SVG Europe, SportTech Journal 2020 by The Magazine Production Company

ADVANCING THE CREATION, PRODUCTION & DISTRIBUTION OF SPORTS CONTENT

AUTUMN 2020

PUBLICATION

Dispersed remote production behind-closed-doors ‘new normal’: How coronavirus completely changed the sports TV landscape Physical events: FutureSPORT Chelsea FC • Feds Summit Lausanne • SVGE Women BT Sport Virtual events: Sports OTT Forum • SVGE Awards • Football Summit • MotorSport Show PLUS: SVG Europe Sponsor Update for 2020

8-11 SEPTEMBER 2020

EMPOWERING CONTENT EVERYWHERE Featuring: DAILY NEWS: All of the latest news, product launches and annoucements from the IBC Daily team EXHIBITOR SHOWCASE: A one-stop-shop to explore the latest industry innovations PROGRAMMES: Free-to-access programmes packed with inspiring future-facing content

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

Take your sporting event to the next level

Whatever kind of sport you love, it’s better in Dolby and you won’t want to experience it any other way. ht tps://professional.dolby.com/

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeuropeupdate

Contents

CONTENTS IN THIS ISSUE

06 From the Chairman

38 Live from BT Sport: SVGE Women

08 Opening Comment

42 Live from Lausanne: Federation Summit

What a turbulent year it has been so far! Each of us imagined it differently 2020: The year that necessity really was mother of invention

12 Live from Japan: Rugby World Cup

Host broadcaster IGBS raises level of production and content to new heights

18 Ferrari Challenge 2019

Live from Mugello: Broadcast production for 2019 Ferrari Challenge Finali Mondiali

BBC’s Barbara Slater wins SVGE Women Achievement Award 2020

2020 event in Lausanne focusses on OTT, fan engagement and esports

46 Live from Antholz: World Biathlon

Eurovision Services shoots clean for Biathlon World Championships 2020

50 Coronavirus crisis: NAB & Football Summit

NAB and SVG Europe Football Summit join list of postponed industry events

52 Coronavirus in Italy with EMG

Euro Media Group Italy puts disaster recovery plans in place

22 22 Kelly Simmons FA

A life of football by accident: FA director of women’s professional game discusses goals

26 FutureSPORT from Chelsea FC

FutureSPORT 2019: Adding bandwidth for sports broadcasting at 5G level

30 Live from Paris: Riot Games LOL

World-leading remote production for Riot Games League of Legends Finals

36 Live from Paris: Pro B Basketball

AMP Visual TV remotely produces Pro B basketball for RMC Sport

54 Coronavius: TV Skyline Germany

Partitioned TV Skyline Ü8UHD OB delivers live music evening for SWR

56 BT Sport distributed production

BT Sport radicalises channel operation with decentralised remote production

NEP Belgium and Broadcast Solutions complete RTBF truck through lockdown

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeuropeupdate

Contents

AUTUMN 2020

64 IABM SVGE Coronavius session

92 Remote for ITV Racing

68 Sky Italia adapts operations

96 Sky Deutschland on Bundesliga

Sports TV broadcast sector speaks out on IABM SVG Europe webcast Sky Italia adapts content and operations through coronavirus lockdown period

ITV Sport reveals remote production behind Royal Ascot racing coverage ‘The corona crisis forced us to quickly throw old ways of thinking overboard’

70 Bundesliga re-start in Germany

DFL and DFB issue broadcast OB guidelines ahead of Bundesliga return

72 Freelance Diaries: Katie Harrison

Sky Sports’ Katie Harrison on the golf front line as crisis escalates

98 74 74 Sports OTT Forum

Sports OTT Forum 2020: Eleven Sports, F1, Olympic Channel and WRC

78 SVG Europe 2020 Awards

Winners announced during ‘as live’ ceremony on YouTube on 27 May

82 Freelance Diaries: Natalie Diamond

Will social distancing measures suck all the fun out of working in OBs?

84 Football Summit 2020 Online

Football Summit: Broadcasting live football behind closed doors

88 LaLiga re-start in Spain

98 Sky Sports Test Cricket

Innovations abound as COVID-safe Test cricket returns to Sky Sports

102 SVG Europe Women Virtual

Virtual event accentuates positives of project re-start and ‘new normal’ in OBs

104 Motorsport Show 2020

Motorsport Show: Back on the track with F1, Nascar and MotoGP teams

108 SVG Europe Sponsor Update

SVG Europe sponsors describe how COVID-19 has impacted their business in 2020. Compiled by Ian McMurray

170 Sponsor Index and Sponsor Thank You 174 Closing Comment

Making the right moves: Op Ed from Sports Video Group Director of Editorial Services Ken Kerschbaumer

LaLiga re-start: ‘We’ve come a long way and it has only been two weeks!’

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

SVG Europe would like to thank its Platinum Sponsors www.dolby.com

www.euromediagroup.com

www.grassvalley.com

www.gravitymedia.com

www.imagen.io

www.limelight.com

www.mobileviewpoint.com

www.nepworldwide.com

www.rossvideo.com

www.pro.sony

www.theswitch.tv

Join SVGE today www.svgeurope.org

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeuropeupdate FROM THE CHAIRMAN

A safe environment for creativity through crisis BY ALESSANDRO REITANO

ADVISORY BOARD CHAIRMAN

Alessandro Reitano Sky Deutschland,

Director Sports Production

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, EDITORIAL

Ken Kerschbaumer

ADVISORY BOARD MEMBERS

SVG Europe, Chairman: Sky Deutschland, Director Sports Production

Tim Achberger

hat a turbulent year 2020 has been so far! I’m sure each of us imagined it differently. We are in the midst of the biggest crisis since World War II and the challenges in economic and socio-political terms are enormous. We do not know exactly how long the consequences of Corona will continue to accompany us and how long it will take for business to recover. Turbulent times inevitably demand changes and so our industry is once again called upon to reinvent itself in places. In such phases, it is often said that a crisis can be seen as an opportunity and my personal impression is that this is exactly what we tried with all our strength and succeeded. Just to go briefly into my experience here at Sky Deutschland. Many processes were changed, adapted and provided with the highest hygiene measures to guarantee the best possible protection for the employees. Only a safe environment allows creative processes, especially in crisis mode. I think I am certainly not describing an individual case here: these adaptations have taken place in all companies in recent months. We work in an environment where change and adaptation have always been at the top of the agenda. However, never before has it been so important to embrace change. I am sure that a return to the ‘old’ habits will no longer be possible. The ‘new normal’, however we may find it in its most diverse forms, will clearly shape the business. Live sport is back and with it the hope for all of us who work in this environment that we will get out of the crisis very quickly. The on-screen innovations that could be seen and heard with the re-start of the various leagues around Europe were impressive. By using additional sound atmo, fan engagement tools, virtual fans and AR enhancements — and also the ‘light-footed’ use of video communications tools such

Jennifer Angell

Sportcast GmbH, Head of Innovation & Technology Management

as Zoom, Teams and others — the behindclosed-door matches were significantly enhanced. Furthermore, the expansion of remote working has positively changed many workflows and will finally change the way we produce in the future. So the ability to act in crisis mode to achieve top performance is given. This also applies to SVG. I would like to express my thanks to the entire SVG Europe team. The most important events had to be re-planned, set up and ‘virtualised’ due to Corona. A tour de force to be able to continue to offer a service to members, sponsors and all interested parties, to be able to give an overview of the market in these difficult times and to provide a platform for people and products. I was able to play a small part and I am always impressed with the professionalism with which the team tries to identify and implement the right topics. We do not know what the next few months will bring. But one thing is already certain: it will be an intensive second half of the year. The EURO and the Olympic Games are two major events that will cast their shadows across 2021 — which will be decisive for the timing of many fixtures/schedules and thus for the volume of production. However we will certainly see further consolidation measures in the market and the expansion and conversion towards decentralised operations will gain even more momentum. The rethinking of current processes and value chains, also with regard to sustainability, will also be a strong support for us. Added to this are the social upheavals and the need to promote and support diversity. It will be sustainable and the challenges will continue to increase, but I am hopeful that 2021 will be a better year for all of us. In any case, it remains exciting. See the crisis as an opportunity! I hope to meet you all again soon at one of the next SVG events. Until then, please stay healthy.

