So there I was, minding my own business, when Eric (our CMO who possesses that rare combination of marketing acumen and tolerance for my tangential musings) suggested that instead of just raving to him about our latest Norsk Studio demos, I share them with the world. So here we go, Eric. You asked for it. (Names have been redacted to protect the innocent – and the guilty.)
Demo #1: Graphic Overlays Without the Nervous Breakdown
Our first client, a major sports analytics provider, approached us with what they described as a significant technical challenge. (Actually, their words were far more colorful.) Their clients—primarily sports broadcasters and commentators who can recite obscure statistics from the 1986 season but find the concept of HDMI somewhat complex—needed to overlay real-time analytics and performance data on their streams.
The traditional approach involved teaching these presenters to use Open Broadcaster Software (OBS, a powerful piece of software that requires considerable technical knowledge). Presenters would manually position graphics feeds, then hope nothing would break during the live stream while they’re explaining why that last play was statistically insignificant yet emotionally important.
It’s a bit like trying to perform a technical task while simultaneously providing commentary—on live television, with viewers ready to comment on any mistakes.
Our solution using Norsk Studio? A simple syndication tool where presenters send their camera feed directly to our service, and we handle the graphic overlays through an API. The real advantage is the ability to split the video stream multiple times with different graphic overlays on each split—something that would traditionally require duplicating the entire setup for each variation.
“But that would allow us to create team-specific graphics without forcing our commentators to clone themselves,” they said, gazing at our demo with the shock usually reserved for the discovery of free parking in central London.
This isn’t just convenient; it’s the difference between our client scaling their business or being limited by technical complexity. Their CTO later shared that they had previously abandoned regional customization precisely because the technical complexity made scaling impractical.
Demo #2: Managing Multi-Camera Production
Next came a culinary content network with a request for something I hadn’t encountered before, which says something for someone who’s spent decades in the broadcasting industry.
The scenario: four cameras filming different chefs in a cooking competition, with three independent mixes needed simultaneously—two for local audience displays and one for YouTube. Their previous attempt at this setup had resulted in what they described as “a technical meltdown that made Gordon Ramsay’s kitchen outbursts look like guided meditation.”
Traditionally, this workflow would require:
- Some clever processing to make sources accessible by multiple mixers
- Three separate workstations with individual mixers
- A significant investment in equipment
- An engineer with the patience of a saint and the problem-solving skills of Sherlock Holmes
- Several days of coding in FFMPEG (or as I call it, “typing arcane incantations while praying”)
Their technical director, a veteran of live broadcasts, looked concerned describing their previous attempts to establish this workflow using traditional methods.
With Norsk Studio, we built a working prototype in approximately 12 minutes. That’s not a typo. Twelve. Minutes.
The silence that followed our demonstration spoke volumes.
I’ve been in broadcasting long enough to remember when achieving this would have required distribution amplifiers, video patch bays, multiple mixers, extensive cabling, and considerable technical expertise. Their production team later mentioned they had been planning to hire an additional full-time engineer just to manage this particular show format.
Demo #3: The Great Audio Channel Shuffle
One of our financial news network clients approached us with a particularly challenging audio routing situation. They regularly receive feeds from global financial centers with audio channels arranged in inconsistent configurations.
Our developer Rob Ashton demonstrated our forthcoming release (coming to NAB) that solves a persistent broadcaster’s challenge: PID (packet identifier) remapping and stream convergence—something that has traditionally been highly specialized, with some businesses focusing almost entirely on this single function.
If you’ve never experienced receiving a live feed with Japanese market analysis on the English channel during an important financial broadcast, consider yourself fortunate. Their director of operations described a particularly challenging incident involving mismatched language feeds during market volatility that nearly resulted in traders making decisions based on commentary they couldn’t understand—a situation that created significant potential for confusion.
Our new feature allows not just audio channel remapping, but complete PID reshuffling and stream convergence – taking several independent audio and video streams, routing and organizing them as required, and seamlessly merging them into a single SRT stream.
Uses for this include maintaining perfect sync between facilities or simply allowing a video feed to be accompanied by multiple commentaries for different audiences. It is particularly valuable for outside broadcasts, while still allowing the various streams to be repurposed as needed downstream.
Traditionally, this required equipment so expensive it needed its own line item in the annual budget and was about as user-friendly as filing taxes in a language you don’t speak. The network’s engineering team, who had previously dedicated entire departments to the problem of stream management, exchanged glances that silently communicated they expected to have a vastly reduced blood pressure measurement at their next physical.
The Revolution Will Be Televised (via Norsk)
What continues to make me proud is how Norsk bridges two worlds: the structured approach of traditional broadcast workflows and the flexibility of modern service-oriented architecture. Watching these workflows come together in minutes rather than days represents a significant advancement in our industry.
Norsk Studio brings high-level workflow design capabilities together with economic scalability that represents a major step forward from when I started in this industry. And remember—all those demonstrations were built from scratch in under half an hour. We can often build a working prototype of a customer’s desired workflow during our first call with them, which is either impressive or surprising, depending on your perspective.
With the underlying Norsk Engine and its SDK offering comprehensive workflow capabilities, and Norsk Studio’s unique drag-and-drop interface (as seen in the accompanying images), I find myself in the fortunate position of doing work I’m passionate about. The challenge we face isn’t technical—it’s perceptual. People remember Norsk as “that thing that fixed our specific problem” or “the replacement for Vendor X,” but that misses the broader potential. Norsk isn’t here to simply compete with legacy vendors; it’s meant to be a new approach for video developers to build live video workflows, whether they’re developing SaaS infrastructure, specific functions, or their next innovative product.
After three decades building some of the world’s largest live streaming workflows (particularly in sports and financial services), Norsk as a product represents the culmination of our collective experience into a toolkit that makes video workflow creation more accessible.
So the next time you encounter a complex video workflow challenge, remember: you could use traditional methods with all their complexity, or you could use Norsk and save yourself considerable time and effort.
Think of Norsk as infrastructure-as-code for live video, but more intuitive. Instead of integrating multiple vendors and hoping for compatibility, you just tell Norsk what you want to achieve. Clean REST APIs for simplicity, deep technical control when you need it. Use what you need, build what you want…. Make Live Easy.
Visit Norsk at booth W2873 at NAB, or set up a demo.
