V-Nova supports World Health Organisation (WHO) with high-quality video collaboration between sites

The entire world from governments and multi-national organisations through to the general public all look to the World Health Organization (WHO) for authoritative guidance relating to global health issues. As a key component of the United Nations, the WHO’s mission is to initiate and support efforts to attain the highest level of public health for the world’s population.

But it can’t do it alone.

As implied in the “world” part of its title, WHO is a large organization, with offices around the globe, all linked to their headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, and UN headquarters in Geneva. Video production and delivery between these sites has steadily become more crucial to ensure that the organisation communicates effectively and as timely as possible

Those inter-site links have been placed under increased strain by the COVID-19 pandemic and the substantial increase in video production and communication that dealing with the crisis has brought about.

At V-Nova we have been providing our technology to help ensure that the WHO’s crucial video communication feeds were not only of the highest possible quality, but that their team could also deliver a higher volume of content over finite bandwidth availability.

Chris Black, Multimedia Producer at the World Health Organization said in an interview with the IABM recently when asked about the ease of set-up and impact it had, “I was really impressed at how it’s set up and then the options it gave us, and with just a little bit of support from Matt and his team and we were up and running, and then it ran non-stop at a really critical time for us.

One day we ran it, we started at 8AM in the morning, and we were broadcasting still at 3AM the next morning. So that was a really long day, and it really showed the reliability of this equipment. I mean there wasn’t a packet dropped in that time so really it’s rock solid and it really made a difference to our work.”

V-Nova technology is a cornerstone of vital international standards – MPEG-5 LCEVC and SMPTE VC-6. LCEVC improves the compression efficiency of any base video codec by up to 50% and any device supporting the underlying codec can be quickly upgraded in software to gain the benefits. VC-6 (which is being used by the WHO) delivers next-generation compression efficiency for live contribution, remote production and file-based workflows.

It is no surprise that the WHO relies on support from companies like ours to help produce and distribute its crucial content to the people who need it most, i.e., all of us. This has never been more important than it is right now, and we’re tremendously proud to be supporting the WHO in their Herculean effort.