Steve Jenkins

President, NEP UK & Ireland

Barry Johnstone

CTV Outside Broadcasts, Chairman

Ten City Media, Consultant

Peter Angell

Hanna Källman

Ten City Media, Principal

Bonnier Broadcasting Sport Sweden, Head of Sports Production

Manuela Baraschi

Sky Italia, Head of Business Partners & Program Management

Konrad Bartelski

Robert Kis

TV Skyline, Chief Executive Officer

Jens Cornelius Knudsen

OTL, Consultant

Daragh Bass

TV 2 Norway, VP Production News and Sports

Andy Beale

Euro Media Group, Director of Operations

NEP Media Solutions UK, Head of Sales

Timo Koch

BT Sport, Chief Engineer

Michael Koegler

Julia Boettger

Sky Deutschland, Head of Operations, Sky Sports

Riccardo Botta

Sky Italia, Director – Production & Creative Hub

ORF, Head of Directors Sport

Dean Locke

Formula One Management, Director of Broadcast and Media

Róisín McKeniry

Jonny Bramley

BBC Sport, Executive Producer

Bridget Bremner

Sky Sports, Production Executive

Robin Broomfield

Timeline Television, Head of Production Technology

Dan Miodownik

Host Broadcast Services, Chief Executive Officer

Florin Mitu

Consultant

Alan Burns

OBS TV, NEP Broadcasting Services UK, Managing Director

Gordon Castle

Eurosport, Senior VP Technology

Brian Clark

FIFA, Head of Host Broadcast Production

Nick Morgan

Premier League Productions, Managing Director

Eric Orengo

Broadcast Engineering Manager

NEP Group, Director of Sales

Christer Pålsson

James Clement

Sky Sports, Head of Operations

Charlie Cope

BBC Sport, Technical Executive

NEP Europe, VP Sales

James Pearce

DAZN, Head of Global Engineering

Lise Cosimi

Roger Pearce

Malcolm Cowan

Emili Planas

Tony Coxon

Inga Ruehl

ITV Sport, Technical Director

Consultant

Mediapro, CTO and Operations Manager

NEP Media Solutions UK, Head of Technology

Sky Production Services, Director

European Tour Productions, Head of Production

Sotiris Salamouris

David Crawford

Ravensbourne, Education Initiative

Michael Crimp

Olympic Broadcasting Services, Chief Technical Officer

Marcin Serafin

IBC, Chief Executive Officer

Ekstraklasa Live Park, Head of Operations

DAZN, VP Production Services

David Shield

All England Lawn Tennis Club, Head of Broadcast & Production

GP Slee

Claire Da Silva Paul Davies

Nicolas Deal

Broadcast Rental, Owner

David Tippett

Orange Sports & Media, Chief Technology Officer

Sunset + Vine, Head of Broadcast

James Dean

Henk van Meerkerk

ESL UK, Managing Director

Fox Sports NL, Head of Production

John Dollin

Arsenal Football Club, Senior Systems & Operations Manager

Ronan Donagher

World Rugby, IT & Broadcast Technology Manager

Angela Gibbons

Shane Warden

ATP Media, Director of Broadcast & Technology

Joachim Wildt

CTV Outside Broadcasts, Chief Executive Officer

Red Bull Media House, Global Head of Content Distribution

BT Sport, Chief Operating Officer Stream TV Networks, Head of Production

Premier League Productions, Head of Production

Perform Group, Director of Broadcast and Technology Services

Hamish Greig

Duncan Humphreys

Anna Ward

Dom Wedgwood

CTV Outside Broadcasts, Commercial Manager

Jamie Hindhaugh

IMG, Global Director of Engineering & Technology

John Williams

Gravity Media,Head of Projects

Tom Woods

Woods Communications, President

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

Create Excitement Control With Ease Connect Everyone Whether you’re looking to create captivating live TV, move to an all IP workflow, playout from the cloud or simply upgrade your existing infrastructure, Grass Valley’s award-winning technology powers an end-to-end ecosystem of reliable, open standards-based solutions that enable smart, responsive workflows, connecting your content to any audience at any time. It’s Content Your Way. Find out more at grassvalley.com Copyright © 2020 Grass Valley Canada. All rights reserved. Specifications subject to change without notice.

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeuropeupdate OPENING COMMENT

2020: The year that necessity really was mother of invention BY HEATHER MCLEAN & WILL STRAUSS Editors, Sports Video Group Europe

t’s fair to say that, thus far, 2020 hasn’t been quite the year we expected it to be. We should have been embracing a multicity European Football Championship, celebrating another ground-breaking Summer Olympics and getting excited about the atmosphere that awaits us at Whistling Straits for the Ryder Cup. Instead, we got COVID-19. And you don’t need us to tell you how that has panned out. But, despite everything, 2020 has certainly taught us a few things — and reinforced some assumptions. The importance of washing our hands effectively, for instance. That is a biggie. Then there’s the sports video industry’s ingrained need for human interaction, connections and networking. It would seem that we cannot cope without it. And no amount of Zoom calls or Google Hangouts can make up for its absence. And, of course, there’s the never-to-beforgotten-again fact that audio (real, fake or otherwise) is absolutely fundamental to the enjoyment of most televised sports. Perhaps most importantly, however, 2020 has shown once again that necessity is the mother of invention. Especially when it comes to sports broadcasting and production. Presented with a global health crisis, a total social lockdown and the worst economic downturn since the great depression of the 1930s, the producers and broadcasters of Europe found the will and wherewithal to 8

reinvent their workflows and their coverage, bringing forward ideas and concepts that were previously R&D, long-term roadmaps or still on the ‘back of a fag packet’, and make them a reality — sometimes purely to get some content to air. The challenges have been great and varied: social distancing, COVID testing, coloured zones, bio-secure bubbles, the reduction in the number of people allowed in the same space, studio or stadium at the same time. But with ingenuity, dedication, some perspex screens, a truckload of hand sanitiser and countless video calls, the sports television industry has found a way. Whether it’s BT Sport’s accelerated move to a distributed remote production model, Sky Sports Cricket putting a microphone and foldback speaker system on a remotecontrolled camera dolly in order to do player interviews or LaLiga adding augmented reality ‘supporters’ inside Spanish football stadiums, the great minds of this industry have conjured up ways of generating, augmenting and distributing their content — and making sure that fans and viewers can enjoy it.

Mental health and wellbeing tested

We’ve all been through a lot this year, of that there is no argument. Some of us have been impacted directly by COVID, some indirectly. Members of our community have been ill, lost friends and loved ones and been made redundant or found themselves without work.

