Barix helps stream the Pope at the World Meeting of Families

Audio over IP specialist Barix AG recently provided a streaming solution for the VII World Meeting of Families at the Bresso Airport near Milan, Italy.

Barix wirelessly delivered religious services in real-time to more than 300 loudspeakers positioned throughout the grounds.

The Catholic Church organises the World Meeting of Families every three years, with this year’s five-day event held from May 30th-June 3rd and featured two main services led by Pope Benedict XVI. An estimated one million people were on hand at Bresso Airport to witness the services, which were broadcast on television worldwide.

MMS Srl, an Italian audio/visual company, provided the audio distribution installation and selected Barix IP audio products for their reliability and cost-efficiency. Four Barix Exstreamer 500 devices encoded the audio for streaming over an Ubiquiti Nanostation 5 AirMax 5.4 Ghz network, feeding four transmission towers. The Exstreamer 500 devices provided the very low latency required to deliver the audio streams in real-time.

MMS Srl also connected 22 Barix Exstreamer 100 to Ubiquiti Nanostation receivers for reliable audio decoding at the loudspeaker points. The loudspeakers were placed amongst 24 towers to cover numerous audio paths, with the most distant end points located approximately three-quarters of a mile from the stage.

Domenico Carnuccio, sound engineer for MMS Srl, said: “It was imperative that the audio was carried wirelessly and the other products tests did not come close to the consistency of the Barix products. They allowed us to deploy a strong audio network in a short amount of time and at a reasonable price.”

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