Japanese production company NTV Technical Resources (NiTRo) recently combined its broadcasting expertise with its television production, postproduction, and CGI chops to launch M-CUBE in 2022. Located in NiTRo’s Tokyo-based facility, the virtual production studio is now home to esports productions for some of Japan's largest gaming leagues. To support encoding and routing needs across a growing range of productions, NiTRo’s team integrated AJA HELO Plus H.264 recorders/streamers and AJA KUMO 6464 3G-SDI routers into its M-CUBE pipeline.
To get M-CUBE off the ground, NiTRo initially leveraged a former online editing room, which it renovated and retrofitted using existing equipment. Since its opening, the studio has been tapped for several esports league productions, as well as for the streaming of international motorsports events, small-scale events, and corporate online seminars. Looking to enhance its facility and increase the number of users it could support, it began plans for an update. Its main goal with the upgrade was to establish an environment optimized for esports streaming that would be accessible to even the most novice user. Signal stability and the capacity to display content from remote participants (including on-screen graphics) in real-time, all while supporting streaming to multiple content delivery networks (CDNs), were also considerations.