Others have had to make some really tough calls. Our mental health and wellbeing has been tested like never before too. Our way of life has changed beyond recognition and in some cases those changes are permanent. As much as it pains me to use the phrase, the ‘new normal’ we are living in is just that. A new way of existing, interacting and working that is not what we’re accustomed to but something that we are having to get familiar with. And fast. It’s not been easy for anyone. But throughout, the resilience and resourcefulness that we’ve come to expect from this sector has shone through. Sports broadcasting has done what Tyson Fury did in his first fight against Deontay Wilder. It has achieved what Tiger Woods did following his back surgery and personal scandal. It has emulated Liverpool FC in Istanbul in 2005, the England cricket team at Headingley in 2019 and Finland’s Lasse Viren in the 1972 Olympic 10,000m final. It has been knocked down, tripped up, dominated, outflanked and battered towards submission, only to get back up again and find a way to somehow triumph against all the odds. This edition of SVG Europe’s The Journal is dedicated to those stories and how the people of the sports television community succeeded in the face of adversity. The tales come from across Europe, covering football, cricket, golf, motor racing and boxing, to name but a few. There’s everything from health and safety protocols to reinvented technical workflows. Some of the things that are documented here will be forgotten about in years to come. Some, however, will have a long-lasting impact. Such is the nature of innovation. But they are all noteworthy and valuable in their own way and many, born through necessity, will help to move the sports television industry forward. 2020 wasn’t at all what we expected. But, what we did expect was advancement, invention and excellence. And we got that in spades. SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

Gravity Media offers production, programming and content services for every broadcast need. Our 500 people serve clients across the sport, media, news and entertainment industries from bases in the UK, Australia, USA, France, Germany and Qatar. Weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re world leaders in providing complex live broadcast facilities and production services to content owners, creators and distributors. We have four broad categories of expertise: Outside Broadcast; Broadcast & Production Facilities; Production & Content; Equipment Rental & Sales. Contact us today to see how we can help with your next production. enquiries@gravitymedia.com

gravitymedia.com

svgeurope SPONSORS PLATINUM

GOLD AE LIVE • AJA VIDEO SYSTEMS • AMAZON WEB SERVICES APPLICASTER • ARKONA TECHNOLOGIES • ATEME BLACKBIRD • BLACKMAGIC DESIGN • BRIGHTCOVE BROADCAST SOLUTIONS • BT MEDIA & BROADCAST • CALREC CANON • CENTURYLINK • CERBERUS TECH • CHYRONHEGO CLEAR-COM • COBALT • DELTACAST • DELTATRE • EDITSHARE ES BROADCAST • EUROVISION SERVICES • EVERTZ • EVS FOCUSRITE PRO • FOR-A • GENELEC • GLOBECAST • GRABYO HARMONIC • IMAGINE COMMUNICATIONS • LAWO • LIVEU LTN GLOBAL • M2A MEDIA • MATROX • MEDIA LINKS MST SYSTEMS • NATIVEWAVES • NCAM • NEP CONNECT NET INSIGHT • OPEN BROADCAST SYSTEMS • PANASONIC BROADCAST • PRESTEIGNE • RED BEE MEDIA • RIEDEL RT SOFTWARE • SENNHEISER • SES ASTRA • SIGNIANT • SMT SOS GLOBAL • STATS PERFORM • SUPPONOR • SYNAMEDIA TEDIAL • TELESTREAM • TELLYO • TELSTRA • TSL PRODUCTS TVU NETWORKS • VERIZON DIGITAL MEDIA SERVICES V-NOVA • VIDI • VISLINK • VIZRT • WILDMOKA WSC SPORTS • ZIXI

OB/SI/OTHER 808 TALENT • ACS • ALDEA SOLUTIONS • AMP VISUAL TV ARENA TELEVISION • BATCAM • BROADCAST RENTAL BROADCAST RF • CAMERA CORPS • CLOUDBASS CREATIVE TECHNOLOGY • CTV • CYANVIEW • DENSITRON DREAM CHIP • FANVIEW • FLETCHER • HITOMI MOTION IMPOSSIBLE • MOVICOM • PIXELLOT • RACETECH REALITY CHECK SYSTEMS • SKYLINE COMMUNICATIONS SLOMO.TV • SOLO SATELLITE COMMUNICATIONS SQUARE BOX SYSTEMS • TEAM • TECHNOLOGY ADVANTAGE TELEGENIC • TELOS ALLIANCE • THE COLLECTV • TV SKYLINE TVN MOBILE PRODUCTION • UI CENTRIC • UNIQFEED VIDEOSYS BROADCAST

Because Sport TV Leads the Way Leading sports television executives from across Europe are at the vanguard of Sports Video Group Europe. An independent affiliate organisation formed by the successful Sports Video Group in the USA, its mission is to advance the creation, production and distribution of sport content â&#x20AC;&#x201D; on all screens â&#x20AC;&#x201D; via information, events and industry initiatives. Make sure your company and your industry are represented in this vital collaborative initiative.

Join SVGE today www.svgeurope.org

svgeuropeupdate

Rugby World Cup 2019

Dan Miodownik (left) and David Shield inside the MCR at the Tokyo Stadium IBC

Live from the Rugby World Cup: Host broadcaster IGBS raises level of production and content to new heights BY KEN KERSCHBAUMER

he 2019 Rugby World Cup will pass the halfway point this weekend and for World Rugby, IGBS (a partnership between HBS and IMG) and rights holders around the world it also marks the halfway point of a new era in host production for the event. Previously the responsibility for the host production fell on the shoulders of the domestic rights holder. But in 2016 IGBS was appointed host broadcaster, a move that has resulted in a deeper production with more content than ever for rights holders and rugby fans around the globe. Project directors for the event are David Shield, IMG Media, SVP, global director of engineering and technology and Dan Miodownik, HBS chief executive. They oversee a team of more nearly 650 people and together bring a world of experience to the host broadcasting of the event. “It’s been a really good partnership, and this is the first time we are working together on a team sport as 12

previously we worked on the Asian Games, a multi-sport event,” says Shield. “And it’s interesting to see HBS work because they are clearly focused on getting consistency to be part of the event. You look at this event and you say, ‘How difficult can it be to cover 48 rugby matches?’ But the difficulty is in making sure they all have a consistent approach and a host philosophy with all of the amount of overlay that brings, like supporting 50 commentary positions and standups.” Miodownik says that IMG and HBS dovetail really well, and that is important given how much the production of the Rugby World Cup has grown since 2015. “The event is just that much bigger and it’s the first it is in Asia and here in Japan and that’s great because this is a rugby playing country,” he adds. “HBS brought a lot of experience from the World Cup into this event, like the live multi-feed concept that until now for a Rugby World Cup was just a world and clean feed.” Looking at the way the event is being produced one can see echoes of the philosophy that is behind HBS work on the FIFA World Cup events. For the first time ever, all 48 matches are being produced in multiple formats, including UHD/SDR, 1080p, and 1080i. “Having the live match feeds in 1080p and UHD lifts the event up to where it should be,” says Miodownik.“We have a broad production plan that has created a lot of content and the UHD quality will give World Rugby a really rich archive while also giving the broadcasters something with real value.” Rights holders have access to not only the traditional World Feed but other live feeds as well: a basic stadium SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

REVOLUTIONISE YOUR MEDIA MANAGEMENT The ultimate platform for management and distribution of sports content Rapid delivery

Powerful search

Controlled access

svgeuropeupdate

Rugby World Cup 2019

Half-time at Argentina vs England, Tokyo Stadium, Saturday 5 October

feed, a clean stadium feed, an additional content feed and, during a match, clips, and a tactical beauty feed. “HBS brought a lot of experience from the World Cup into this event, like the live multi-feed concept that until now for a Rugby World Cup was just a world and clean feed,” says Shield. Along with the feeds are seven ENG TV crews that include a rugby expert producer, a cameraman, and an assistant producer. They are focused on covering training, creating feature stories and more, including creating fresh clips of replacement players in front of a green screen that are used for player lineups. “All told we are probably creating 10 hours of content for every hour of content that rights holders previously had access to,” says Shield.

