How The Jasper Picture Company delivered a 16-hour charity telethon across five platforms with Castr
Sixteen continuous hours of live fundraising, sent to five platforms at once, with a backup feed standing by from the first minute to the last.
A Melbourne production company that works for causes
The Jasper Picture Company is a Melbourne-based production and livestreaming company that works with organisations creating positive social impact, and helps them tell their stories. Its own standard is plain: “We believe video should do more than look good. It should help good organisations reach more people and create real change.”
One of those organisations is the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, an independent Australian charity that provides food, housing, healthcare, legal support and advocacy for refugees and people seeking asylum. The Jasper Picture Company has produced the livestream for the ASRC’s annual World Refugee Day Telethon for two consecutive years, both times completely pro bono.
2026 marked the ASRC’s 25th anniversary, which made the telethon a bigger undertaking than usual. Sixteen continuous hours of live programming, with A$1.5 million to raise before the day was over.
Sixteen hours live, with no second take
The broadcast was set for 7am to 11pm on June 20, from the ASRC’s Home of Hope in Footscray, Melbourne. The livestream was the heart of the fundraising campaign: every interview, performance, guest speaker and donation milestone depended on it. If viewers could not watch, they could not hear the stories, connect with them, or be inspired to donate.
People would be donating in real time, all day, so the broadcast had to feel professional and trustworthy for as long as it ran.
A broadcast that long takes extensive planning, testing and redundancy. On the production side it meant multiple cameras, live switching, audio and graphics, all running through a constant turnover of guests. And it had to reach five platforms at once, so supporters could watch where they already were.
Reliability was the highest priority. The stream needed to stay online from the first minute until the last.
The priorities
- Sixteen unbroken hours of live programming
- One production distributed to five platforms: YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, X and LinkedIn
- Primary and backup feeds live throughout the event
- A backup feed ready to take over without the audience noticing
- Signal quality monitored across the broadcast
- Fast technical assistance during a live event
- A broadcast polished enough to ask for donations
Confidence that the distribution would hold
Rather than managing a separate stream for every destination, the team could focus on producing the event while Castr handled the distribution. As The Jasper Picture Company puts it: “Castr gave us confidence that we could reliably distribute one live production to multiple platforms simultaneously.”
A dependable platform takes technical complexity and risk out of a long-form live event: fewer things to set up beforehand, fewer that can go wrong once it starts. And if a question came up, The Jasper Picture Company had a direct line to Castr’s team during setup and on the day itself.
For an event where every donation counts, reliability is what the fundraising goal depends on.
The distribution and redundancy layer under a sixteen-hour broadcast
The Jasper Picture Company uses Castr as the distribution and redundancy layer behind its productions.
For the telethon, a primary stream and a separate backup stream ran in parallel from open to close. Castr took both feeds and pushed the live program out to five destinations from one workflow.
That let Jasper’s production team spend the day on the event itself, on cameras, audio, guests, performances, graphics, and show flow, while Castr handled distribution underneath it.
What Castr handled downstream of the production:
Live streaming built for long-duration broadcasts
Multistreaming to five destinations at once
Primary and backup ingest running in parallel
Australian-region ingest close to the venue
Stream health monitoring through the broadcast
Centralized destination management
RTMP and RTMPS destination support
Direct technical support on a dedicated channel
Making the backup feed interchangeable
A second feed is only redundancy if it can replace the first without the audience noticing, and that takes more than running two streams at once. If the backup differs from the primary in frame rate, resolution or encoding settings, the switch shows. It becomes the interruption it was there to prevent.
Castr matched both of Jasper’s contribution paths, checking stream health and settings on each, so either could carry the show at any point in the day.
Neither path was an emergency configuration sitting unused. Both stayed live for as long as the show ran. And because the redundancy sat at the source, one backup covered all five destinations.
Sending one production to five places at once
The ASRC’s supporters were already spread across YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, X and LinkedIn, so the telethon had to meet them where they were.
Feeding five platforms from the production itself would have meant five encoding workflows leaving the venue, each configured and monitored separately. Instead, Jasper sent one production to Castr and managed distribution from there.
The team watched all five destinations in one place, and if a platform needed attention mid-show, it could be handled in Castr without touching the production setup.
On a sixteen-hour broadcast, every variable taken out of the signal path is one less thing that can fail.
Support that answers during the broadcast, not after it
The Jasper Picture Company spent weeks getting ahead of the day: technical planning, equipment testing, run sheets, contingency plans. On the day its own team worked alongside volunteers, many of whom had never worked together before but quickly formed an effective production team.
Preparation that thorough answers most questions in advance, and Castr was part of it. Jasper had a dedicated Castr channel on WhatsApp, and across setup and earlier productions Castr worked through encoder and source settings with the team, validated the primary and backup paths, and helped with RTMPS destinations, adaptive bitrate and stream health checks. During the show the same channel was there for what cannot wait: audio, signal, destination connectivity.
Sixteen hours live, and A$1.59 million raised
The telethon ran the full sixteen hours with both feeds live from start to finish, and the program reached all five platforms without a drop.
Support for a fundraising campaign that raised A$1,593,789
One continuous broadcast, 7am to 11pm
Keep primary and backup feeds live all day
Thousands of supporters engaged across the day
Simultaneous delivery to YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, X and LinkedIn
A second consecutive year produced pro bono for the ASRC
Castr gave us confidence that we could reliably distribute one live production to multiple platforms simultaneously. Rather than managing a separate stream for every destination, we could stay focused on producing the event and leave that side of it to Castr. On a sixteen-hour broadcast, a dependable platform takes out a lot of the complexity and risk.
We also had a direct channel to Castr’s team. Most of our questions were sorted before the day started, and anything that came up while we were live we could ask about and have an answer in minutes.
The same setup is waiting for the next event
The Jasper Picture Company continues to run livestreaming for conferences, fundraisers, panels, corporate events, and not-for-profit organizations. The telethon was the largest test of the setup so far rather than a one-off built for it.
With distribution, backup ingest, and live troubleshooting already in place, the company can take on longer and more demanding productions without assembling new infrastructure each time. Two years in, the ASRC telethon has become an annual fixture the setup is already proven against.
More customer stories
How DanceBUG Streams Hundreds of Dance Competitions with Castr
Live Event Streaming, HLS Delivery, Developer API Integration
Read the story →
How Dubai World Trade Centre Runs Multi-Session Events with Castr
Multi-Session Event Streaming, Hybrid Events, Conference Streaming
Read the story →
How The Pits TV Powers Its Motorsport OTT Platform with Castr
OTT Platform, Live Sports Streaming, Premium Video Delivery
Read the story →Let’s talk through your live video setup
Bring us your channels, destinations, and delivery requirements. We’ll help you shape a workflow that stays organized as they change.
Evaluating a larger rollout? See how enterprise video streaming gets scoped.
