Roses 2022

Error creating thumbnail: File missing

Roses 2022 Logo

Roses 2022 was the first fully in-person Roses in three years, after the cancellation of Roses 2020 and whatever Roses Unlocked was. It was also the first Lancaster Roses for almost everyone involved. Despite that, it was widely remarked as the most successful Roses in recent memory.

Project Group

Error creating thumbnail: File missing

Roses 2022 Team on the Friday

The YSTV Roses 2022 Project Group consisted of the following:

Roses Lead: Joe Radford
Production Lead: Alize Akturk
Tech Lead: Rhys Milling
Infrastructure Lead: Liam Burnand
Graphics Leads: Ben Allen and Marks Polakovs
Crewing and Training Leads: Meg Maguire and Liv Woodward
Sport Lead: Matt Ward-Perkins
Studio Lead: Max Roach
VT Lead: Beth Marsch
Marketing Lead: Charlotte Pye

Preparations

Roses planning began even before Christmas, but kicked into full steam around February with a scouting trip to Lancaster.

Infrastructure

What could go wrong? Quite a bit, actually.

Three days before we were due to set off for Lancaster, ystvstrm7 (our primary streaming server for around 20 years, due to be decommissioned for about 15 of them) finally gave up the ghost. Not ideal. By some incredible stroke of luck, Marks had spent just the previous evening putting the finishing touches on an Ansible playbook to automate spinning up a new streaming relay server. However, we would still need something to run it against. Luckily, Rhys had spent some time throughout the year developing contacts with IT Services and could acquire a number of virtual machines to use for this (and in fact had already set up ystvstrm8 as a supposed backup to strm7), so ystvstrm0 was provisioned and set up as a streaming server.

So far so good, however while running some final tests the team discovered a minor pickle: Speed, the primary transcoding server, could barely handle transcoding one stream. And we needed it to do six concurrently. Oh dear. A number of backup plans were assembled:

• Installing a newly acquired GPU in Speed
• Requesting yet more virtual machines from ITS

The selected plan was "all of them, at the same time", so Rhys requested yet more VMs (eventually leading to YSTV having over 50 cores worth of York CPUs dedicated to them), Dan Wade installed the GPU, and Ben Allen wrote up some FFMPEG fuckary to use it for transcoding. In the end, this one GPU could handle all six concurrent streams without breaking a sweat, and the VMs weren't actually used (though having them there as a safety net was definitely useful). Great! Surely all our woes were gone? Wait, there's another paragraph in this section?

Oh yes there is. Marks, the first YSTV member on-site in Lancaster, discovered upon arrival that while the streaming VMs were fully provisioned and ready to go, IT Services hadn't yet unblocked port 1935, which was necessary for any streaming traffic to make it to them. This meant that all of this work was effectively moot, as we couldn't actually get any video out of Lancaster. Even less ideal.

To resolve this, Ben hatched a dastardly plan: LA1:TV had a Wowza streaming server on site which was malfunctioning, but would have the necessary ports unblocked, so we could stream to it from Lancaster and then pull in the streams from it into York's network, at which point we can do whatever we please. Some mildly panicked Slack messages and a Zoom call with a LA1 alumnus later (at 11:30 in the evening, as everyone else was going into town), Ben had the admin credentials for this server, so alongside Marks and later Liam Burnand he holed himself up in the studios of Bailrigg FM (the only place we would have access that late at night) and reworked our entire streaming architecture. Marks and Liam left Bailrigg just before 5am and got some rest (or at least Marks did, while Liam decided to not sleep that night and passed out on the floor later that afternoon). Marks woke up at around 7am to messages from Ben, who had just left Bailrigg.

Error creating thumbnail: File missing

Ben's (hastily drawn at 5am) diagram of the infrastructure

Roses Weekend

Error creating thumbnail: File missing

The van parked perfectly overnight

Friday

Broadcast	Time	Producer	Crew
Studio Show	09:00	Max Roach	TODO
Handball - Women's 1sts	09:00	Sophie Nimmo	TODO
Handball - Men's 1sts	10:45	Sofia Macip Hefferan	TODO
Ultimate - Mixed Outdoor	12:30	LA1:TV	TODO
Lacrosse - Men's 1sts	F13:00	Eve Harding	TODO
American Football	14:15	LA1:TV	TODO
Hockey - Women's 1sts	14:15	Sophie Bolwell-Davies	TODO
Hockey - Men's 1sts	15:10	Liv Woodward	TODO
Opening Ceremony	18:00	Kira Moore	TODO
Netball - Women's 1sts	19:00	Kira Moore	TODO

Outcome

Almost everyone we spoke to agreed that 2022 was the best YSTV Roses production in recent memory, and a major upgrade from whatever 2021 was.

YSTV's work on Roses 2022 won them the awards for Best Coverage at the 2022 YUMAs and Silver for Best Event Coverage at NaSTA 2023.