Life at the IBC

Miowdownik and Shield spend the majority of their time at the International Broadcast Centre (IBC) which is located near Tokyo Stadium. Temporary cabins have been put in place to house master control quality control, cable interconnection, central equipment, a technical compound and satellite farm, a booking office, and unilateral areas. A digital team creating content for rights holder social media needs and a post-production unit is also on site. The growth of the Rugby World Cup’s offering for rights holders is a growing trend for all major international events that are relying on host broadcast service providers. Shield credits the explosion in content being created around events like the Rugby World Cup to rights holders trusting host broadcasters more and more. 14

“Something like The Open Championship used to need a complete parallel production but now it is much more relaxed, and rights holders let the host do it,” says Shield. At the core of the match production are four production teams from France, the UK, South Africa, and New Zealand. “Expertise in rugby production lives everywhere, and we have been pleasantly surprised,” says Miodownik of the efforts to date.“We had workshops with the teams, and they are each bringing a different personality to it which is good. For example, they all use the Spidercam in a slightly different way.” Eight of the stadiums are outfitted for Spidercams meaning that 34 of the 48 matches will make use of the aerial camera system. “We did an analysis of the productions of the previous World Cup matches and how much each camera was used, and we came to the conclusion that there was no addition where the value for the money is greater than the Spidercam,” says Miodownik. “Our goal is to have a Spidercam at all the knockout games. “The logistics people have done a phenomenal job of moving people and equipment and it’s astonishing. And the patience of more than 600 people, many of whom are on the road for six weeks for the first time in their career, and dealing with a different culture, has been phenomenal,” adds Miodownik. Also new this year is Canon’s Free Viewpoint system which is making its official world debut. Located in Yokohama Stadium, the Free Viewpoint system requires 125 cameras to be rigged in the bowl to capture volumetric SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeuropeupdate

Rugby World Cup 2019

Christian Gobbel, HBS CTO, inside the Rugby World Cup master control area

“The patience of more than 600 people, many on the road for six weeks for the first time in their career, has been phenomenal” DAN MIODOWNIK

images of the action and then synthesise all of that data into a virtual camera system that allows the operator to fly around and create replays that are truly unique. “It’s developed a huge amount in the past four years as back then it would take months to process and now it is nearly live,” says Shield. Clips from the system reside on the clip server that is available to rights holders. They can then take those clips and either air them after the match or even virtually work their talent into the images, something that RTE did earlier this week. Alston Elliot also built out a new graphics package for the tournament and a small amount of AR is also being used. “The graphics look is a modern, flat style that doesn’t have too much shine,” adds Shield.

Flypack efforts

NEP is in Japan with a multi-national effort that brings together four fly kits each from its UK and Singapore divisions. Four of those fly packs are IP while the other four are SDI and, as the tournament progresses, they move from one stadium to the next. Kumamoto Stadium, Hanazono Rugby Stadium, Kumagaya Rugby Stadium, Fukuoka Hakatanomori Stadium, and Kamishi Recovey Memorial Stadium all 16

have 23 cameras. Shizuoka Stadium Ecopa, City of Toyota Stadium, Kobe Misaki Stadium, Sapporo Dome, International Stadium Yokohama, Tokyo Stadium, and Ota Stadium all have 28 cameras (the additional being the Spidercam, two handheld cameras, and a hand try line camera on the left and right side). Beginning in the quarter-finals that count rises to 32 with four corner flag cameras being added to the mix and the semi-finals and final will include two additional super slo-mo cameras (all cameras are either Grass Valley LDX 86 or Sony HDC-4300). SOS Global has been tasked with the challenge of getting the equipment from venue to venue while NTT and Vidi are handling transport of signals from the stadiums to the IBC and Telstra is moving signals from the IBC to IMG’s facility in Stockley Park outside of London where additional post-production work is being done. “The logistics people have done a phenomenal job of moving people and equipment and it’s astonishing,” says Miodownik. “And the patience of more than 600 people, many of whom are on the road for six weeks for the first time in their career, and dealing with a different culture, has been phenomenal.” The Rugby World Cup 2019 continues until 2 November, culminating in the World Cup Final in Yokohama. SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeuropeupdate

Ferrari Challenge 2019

Global Production’s OB6 HD mobile vehicle was used. It can be equipped with up to 30 cameras

Live from Mugello: Broadcast production for Ferrari Challenge Finali Mondiali BY ROBERTO LANDINI

“We pay particular attention to the safety of the worker: just think that the cars pass at 300 km per hour” DAVIDE FURLAN

he 2019 final of the Ferrari Challenge or Corse Clienti was held at Mugello from 24-27 October. The Corse Clienti is a single-marque motor championship created in 1993, now involving three official championships in the United States, AsiaPacific and Europe. Last weekend competitors gathered at the annual Finali Mondiali at the Mugello Circuit in Italy, the automotive and motorcycle circuit of Scarperia and San Piero, owned by Ferrari. The 5,245-metre track, which winds through 15 curves, attracted over 170 Ferrari cars. The Ferrari Challenge’s showpiece Trofeo Pirelli World Final was won by Adam Carroll, who led lights-to-flag, holding off a late challenge from Bjorn Grossmann. Global Production from Turin was chosen for production of on-site television footage and related content distribution, and also as the executive producer

of the television event. Davide Furlan, CEO and partner of Global Production told SVG Europe, “Since 2010 we have been chosen as official producers of the Ferrari Challenge, an event that, given our long experience in television shooting on automobile tracks, represents a very interesting event for us. This is because making a motor sport transmission, ensuring the continuity of the shots, and maximising vehicle speed, requires operational peculiarities that not all TV services can boast. “It is a question of knowing how to choose the most pertinent technologies and composing operational skills within a circuit that in any case always presents a dangerous component of no small significance. “We pay particular attention to everything concerning the safety of the worker: just think that the cars pass at 300 km per hour and therefore the whole event must be followed according to stringent safety constraints. Thanks to our capacities that have developed over the years, we make a commitment far beyond the basic laws against accidents at work. In addition to making the shooting spectacular and to tell the best sport story for viewers, we take great care not to put anyone in danger.” At Mugello, Global Production’s OB6 HD mobile vehicle was used. It can be equipped, as standard, with up to 30 GrassValley LDK86N cameras with 4K HDR, 3x, 6x licenses. It is a 16.50m x 4m trailer that mounts Imagine Communications technologies as AV matrices and a Grass Valley Kayak HD300 video mixer at its heart. Audio and video glue is by Imagine Communications SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

IQ Sports Producer Create live professional sports productions without onsite camera team Ideal for sports games that donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have the capital and production resource of the major leagues

Live stream 2 or 4 x 4K cameras (Stitched and de-warped)

Highlights & Clips

Overlays & Scoreboard

Remote management

Recordings (Cloud or local)

Want more information? Go to mobileviewpoint.com

svgeuropeupdate

for 96 3G video inputs, 3ME Panel and 2ME panels. There is a Digico audio mixer with 96 inputs and 48 AES outputs and Riedel intercom systems with 24 LCD panels. Monitors include 55” LG LCD for production, 32” LG LCD for the Slomo section and Sony PVM-1741 for the engineering area. On board there are up to 10 EVS as LiveSlomotion Recorder and up to 10 VTR (HDCAM-XDCAM), two Hyperdeck 4K, and then distribution and re-clocking, 16 channel video embedders and de-embedders, and video and audio distribution including analogue, distribution, 10 3G video and audio frame sync cards with colour correction and delay, 18 video cross converters and various signal measurement tools, master time clock generator, change over, plus audio analysers with Dolby E and more.

