If you’ve watched FOX 4 and seen a sweeping view of Possum Kingdom Lake, there’s a good chance you were looking at a camera we built for Lush Resort. It’s live right now at platinumcom.stream, and it’s featured on the Lush Resort website too. Getting it on the air took more than mounting a camera on a roof, and it all started with a TV problem.
It started with DIRECTV
We first came to Lush Resort to take over their DIRECTV account. The previous dealer had done a poor job, and the resort was on the verge of cancelling. We cleaned up the system, got the TVs working the way they should, and earned their trust in the process.
That’s how a lot of our best relationships start. Once a customer sees that we show up, fix things properly and answer the phone, the conversation naturally turns to everything else on the property.
From TV to the whole property
At Lush, that meant upgrading the resort’s network and its camera system. The owners also had a bigger idea in mind.
FOX 4 covers the Possum Kingdom area, but it didn’t have a camera on the lake. The owners had been talking with the news team and had the green light: if they could get a live feed working, FOX 4 would use it. They just needed someone who could make it happen.
Step one: a camera worth putting on TV
A typical weather camera wasn’t going to cut it for television. We installed a UniFi G4 PTZ, a pan-tilt-zoom camera with a sharp image and a commanding view over the water, the pool and the boat docks.
Step two: waiting for fiber
A great camera is only as good as the connection behind it. Lush was still on DSL, which doesn’t have anywhere near the upload bandwidth a live HD stream needs. So we waited for fiber to reach the property. Once it was installed, we finally had the bandwidth to send a reliable, high-quality stream off site.
Step three: getting the feed into a newsroom
This was the hardest part. Security cameras like the G4 PTZ put out an RTSP stream, which is great for recording but not for broadcast. The station’s system couldn’t ingest the RTSP feed directly. Without regular keyframes (the full frames a video player needs to start playback), the feed took forever to load, if it loaded at all.
The fix was the open-source Restreamer project. We pull the camera feed in locally and hand it to Restreamer, which turns it into an HLS stream: the same format streaming services use, with clean keyframes and fast start-up. That stream is delivered through Cloudflare to FOX 4 and to platinumcom.stream.
The result is a feed that loads quickly and looks sharp on air. We’ll admit it: there’s nothing quite like turning on the morning news and seeing it.
What’s happened since
The camera was just the beginning. Since then we’ve upgraded the audio at Lush and rebuilt nearly everything on site. The owners are thrilled with the results, and they’ve been recommending us all around the lake, including to the friends and home buyers they work with through the Lush Realty Team and Lush property management.
Have a project like this?
Whether it’s a live camera, a network that can handle it, or the TV and audio system on top, this is the kind of work we love: one local team for the whole picture.
Call (817) 551-1000 or request a quote online.
