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PERTH, Western Australia — At Nova Entertainment, we rely heavily on the Tieline ViA for portable outside broadcast setups for our Perth-based Nova 93.7 breakfast show. We have around 600,000 listeners and want to take the show on the road, ensuring listeners at home or in the car don’t miss out on the live and local experience. Depending on the event, the local audience at a venue may range from 50 to 1,000 or more!
The ViA is more portable than a rack-mounted codec with a larger console, and, as a lightweight package, makes travel simple. We have used it for shows in Los Angeles and, recently, on a trip to Bali, Indonesia, to broadcast our breakfast show on the Friday morning before the Australian Football League Grand Final. Our setup is typically simple: four portable wireless microphone receivers and one portable IEM transmitter. If we require a larger setup, we bring more equipment. For transmissions, we combine LTE with another IP transport — Wi-Fi via a portable router or, ideally, an Ethernet connection at the venue. Starlink is an option we are using more via Wi-Fi or Ethernet.
Nationwide, the Nova Entertainment Network has about eight Tieline ViAs, 60 Merlins, four Genies, and several Gateway 4s and Bridge-ITs that reliably deliver all our transmissions. For breakfast remotes, we connect our ViA to one of three Tieline Merlins back at the studio, and every OB connects with Tieline’s SmartStream Plus redundant streaming technology, transmitted locally by Telstra or Optus cellular networks, National Broadband Network LAN connections, or Starlink. At the station, we have two different ISP links for diversity. In Bali, we used the hotel’s Ethernet internet and a Wi-Fi hotspot connected to a local telco.
A tech go-to bag
The ViA’s reliability, audio quality, latency and overall performance are excellent. It is only limited by the networks it is connected to. We have been in some locations where teenagers wouldn’t stay for longer than five minutes due to poor connectivity. Still, the ViA delivered with SmartStream Plus getting us over the line, albeit with a reduced bitrate on occasion.
All our OBs require a return mix-minus, and we can include everything on the program bus if required. We predominantly encode using Music Plus stereo at 64 kbps, since we only send mono voice back to the studio. However, we do use a stereo return to feed PA and talkback to the remote site. We love the built-in input EQ and dynamics features, like compression, which we use regularly. It reduces the outboard gear, and the whole kit can fit in a small Pelican air case.
The built-in matrix editor is essential to how we operate with headphone and PA mixes. We also use the Tieline Cloud Codec Controller regularly, as the kits are often out with just the talent and no technician. This is very handy to tweak audio levels or IP routing. Sometimes we use an external relay activation box connected to the control port I/O, and a codec rule activates an audio matrix switch to route mics to the PA locally during an OB when required.
The internal battery acts like a UPS when we are connected to an unreliable on-site power source. This was the case in Bali, where we briefly lost power during the show, but the transmission remained unaffected. It has also been essential for quite a few OBs, where we have walked for an entire three-hour show and flipped between cars and venues while on the move.
In summary, the codec is very well received by all staff, and the ViA kit is our go-to bag; I can instruct someone to grab it and run, then sort out the config remotely if required. It is extremely versatile and high-performing. The kit’s nimbleness allows us to take it anywhere. Whether following the state premier on a walk through a facility, or walking from a local suburb into Perth city for a telethon fundraiser, it gets the team closer to our audience.
The author has been the technical manager at Nova Entertainment in Perth for 18 years.
This story originally appeared in the March/April 2026 edition of RedTech Magazine. You can read or download it for free here.
You can access all past RedTech publications, for free, here.
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