Audio innovation with an Olympic vision

The HD images were distributed all over the world and in Italy transmitted live on Sky. Global Production, in addition to serving as producer of the international clean host broadcast feed, also produced a second feed for international broadcasters in English and a third national feed for the personalisation of Sky Italia, with a different running order. The OB6 vehicle chosen for this engagement allows double production thanks to completely separate internal main and secondary control spaces. Furlan added: “This final was carried out with a commitment of 20 GVG cameras, located on the circuit, covering the strategic parts of the track where overtaking and contacts between cars often take place whilst always giving continuity of the story and the competition. The standard shooting specifications are always adapted and interpreted by us according to the peculiarities of the circuit.” Audio provides an increasingly important dimension in today’s media output and for the finals it was produced according to the 3D immersive audio technique in recording and 5.1 Dolby live. For the audio recordings, in addition to the typical microphones on each camera that follows the video, two omnidirectional shooting systems were used with Soundfield heads placed in the paddock and near the 20

Ferrari Challenge 2019

TV compound. A special Klang codec received the AES EBU signals of all in-field microphones and a dedicated audio engineer decided the exact location of each sound to determine the typical virtual spatiality of immersive audio. Following the director’s shots and to create an even greater presence effect with 3D audio, the sound source is better placed in threedimensional space. Given the likely involvement of Global Production in the upcoming 2020 Olympics, in which the audio will be officially realised and transmitted in an immersive 3D way, the tests on this new shooting system continue and the Ferrari Challenge returned important information. The metadata used for this additional information is coded in the production phase and delivered together with the video signal. Then the software at home in the decoder performs decoding and sends discrete sounds to the extended surround speaker system. Last year’s production was in UHD while this year it was broadcast in HD as a Sky choice, as they currently only broadcast one channel in UHD. At Mugello, the TV compound was positioned at the start of the paddocks and the satellite uplink connection was outsourced to Globecast. Davide Furlan concluded: “The Ferrari Challenge lasts three days from Friday to Sunday and we start with the preparations even from the previous Monday, to be ready on Friday morning. Timed qualification commences on Thursday and we start with tests and recordings of the contour contributions. “The team we deployed for this occasion included about 45 professionals, of which there were director, assistant director, video mixer, five rvm operators, four camera controls, two sound mixers, the producer and the technical leader. “One of the features that distinguishes the production of the Ferrari Challenge is the presence of miniaturised on-board live cameras, in fact, we have five of them, four on the racing cars and one on the safety car. They are miniature Marshall cameras with VSN Vislink radio links,” he said. SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

Make it. Manage it. Show the world. Expertly Engineered Solutions Worldwide • •

OB Vans/Mobile Units Flypacks

• •

Studio Production Centralized Production

• • • • • • •

Host Broadcast Support Systems Integration Post Production Augmented Reality Connectivity & Transmission Wireless & RF Specialty Capture

• • • • • •

Automated Ingest Media Asset Management Master Control Remote Commentary Live / Non-Live Graphics Premium Playout

• •

Advanced Content Delivery Intuitive System Monitoring

•

Video Display

• •

Audio Lighting

BEHIND POWERFUL PRODUCTION NEPGROUP.COM

svgeuropeupdate

The Football Association

Kelly Simmons, director of the women’s professional game at The FA

A life of football by accident FA director of women’s professional game Kelly Simmons discusses goals BY HEATHER MCLEAN

he Football Association (FA) established the Women’s Super League in 2011, and in 2018 it went fully professional for the first time. Overseeing the development of women’s and girl’s football under the auspices of the FA is Kelly Simmons, director of the women’s professional game. Simmons is focused on the entire gamut of the domestic women’s professional game, from grass roots growth and encouraging girls to play, to the top-level league that is taking this sport into the realms of mainstream popularity. Women’s sport has got a lot more press than usual this year. On the significance of the Women’s World Cup to the overall popularity of the women’s game, Simmons comments: “It was massive. The semi final moment is the second most-watched television programme of any sport on television this year [following the Rugby World Cup final]; 11.7 million were watching the semi final. “Why’s that important? Because we’ve been trying to break down cultural barriers as we’ve developed the game. We’ve come a long way, but there are still perceptions that it’s a male sport or women’s football isn’t great to watch, or whatever these stereotypes and perceptions are — 22

they have just been smashed through these global and domestic audiences. “FIFA announced their audience [reach for the Women’s World Cup 2019] recently and globally it was over a billion [1.12 billion viewers watched coverage of France 2019], and that means a huge audience has seen top quality women’s football and has been coming back in more and more numbers throughout that tournament. They’ve seen it, they’ve enjoyed it, and they’re engaged in it.” She adds that the Women’s World Cup is now followed by another two events that are enabling her to continue to push the women’s game through the FA: “We’ve had three incredible years, with the World Cup in a great time zone having been held in France, we’ve got the Olympics and we’ve qualified which is fantastic so we’ve got that to look forward to, and then we’ve got the UEFA Women’s Euro Championships in England which is going to be phenomenal and the BBC have bought the rights and it’s going to be huge. “So it’s not just a one off and capitalising on that,” she notes, referring to the Women’s World Cup,“It’s three years with fantastic pinnacle events too hook everything to, and SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeuropeupdate

“I think when we look back at 2019, we’re going to go, ‘wow, something really happened there’.”

make sure we keep women’s football high and visible in the public eye.” In September 2019 the FA launched FA Player, a new live streaming platform, exclusively dedicated to women’s football. FA Player, which is free to use and available online and via a dedicated mobile app, provides live access to over 150 domestic women’s football fixtures throughout the season. BT Sport, host broadcaster for the Women’s Super League, and the BBC are continuing their regular coverage with over 30 live games televised across the 2019-20 season, with FA Player created to broaden access beyond traditional channels free of charge in a single destination. As to why it decided to go over the top (OTT) with its own channel, Simons says the FA noticed through research it carried out internally that more could be done to bring the sport to fans. She explains: “From our research, we were only getting max two games out a week, and not every house has BT Sport so people don’t know where to go to find women’s football. We thought an OTT offering was really important as part of building that fan base.” The FA has already beaten its internal target of people registering for the FA Player channel by the end of the year, from its launch in September. However, says Simmons,“we smashed it in the first week.” She adds: “We didn’t have a lot to benchmark that figure against, but we smashed it so we’re now resetting the targets for the year.” The launch of FA Player and production of those extra games has already paid off, increasing the women’s games reach. Since the channel launched, the FA has already signed three overseas TV distribution deals for the content on the channel and it is tendering for an agency to help it do further deals, and, “there are more in the offing,” Simmons adds.“This is starting to produce revenues in terms of overseas TV rights,” says Simmons. “We’re really pleased!”

Counting pinnacle moments

Simmons says what she terms as “pinnacle moments” — such as sports World Cups, European Championships, and the Olympics — events with great focus, brand commitment and eyeballs at home on them, hold audience imaginations temporarily, but until now breaking from those pinnacle events into mainstream sporting popularity has been the territory of male sports only. She says: “No women’s sport has broken through [from those kind of pinnacle events] into the regular, domestic mainstream, in a visible way like men’s cricket, football and rugby has. With the exception of probably women’s basketball in America, I can’t think of a commercially 24

The Football Association

viable professional women’s sports league.” Simmons goes on: “I genuinely think the Women’s Super League has got a fantastic chance of breaking through into the mainstream. Over the next five to seven years it will become commercially sustainable, so I think [we are now facing] a fantastic challenge in women’s sport and women’s football. The women’s sport has come a long way in a very short time from a pretty low base, in terms of profile and revenue and audiences.”

