What do you do when you need to do a live broadcast from celebrity chef Molly Yeh’s home kitchen from her farmhouse on the Minnesota/North Dakota border? You turn to Vista Studio’s technical team to come up with innovative, cost-effective solutions. 

Molly Yeh is a famous Food Network star who gave up the hustle of New York City to live on a farm on the Minnesota/North Dakota border. The story of her transition is told on her Food Network show, Girl Meets Farm. Molly’s Food Network contract made her a part of the new interactive Food Network Kitchen live cooking subscription service that is shot in New York and on Stage 2 at Vista Studios in Los Angeles. Molly’s upper-midwestern location made it difficult for her to be in New York or LA to shoot her segments. So, Vista Studios recommended a simplistic bonded cellular solution they’ve used on many live productions previously. 

Bonded cellular is a modern technology that enables field broadcasters to send full-resolution video back to a production studio as another video source in a live broadcast. The remote backpacks leverage multiple 4G cellular modems with several different mobile carriers, for redundancy and signal strength, to send the video transmission back to the production studio. 

This solution has a tiny footprint and is mobilized very quickly. It also eliminates the need to spend a fortune on production vehicles, satellite uplinks, shipping, and travel expenses. When compared to a satellite uplink, which notoriously has a long delay time for signal propagation, the bonded cellular solution has a delay time of only 1 second. 

Once back in the production control room at Vista, existing routing, switching, graphics, and replay systems were used to create a full production, just as if they were handled in a production truck at the venue but at a fraction of the cost.

The Vista Studios bonded cellular solution enabled Food Network Kitchen to go live from Molly Yeh’s farmhouse kitchen, regardless of the infrastructure that was available on location. Better yet, the crew on site didn’t have miles of cables to run and were entirely wireless while capturing their content.