Diving Plongeon Canada (DPC), a not-for-profit organisation promoting growth and awareness of the sport across Canada, has been organising virtual dive meets, powered by Dejero EnGo mobile transmitters and WayPoint receivers, to reduce the impact of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic on the sport.

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Dejero: ISS replicated the live competition atmosphere for divers by streaming live video poolside using Dejero technology

The live video solution, provided by local systems integrator Integrated Sports Systems (ISS), enables athletes to compete from different locations simultaneously, while judges score dives from their homes in real-time.

ISS devised u-Judge, a solution built around Dejero’s EnGo mobile transmitters and WayPoint receiver, that delivers the low latency required to make these competitions as realistic as possible for the athletes.

The technology was in use during the Friendly Nations Challenge, a transcontinental competition between the top divers of Great Britain and Canada that took place on 1-2 April. The event saw each tea, competing in their own pools on either side of the Atlantic Ocean. It was the first international live meet for the Canadian team since the country enforced its Covid-19 lockdown measures in early 2020.

“During the Covid-19 downtime, Integrated Sports researched creative ways to build a virtual competition that would allow athletes to not only dive in real-time, but to replicate the actual feeling of a live competition against others with immediate scores from judges,” said Jeff Feeney, director of events and communications at DPC.

“Low latency is crucial to the sport of diving and Dejero was the obvious technology provider to make live viewing and judging possible. The Dejero workflow provides the simplicity of receiving high-quality live video, producing a stream and switching right then and there. This technology is going to change the way we handle national training and competitions going forward, saving us time and travel costs, even beyond Covid-19.”

In Montreal, DPC displayed the live production feeds from the EnGo mobile transmitters at each venue onto a large poolside video wall to deeper immerse the athletes into the action, allowing the Canadian team to watch their competitors perform in real-time.

“With this project, Integrated Sport Systems is really living up to its name, by integrating all the technology pieces to this puzzle to bring DPC’s ambitions to life,” said Michael Morris of Integrated Sports. “There is typically a 20-second delay during the regular streaming of live events, which ruins the experience of diving. Judges like to score a dive every minute, which is why we turned to Dejero to solve this latency problem by showing judges live video of dives via our u-Judge platform, with less than a second delay. Currently, we can stream from up to four different pools simultaneously, but with the help of Dejero we have our eyes set on more feeds, with the potential to virtualise future competitions including more countries and more competitors, starting as early as May.”