Life of football by accident

Simmons got into the football industry completely by accident. After gaining her coaching qualification at university, where she also played football, a sabbatical year to be the sports officer at her university after she completed her degree led her to Manchester University to do a similar role around their sports development and sports competitions,“which wasn’t the plan at all, because I was supposed to be going back [to university] to do a Masters in social work,” she notes. “Then the FA rang me and said ‘we’re starting to look at women’s football, would you come in and have a chat?’.” Simmons began working for the FA coaching coaches and teachers and trying to put some infrastructure into the game, skilling up the workforce to develop girl’s football in clubs and schools. Simmons adds: “I hadn’t planned to work in football because I didn’t think was any career in football, it never even entered my head. There was no visibility of women’s football or women in football [then].” She was then promoted to head up girls’ and women’s development in football at the FA. Working with the then technical director for the FA, Howard Wilkinson, in the late 1990s she began developing the women’s section of the blueprint of the Charter for Equality for the FA, which is still a key strategy for the association. When her equivalent on the boy’s side of the FA left to become an academy director at Tottenham FC, Simmons then became head of development for the merged boys and girls sides of the game. She eventually became director of development, responsible for children’s and grass roots football. “We invest about £50 million to £60 million a year into community football, county FA’s, and more,” she comments. Finally, as the Women’s Super League went professional following the 2017-2018 season, a new job was created to oversee it and Simmons took up her current role as director of the women’s professional game, looking at the development of professional women’s football in September 2018.“So, a life of football really, by accident!” SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

Reinvent live production. Rewrite the future Seize the moment and embrace Rewrite theoffuture the opportunities a different world. Together weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re reinventing live with agile new production possibilities to help working smarter.

pro.sony/liveproduction

From distributed, remote & cloudbased production to imaging innovation that engages viewers with thrilling visual experiences. Broadcast expertise delivered by the most trusted sport production partner.

svgeuropeupdate

FutureSport 2019

Added bandwidth: Matt Stagg, Claire Harvey, Ian Wagdin, Heather McLean (chair), Pete Rodriguez and Tiana Trumpa

FutureSPORT 2019: Adding bandwidth for sports broadcasting at the 5G level BY DAVID FOX

G cellular technology has the potential to deliver video signals with similar quality and speeds as broadcast wireless links or even fibre connections. But making sure a consumer-focused telecoms industry takes heed of broadcast needs has required early engagement, as a session on ‘Adding bandwidth: Sports broadcasting at the 5G level’at FutureSPORT 2019 revealed. When 4G launched “it was just a flat network that provided more bandwidth,” was quicker, and allowed people to watch video, explained Matt Stagg, BT Sport, director of mobile strategy. But when 5G was envisaged, industries that saw opportunities in it got involved early on, so its very low latency (1 millisecond) was a request from car manufacturers “because of braking distance on autonomous cars.” Media and entertainment companies were “fairly late” engaging with 5G, but there was a realisation that if they didn’t get their requirements into the standards we “would end up the same as we are with 4G”, having to share bandwidth with consumers and just be on a best-effort network, he added. The latest version of 5G standards, release 15, does 26

have some broadcast-relevant implementations, but is still fairly generic. Broadcast has had more involvement in release 16, but it will be release 17, in 18 months, “that we’ve had very heavy involvement in,” via the EBU and companies like NEP, said Ian Wagdin, BBC R&D, senior technology transfer manager.“We’ve got a whole bunch of specifications that we need for media to cover everything that we currently do using radio.” It is dull and boring,“but really important work” that will enable us to replace the spectrum we will lose in 3-5 years for things like radio microphones with 5G. From the telco perspective, early co-operation with broadcasters allows them “to try out things and learn together,” and “not just putting the network out there and seeing what happens, and what different industries do with it, but really to design the network together,” said Tiana Trumpa, Deutsche Telekom, 5G product manager. Deutsche Telekom worked on a test on the Berlin Marathon, in September, to see how its uplinks would function over the 5G network and “see how stable the connection would be” when it was competing with many other users for bandwidth, in an area with many LTE antennas that might cause interference. They wanted SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

SOS Global Express During these uncertain times, rely on our proven 24 / 7 team for your upcoming projects

Air, Land & Sea

We Go Around The World, Around The Clock. Handling cargo logistics for major sports, live events, productions and corporate events

OUR EXPERIENCE 30+ years of experience with major global events, sports, live events, broadcast TV, corporate, music touring, conferences, exhibitions, and feature film productions.

WORLDWIDE world, with a network of trusted partners, make SOS GLOBAL the leader in event logistics.

SOME OF OUR PROJECTS

24/07/365 We provide world-class services around the clock. You will always be able to reach us 24/7/365 with one phone call no matter where you are in the world.

• Olympics • FIFA World Cups • NFL Super Bowl • IBC and NAB Show • Global branding events • Global activation projects

WE PROVIDE • Stress-free event cargo logistics • Competitive pricing • Global reach • Import, export, ATA Carnets… One company responsible for your entire project. Please note that we have rebranded to “SOS Events Logistics Ltd” in the UK sosglobal.com

USA SOS Global Express, Inc. sos@sosglobal.com

UK SOS Event Logistics Ltd. sos@sosglobal.co.uk

Germany SOS Global GmbH info@sosglobal.eu

svgeuropeupdate

FutureSport 2019

There is also still a legacy 4G core network, he explained. Work is also needed to guarantee quality of service, with service level agreements and network slicing (when it arrives — along with the 5G core). There will also be a cost to operators to develop a broadcast slice, with guaranteed latency for a specific area, so they need to see a return on that investment, added Stagg.

An evolving revolution

Vodafone’s Pete Rodriguez and Deutsche Telekom’s Tiana Trumpa

to see if the quality would be good enough for the OB director to use those camera angles, and indeed some did end up in the world feed. They also wanted to experiment with user-generated content, such as YouTubers, and “learned a lot playing around with smart phones and cloud production,” she said. Vodafone UK has also worked with some sports videorelated 5G trials. In the Isles of Scilly it set up with eight Samsung S10 phones around a football pitch, for the smallest league in the world (there are only two teams). There were also three RF broadcast cameras and a gallery in the changing rooms. Each S10 signal was sent to a mast 2km away, was collated and returned via fixed wireless access from the mast. The result was transmitted around the island with fans using Facebook to give their verdict on whether the referee got everything right. “It helped not having much 5G out there — that’s why we got the distance,” said Pete Rodriguez, Vodafone UK, 5G programme delivery, senior manager. Vodafone also did a trial at the Ricoh Arena in Coventry during the summer, where it has 5G indoors and outdoors, with Wasps rugby club to demonstrate an interactive haptic rugby tackle suit. The EE Wembley Cup was the first 5G live-streaming, remotely-produced sports event, with EE working with its sister company BT Sport,“which worked really well,” said Matt Stagg, BT Sport, director of mobile strategy. Then, at IBC, it did the first multi-area 5G demonstration, with presenters in various locations. However, “we have a long way to go to have a satellite replacement or broadcast-grade network,” said Stagg. The economics of mobile networks mean that all roll-outs are driven by consumer offerings, which is why that is being launched now “is all focused on downlinks, so more people can stream in more areas. It works very well in a stadium” where 4G really struggles. There will be various issues to overcome before 5G is suitable for broadcast. For example,“not all devices use 5G for the uplink. You sometimes have a mix of 4G and 5G.” 28

