Dicentis delivers at EU-Western Balkans summit
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The in-person summit was held in October 2021 in Brdo pri Kranju. The leaders of the EU member states met in person with the six Western Balkans partners. Slovenia took over presidency of the Council of the European Union in July 2021 and hosted this get-together, marking the highlight of their presidency. Local AV solutions company and Bosch partner Robotrade, a member of the Congress Rental Network (CRN), was commissioned with the technical execution of the two-day summit.
Though many conferences are held remotely as hybrid events these days, remote participation by heads of state was not appropriate in this case, due to the international importance of the meeting. That’s why Robert Omovšek, CEO of Robotrade, and his team had to work out a solution that both complied with strict COVID-19 regulations and catered to the infrastructure of the location, the Brdo Conference Centre. To utilise wireless conferencing equipment was no option as signal jammers were used inside the conferencing room during the event.
The solution was a Dicentis conferencing system from Bosch, consisting of Dicentis multimedia devices, discussion devices and a system server. Important functions for the summit – such as video-title generation and speaker times – could be all realised with EasyConf, the partner software from MVI AudioVisual which is seamlessly integrated into the Dicentis software.
Another challenge of the summit was to host the large number of interpreters that were needed in COVID-safe booths. Having limited options to create distributed interpreter hubs around the venue, the officials decided to establish a connection to 85 remote interpreters in Brussels for simultaneous interpretation of 28 languages, 18 interpreters served as backup on site. Teaming up with Telekom Slovenije, whose team established a highspeed dark fiber network connection to the EU headquarters in Brussels, Robotrade was able to provide a highly reliable and secure meeting infrastructure for the summit.
“We needed a bullet-proof integrated solution with no bottlenecks, to ensure the show kept going,” says Omovšek. “Dicentis is a fully IP-based system that works flawlessly. The software is easy to configure and allowed us to react quickly in case of a broken connection to Brussels. After on-site simulations prior to the event, our backup plan to switch from remote to local interpretation resources supporting six key languages could have been realized in less than one minute, thanks to Dicentis.”
Two HD video streams of the summit were broadcast using SRT protocol over a secure connection to Brussels. One stream with embedded audio showed the speakers who had the floor for lip-sync interpretation, the other provided a split view of the conference room. All audio signals of the interpretation languages from Brussels were locally converted into 28 Dante streams and inserted into Dicentis.
“The Dicentis IP architecture also allowed us to seamlessly integrate third-party products like Avonic cams for camera tracking and MVI’s software enabling multiple views to constantly show the talking head without noticing any camera movements,” adds Omovšek. “The entire event went very smoothly, and the officials sent us a thank-you letter expressing their appreciation. Our trust in Bosch conferencing equipment once again proved to be the right choice.”
