestream and setup:
You can rewatch the entire 3-hour broadcast here:
About the operation
The system consists of two wings guiding plastic to a central ‘retention zone’ (the trash bag). Like a regular trash bag, this one too needs to be regularly emptied. Unlike your regular trash bag, this one (ideally) contains several tonnes of waste.
The whole system is towed by two Maersk vessels called Trader and Tender, which is also where the crew lives, the collected plastic is stored, and all the communication infrastructure is installed.
The procedure to empty the trash bag is what is called an extraction. In layman's terms:
- Hand off one of the wings to the other ship, so that one ship is free of the system and can move about.
- Hook the back of the system (where the retention zone is) to a giant winch.
- Hoist the retention zone on deck, and disconnect it from the rest of the system.
- Turn it upside down... And shake it.
Most of the plastic can be found in so-called ocean ‘gyres’, the biggest and most famous of which is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. It takes about 5 days of sailing to get there, so trips are 6 weeks long to spend as much time as possible cleaning oceans.
So, 6 weeks at sea... That would make sending any livestream team out there prohibitively expensive. Our first guideline for a livestream installation is clear, it must be fully unmanned.
Satellite
Knowing that any livestream of an extraction would have to be from a fully unmanned system, 5 days sailing from any shore, the design of a system can start.
The first major constraint would be connectivity. The only real option at the start of the project was a low-bandwidth, high-latency satellite connection to geostationary orbit. On this connection, maximum speeds of up to 2 mbps upload could be achieved, with a round-trip latency of two seconds and packet loss of about 30%. In stormy weather, packet loss up to 50% was not at all uncommon. These are, to put it lightly, suboptimal conditions for even a single HD video stream.
The first livestream system
It is with these constraints, that first plans for a livestream system were drawn up. The idea was to install a remotely controlled switcher on one of the Maersk vessels, that would select one out of several camera feeds to stream through to our forwarding endpoint. The selected feed would be put through a high-resilience SRT encoder, with extensive tweaking to streaming parameters to accommodate the nature of the connection.
And so it was, early 2022, that the first livestream system was installed on Maersk Tender. Functioning as a proof of concept, this system consisted of two cameras and a computer with a capture card. Remote desktop was used for switching and configuration, with a terrible full two seconds between any action and response. It was painfully slow, but it worked. And for the first time there was access to a HD stream of operations on deck.
Normalizing the stream
Support for SRT, especially with such extensively tweaked parameters, is not ubiquitous. So the stream had to be normalized and connection interruptions smoothed over, before any stream would be fit for broadcast after reaching the cloud.
For this purpose, Mistserver was selected as the stream forwarding and normalization toolkit. This tool, developed by OptiMist Video, has previously proven extremely reliable in difficult and highly custom livestream situations, such as during our work on the World Solar Challenge.
Instances in the cloud and on-ship were set up to convert the outgoing stream into a format suitable for the ‘unsafe’ connection, then once it has safely reached the cloud, convert it back to a normal format for the ‘safe’ internet.
Success!
After a lot of tweaking and tuning, the setup proved successful and was used for the first intercompany live stream of an extraction.
Changing constraints
A few months after the start of the project, a new technology was developing rapidly. As it became clear that Starlink would soon offer a new paradigm in maritime connectivity, with an order of magnitude more bandwidth, less delay and packet loss, the plan was changed.
In the new setup, 5 cameras from various perspectives would all be sent through the same SRT infrastructure. But this time, all the way back to our livestream control room in The Netherlands, where the program would be cut together into something fun to watch.
Fresh cables were installed throughout the vessel, the onboard switching computer was adopted into a different project, and the camera equipment was moved to be fully IP on a separate VLAN for safe and isolated remote administration.
The 100th extraction livestream
At last, the technology was not only proven, it was ready for a serious broadcast. And with the 100th extraction of waste from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch upcoming, a worthy subject was found. The milestone was embraced as a key communication moment for followers worldwide and a livestream production was prepared.
Of course, no maritime operation is ever simple. From a production standpoint, we had to be prepared for any eventuality. A lot of b-roll footage and playouts were prepared to fill time, and the run of show was purposefully kept flexible in case the operations at sea would be delayed. In the end the pulling on deck of the retention zone ended up taking a solid hour longer than expected, so all of the extra material was used. Luckily the audience had very little notice of this and were treated to a comprehensive three hour update and live view of the Pacific.
Transparency in a high-risk environment
The question of: “why go through all this trouble to livestream an operation like this?” is easily asked. And it’s a question we’ve had to answer in many previous similar projects we’ve done. Indeed there are a lot of reasons not to, from concerns of risk to the operation all the way to the potential of a strategic disadvantage. By the nature of the work, operations teams in high-risk environments have to be risk averse, and any activity not essential to the work is by default a risk factor.
And yet, over the last few years Stream My Event have been lucky to be involved in projects such as infrastructure, aviation, solar car racing, healthcare and rescue services. Without fail, these projects have found the payoff worth it. What is it that keeps them coming back to livestreaming?
We have found that ‘live’ has an unmatched ability to bring people together and to show the absolute unvarnished truth of an experience. There is no filter or polish; this is not a bug, it’s a feature. And yes sometimes it will be boring. But nothing short of being there will ever bring you closer to the experience. People respond to that, they appreciate it and come together over it. The inherent flaws of livestreaming from impossible environments are easily forgiven by an audience all too happy to just get a glimpse of what goes on behind the curtain. It’s much easier to root for something when you can actually see it taking place on a regular basis.
The Future
Recently, The Ocean Cleanup announced that it has developed a proven capability to extract plastic from the ocean, and is ready to start scaling up operations towards its mission of removing all plastic from the worlds oceans. This is a mission that Stream My Event supports and will continue to support.
Read more about the recent announcement:
https://theoceancleanup.com/updates/the-great-pacific-garbage-patch-can-be-cleaned-for-7-5-billion/
Donate now to support The Ocean Cleanup:
https://theoceancleanup.com/donate/