The lower latency and greater bandwidth of current 5G will be useful for remote production, but some of this can already be done on 4G LTE, said Claire Harvey, UK5G Creative Industries Working Group, Chair, and Red Bee Media, account director. Indeed, broadcasters can already experiment with this, or with AR and VR applications, with existing technology. “You can kind of get a feel, albeit in a fairly controlled environment for what’s going on,” she said. But, “you need to start thinking now about how you are going to be able to use these technologies, because they are going to come along pretty quickly once the standards are there.” “I think it’s a mistake to think of 5G as just a cellular technology. There is a whole bunch of stuff that is going to come along that we will make use of,” said Wagdin. Stand-alone private 5G networks are already being built for factories, and some industries may be allowed to have their own slice of spectrum. This could be done for sporting events, and convergence with other wired, satellite and wireless networks could mean that “everything just becomes one good network,” connecting devices together in different ways. We are approaching an era “where we don’t care how a signal gets from point A to point B.We’re just sending ones and noughts,” and as long as they end up in the right order at the right time “then I can start to be a lot more creative about how I deploy things,” from covering marathons or the Tour de France down to a handful of cameras on a snooker match. Trumpa admitted that 5G may be getting overhyped as revolutionary, although there are undoubtedly some “really cool technological aspects”, it will be an evolution that requires a lot of iteration in conjunction with broadcasters.“There are a lot of things we can already do, and practice and test on 4G and just add 5G to it.” Wagdin believes that the opportunity for broadcasters will be in rolling out private networks, “in the same way that we put in mesh networks for radio cams,” or install a WiFi network. “We’re really clever with RF. We really know what we’re doing, and with access to the spectrum — whether we lease that from Ofcom or whatever — then we’ll be able to put in our own, stand-alone private networks and do things that don’t rely on the big cores.” He’s not suggesting broadcasters build their own nationwide network, but simply one covering a studio or event space. SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

LIVE PRODUCTION What are your challenges? • Shoulder programming, OTT and social media content? • A niche sport fighting to get coverage of your events for your dedicated fanbase? • Need to broaden your fan engagement through dedicated social media channels and streaming content? • Perhaps you’re heavily into live events? • Festivals, concerts, company announcements or perhaps global product launches? Or is it Operational - Need to produce live content with a distributed production team?

MIMiC – The first fully integrated cloud based live production service. Find out more @ theswitch.tv

theswitch tv

theswitchtv

the-switch

theswitchtv

svgeuropeupdate

League of Legends Finals

China’s FunPlus Phoenix team lifts the Summoner’s Cup as 2019 World Champions (Photo: Colin Young-Wolff/Riot Games)

Live from Paris: World-leading remote production for Riot Games’ LoL Finals BY FERGAL RINGROSE

he Finals of Riot Games’ 2019 League of Legends World Championship were held on Sunday 10 November at the AccorHotels Arena in Paris, with the winning Chinese FunPlus Phoenix team lifting the Summoner’s Cup as 2019 World Champions and taking home more than US $2 million in prize money. Riot Games chief executive Nicolo Laurent described the Finals as “the biggest event in the history of esports,” with an estimated 100 million people watching around the world. The 2019 League of Legends World Championship is the ninth year for the tournament, arising from the competitive multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game developed by Riot Games. The Championship was 30

held in Berlin, Madrid and Paris, with 24 teams from 13 regions competing for the tournament, having qualified from regionals circuits in China, Europe, North America, South Korea and South East Asia. More than 15,000 esports fans packed into the AccorHotels Arena to see the Finals match live last Sunday. Technical complexity for the Finals is ramped up each year by the demands of the in-venue Opening Ceremony. In 2017 Riot Games deployed a virtual dragon flying through Beijing National Stadium. Last year AR was factored into the Opening Ceremony at Incheon Munhak Stadium in South Korea, allowing in-game band K/DA to be virtually inserted onstage into the opening musical performance alongside Madison Beer, Miyeon and Soyeon of (G)I-DLE, and Jaira Burns. SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

365

INSIGHT AND EXPERTISE FOR THE CONTENT AND TECHNOLOGY COMMUNITY

FOR THE FULL PICTURE VISIT IBC365

– Industry trends articles

– Interviews with key industry players

– Video content, including IBC Conference key notes – In depth IBC technical papers

– Free access to IBC SHOWCASE

 facebook.com/IBCShow

 @IBC365

 @IBCShow

svgeuropeupdate

League of Legends Finals

Packed Arena in Paris for League of Legends World Finals (Photo by Colin Young-Wolff/Riot Games)

This year’s Opening Ceremony featured hip-hop collective True Damage, along with League of Legends characters Qiyana, Akali, Senna, Ekko and Yasuo. The show featured four Holonets from Kaleida, giant hanging fine metal meshes that are highly reflective and also seethrough — giving the effect of being a hologram. The meshes were positioned on either side of the stage, so the audience could see in front of and behind the talent on stage — with eight 4K screens positioned all around, each individually controlled. The Riot Games team has over the last few years evolved what may be the most sophisticated at-home production model in the world, seeking to produce the world feed show from its studio in Los Angeles no matter where its tournament event is being staged — and in the process dramatically reducing the number of trucks and production people required on-site. This year, in addition to the world feed being produced in LA, the English language show was produced at Riot’s European headquarters facility in Berlin. So, for 2019, the League of Legends World Finals featured not one but two remote productions. 32

And in the heat of battle, Riot Games’ Esports Technology Group decided to innovate with the new JPEG XS compression format — realising what is probably the first trans-Atlantic remote production undertaken using JPEG XS. All of which meant the Finals were produced and sent to 40 distribution partners around the globe with just one OB truck on-site at the Accor Hotels Arena in Paris. That was NEP Sweden’s UHD 1, used to cut the Opening Ceremony segment of the show, the in-venue screens production and to provide infrastructure for comms, signal distribution and some camera shading. NEP Sweden combined with fellow NEP company Creative Technology (CT) to provide the audio infrastructure for both broadcast and in-venue, built around a Riedel Mediornet network with 280 ports and Riedel Bolero comms with around 70 beltpacks. Creative Technology also provided Roe LED screens and Barco projectors for the in-venue stage show, working closely with Riot’s long-time technical production services partner Concom. At the Arena NEP Sweden engineer-in-charge Linus SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

League of Legends Finals

svgeuropeupdate

Malmborg told SVG Europe,“The first part of the show is the Opening Ceremony, which is produced and directed here in this truck. In parallel with that we have an in-house production doing the screen feeds. “And then when the Opening Ceremony is over we change to game mode. The producers for the game show will be here, but it will be cut and finalised in LA. That’s mainly because all the servers for the observers [the computers providing the video of the game] and all the graphic elements are in LA and so it minimises delay and always keeps quality high. The end product is going out from LA.

Secret sauce: Riot Direct backbone

“The truck is basically a workplace and a huge stage box, which is linked to the huge stage box inside the venue provided by CT. Since this truck is based on Riedel’s MediorNet we have extended all over the venue together with CT. Everything is on the same network. “We need to always bear latency in mind, which is why this solution was chosen rather than doing conventional signal distribution out from a hub. There is a fully redundant system here, so if LA goes down or fibre goes down there are game observers picking up here so we could do the show from here,” said Malmborg.

