On April 20th 2010 the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig collapsed leaving a gushing well at the sea floor.

Each night on the news a crystal clear video was shown of the oil escaping from the sea bed.

Those in the subsea industry and media were able to watch this video live via a web link.

So how do these pictures get transported from so far away and in such extreme conditions so quickly?

Cameras are attached to an ROV (Remotely Operated Vehicle) and this unmanned submarine is lowered from the back deck of a ship.

The cables that allow the ROV to be controlled also include a fibre optic cable that feeds the images back up to the surface.

Once on the ship, a media streaming service is used to publish these videos to a website that can be viewed using a media player on a computer.

To get the videos off the ship and to the internet, a satellite internet connection called Vsat is used.

In some cases users of these systems can actually control these cameras but thankfully not the ROV.

Darlington-based CTC Marine Projects are specialists in subsea construction, cable laying and trenching, and operate a fleet of ships and heavy-duty assets that can trench and plough the seabed.

When I first started looking after IT Systems on ships, satellite communications were poor and it would take hours to download the contents of a floppy disk.

But now we can operate with speeds upwards of two megabytes per second (2mbps), which means that we are able to fix most problems on ship systems from the comfort of a Teesside office.

Jonathan Wheatley is managing director of MC Ware Group in Stokesley. Follow Jonathan on twitter at @jonoware.