How Dubai World Trade Centre runs multi-room conference livestreams with Castr
From single-stage keynotes to international conferences like ICOM Dubai 2025, Dubai World Trade Centre uses Castr to run parallel session streams without rebuilding its video setup for every event.
The Middle East’s largest convention and exhibition venue
Dubai World Trade Centre (DWTC) is the biggest convention venue in the Middle East. It brings in millions of visitors every year for major trade shows, summits, and exhibitions.
Its in-house agency, DXB LIVE, handles everything from conference planning to live technical production. For hybrid events, the team is responsible for two audiences at once (the people sitting in the halls and the attendees watching online), so their streaming setup has to fit right into their on-site production workflow.
One conference, dozens of rooms going live at the same time
At DWTC’s scale, a major conference is rarely a single broadcast. One event can fill multiple halls with keynotes, breakout workshops, and committee panels all running on the same schedule.
Streaming a single stage is straightforward. The real pressure comes when a production crew has to capture, encode, and deliver parallel feeds from across the venue at the same time. If every room is set up as a separate streaming job, technicians end up jumping between browser tabs, encoders, and player links just to keep an eye on the schedule.
As hybrid conferences became standard on the calendar, DWTC needed a way to run every room on its own stream without rebuilding the workflow for every show.
The priorities
- Stream multiple conference sessions in parallel
- Support hybrid and remote audience workflows
- Keep playback stable with adaptive bitrate
- Manage each event’s streams from one dashboard
- Ingest and produce locally in Dubai
- Fit different event formats and room layouts
Built for whole event schedules, not just single streams
In 2024, DWTC moved its event streaming to Castr. Rather than building a new video setup for every event, the team wanted a single platform they could configure for both standalone sessions and full multi-room conferences.
Three things made Castr the right fit for the venue:
Repeatable multi-room setup: The team can pre-build dedicated channels for each hall or track ahead of the event and watch every live feed from one screen.
Regional ingest in Dubai: With production crews working on-site at the venue, sending live feeds to a local Dubai ingest server keeps the signal path short and stable.
Embeddable, access-controlled players: Every channel outputs an HLS link with built-in security, so event organizers can drop streams straight into their own conference portals or hybrid event apps.
How DWTC runs multi-session events on Castr
Today, DWTC uses Castr to handle the entire live video path from the venue floor to remote attendees.
Here is how the workflow runs on an event day:
A dedicated channel for every room and track
Large events are built around parallel programming. Instead of one continuous broadcast, sessions run simultaneously across halls, meeting rooms, and breakout spaces. In Castr, DWTC sets up a separate livestream channel for each room or track ahead of the event, complete with its own encoder feed, player link, and monitoring view.
That was the setup behind ICOM Dubai 2025, a global museums and heritage conference hosted at DWTC with International Committee sessions running in parallel. Instead of managing each committee room as a separate project, the team ran the entire schedule from one Castr account.
Reliable playback for remote attendees
For hybrid events, online viewers need the same reliability as people in the hall, especially when international attendees are tuning in on different network speeds.
Castr handles that on every session channel:
Adaptive bitrate playback: Video quality adjusts automatically to each viewer’s device and connection, so international attendees get a smooth stream regardless of their local network.
Protected HLS links: Each session generates an HLS playback link that organizers can embed into any website or event platform, with HLS protection enabled to keep private or ticketed sessions restricted to registered attendees.
Local ingest in Dubai for on-site production
Because production happens on the ground at DWTC, signal routing matters. On-site encoders send live feeds straight to Castr’s Dubai-region ingest servers, keeping the local signal path short before Castr distributes the stream to viewers around the world.
Once the sessions go live, the production team monitors every active room from a single dashboard. If a schedule shifts or a feed needs attention in one room, an operator can step in and adjust that channel without disturbing the rest of the event.
One repeatable workflow for every event day
Since moving to Castr, multi-session conferences and single-room productions start from the same prepared setup instead of a fresh build each time.
Across an event day, the team can:
Manage multiple event streams from one platform
Run parallel conference sessions side by side
Deliver adaptive bitrate playback to remote viewers
Prepare dedicated streams for specific rooms and tracks
Use Dubai-region workflows for local production
Support hybrid participation at professional conferences
Take complexity out of live event days
The venue changes shape. The setup doesn’t.
As hybrid conferences and international summits continue to grow across Dubai’s calendar, venues have to support bigger remote audiences without adding complexity in the control room.
With Castr built into its streaming workflow, DWTC is ready for whatever format comes through the doors next. From single-stage keynotes to multi-room congresses, the team configures an existing platform rather than rebuilding from scratch, turning the next event on the calendar into a scheduling question instead of an engineering one.
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