Get in touch: kontakt@msadura.pl

Stage Lights and Subnets: Networking the Theatrical Music Awards

The calm before the storm. The empty theater auditorium viewed from the stage, just hours before the live broadcast crew arrived to set up their streaming gear.

Let’s take a little trip down memory lane today. I was recently looking through some old project files and found these photos from a fantastic gig: prepping the IT infrastructure for the Theatrical Music Awards at a prominent theater in Warsaw.

When IT meets live entertainment, the stakes are always high. Our primary mission for this event was twofold: completely secure and optimize the main internet uplink to prevent any stream drops, and deploy a robust, temporary LAN directly inside the auditorium for the broadcasting crew’s specialized equipment. There is a unique kind of adrenaline that comes with ensuring zero packet loss during a live, multi-camera stream. 

 

Full view of the theater’s main server rack. We integrated our temporary broadcast routing equipment alongside the existing infrastructure, servers, and UPS units.
Close-up of the distribution layer. We patched in temporary lines to physically and logically isolate the broadcasting crew’s LAN from the theater’s internal traffic.
A side-angle look at the rack’s interior. You can see the heavy routing of orange network cables supplying hardwired connectivity to different zones of the building.