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

Ben Tompsett, Creative Technology, head of broadcast (left) and Linus Malmborg, NEP Sweden, engineer-in-charge

The core enabler for Riot Games production approach is its own Riot Direct network (the ISP used to service all LoL gameplay) to send feeds from tournament remotes back to the Los Angeles production facility. With multiple terabits of edge capacity, it’s a resource they trust and leverage for the most reliable network. Riot sources local ISPs for the last mile to connect the closest Riot Direct ingest point. To connect to Riot Direct, the team selects diverse routes for its traffic to traverse, avoiding any shared PoPs or long-haul fibre routes. The ultimate goal is to

svgeuropeupdate

“Once you break apart the venue and the production from the equipment that’s producing it, suddenly a lot of options open up” SCOTT ADAMETZ

always survive a fibre cut anywhere along either path by dynamically routing over the best path and failing over all traffic in a few tenths of a second. Everything from cameras and in-game observer feeds to caster audio and crowd microphones were encoded to video and audio streams and transmitted back to the primary remote production centre in Southern California. Riot’s broadcast engineers used a few different codecs for transporting the various video feeds based on roundtrip time, importance of signals and quality considerations. The codecs used were a mixture of H.264 and JPEG2000 streams — with this year a major innovation in introducing JPEG XS compression using IntoPIX codecs, with greatly improved video compression quality and sub-1ms latency. The total bandwidth dedicated to the test was 2.7 gigabits per second between LA and Worlds. As part of the test, Riot used SMPTE 2110 both at Worlds and in Los Angeles to distribute both uncompressed (ST2110-20) and compressed (ST2110-22) video signals in a dedicated network segment. At the Arena Riot Games Esports Technology Group head Scott Adametz told SVG Europe,“Some broadcasters choose to come here to produce their shows and we give them space. From here there’s over 100 feeds going back and forth between us and our regional partners and our

League of Legends Finals

headend in Los Angeles and our co-produced facility in Berlin, which is handling the English language feed. “LA is handling the World Feed and it is then given to our partners to add their own graphics and voice it themselves in their own language. Our show is streamed live in 19 different languages and we have over 40 distribution partners, some of them in this room. Twitch and YouTube are our major providers and distribution partners in the US, and abroad there are 38 other partners. “Now we’re going across 6,000 miles and we’re doing it with brand new cutting-edge codecs for distribution of content over the internet. We’re using JPEG XS: we think it might be the first time JPEG XS has been used in production, over 6,000 miles, with trans-Atlantic [routes],” said Adametz. “It’s the IntoPIX codec running on Nevion hardware. So it’s Nevion to Nevion for both JPEG-2000 and XS; Haivision for MPEG-4; and Lawo for some legacy J2K. Haivision has been a huge partner of ours for MPEG4 transmission and now Nevion is becoming another partner for other codecs. “We’re excited about it, as it’s an R&D project for us. It’s super-important that we have targeted R&D for every show, so we can have something bigger and better every time.

New 12G-SDI 4K/UltraHD Recording, Playback and Multi-Channel HD Recording 12G Power and Simplicity From the leading name in digital recorders, the new Ki Pro Ultra 12G is AJA’s premier model with 12G-SDI I/O for high resolution, deep color, high frame rate recording with HDR support, in a compact, portable design. Record and playback single channel 4K/UltraHD 50/60p to Apple® ProRes or Avid® DNxHR over built-in 12G-SDI, with HD-BNC or 12G-SDI FIber SFP+ options. Record up to four HD 1080p 50/60 sources simultaneously to Apple ProRes onto reliable AJA Pak media with Ki Protect for worry free recording. Control it all from a beautiful front panel HD display or over the LAN via the Ki Pro Ultra 12G’s integrated web browser based UI.

www.aja.com

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeuropeupdate

League of Legends Finals

“The reason we brought XS in for this is we want to up our game on quality — and it also reduces latency by about 150 milliseconds. That’s huge in gaming, and it should be huge in video so that our fans and players watching at home can see it faster. I think it is going to make it into our next major show as a production standard. “If you put everything in one place you limit yourself to the capabilities of that one place, be it the truck or the rack or whatever it is,” he continued. “Once you break apart the venue and the production from the equipment that’s producing it, suddenly a lot of options open up. One of those big options is not having to fly our entire crew out to all these different stages, but getting a consistent quality level regardless of what country we’re in. “This is a giant arena that does concerts; but we haven’t had to change the methodology as to how we produce the content.We have solved that equation.We just have pointto-point circuits that we trust and rely on to get all our signals back to a central place where we can make them look amazing and do some cool things. “For Riot Direct we peer freely with other providers. The idea there — and this is what has made the game perform so well over so many years — is that we get the traffic for our game onto our backbone where we can guarantee quality as soon as possible.

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

Scott Adametz, Riot Games, head of Esports Technology Group

“We don’t rely on the internet to route to our game servers. We pick that traffic up freely from any provider that will offer it to us, and then guarantee it gets to its destination and return. Latency is usually lower when we can peer directly with ISPs because we can provide an optimised path to the nearest game server. Riot Direct spans the globe,” he said.

svgeuropeupdate

Match director Raphael Gaboriaeu calls the shots for Paris Basketball vs Aix Maurienne, with Simplylive ViBox

Live from Paris: AMP TV remotely produces Pro B basketball for RMC Sport BY FABRICE MARINONI

emote production trials are carried out regularly in France but for the Pro B clash between Paris Basketball and Aix Maurienne broadcast on Sunday 26 January on RMC Sport, AMP Visual TV delivered a real live remote production that went to air. “At RMC Sport we like to implement new workflows. We had been thinking about producing a live remote production and not just a trial for quite some time, so with AMP Visual TV and our own Letsee team we

Paris Basketball vs Aix Maurienne at AccorHotels Arena Paris, 26 January. Photos: Paris Basketball 36

Pro B Basketall Championship

chose a basketball game,” said Luc Pannier, director of broadcasting and production for the Altice Group, owner of RMC Sport. This is the first time a Pro B (second division of the National Basketball Championship) regular-season match has ever been held at the AccorHotels Arena in Paris-Bercy — two days after the NBA Paris Game 2020 between Charlotte and Milwaukee. Equipment used for coverage was identical to that of a traditional match produced with the help of the IXI Live mobile unit. Seven cameras were deployed around the basketball court with five camera operators manning the three cameras on the sidelines, plus one for wide shots and one for close-ups, with two minicams positioned behind the hoops. “We placed a sensor at the base of the wide-angle camera that, depending on the shot, automatically enabled the minicam to follow the direction of the action. The interesting thing about our set-up is that we used traditional 300Mb fibre broadband instead of a costly dark fibre network to send seven video and audio signals as well as all the other data,” said François Valadoux, deputy CEO for technical resources at AMP Visual TV. On-site at the AccorHotel Arena in Bercy there was a pared-down production crew of five camera operators, some assistants and two sound engineers. At the AMP Visual TV media centre (which has moved from the 15th arrondissement of Paris to join the nerve centre of the group’s studio facilities situated at la Plaine Saint Denis, close to the future Olympics village), the crew members who usually work in the IXI Live mobile unit were calling the shots. They included a director, LSM operator, digital imaging technician, sound engineer and, for the graphics, a dedicated broadcast designer from Tangodelta, services provider for the Professional Basketball League. Worth mentioning is the fact that the commentator and the sports analyst were also in a remote location and just the on-air announcer was present at the stadium to be on set and conduct interviews. “As far as I am concerned, it makes no difference that we are not on site. Directions are given in real-time (as well as tally signals for the camera operators),” said match director Raphael Gaborieau. “Before the match, I was told there would probably be a one-second delay between transmitting and receiving the signals back at the studio but the delay was barely a quarter of a second. “For the remote production I used a ViBox, like I normally would in the production truck and I could even have single-handedly managed the slomo replays if needed,” said Gaborieau. “However I chose to go to the stadium to check the camera positions and for a briefing with the operators on site. Otherwise we could have simply used skype to visualise each position.” SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

OB-Van Production 6-12 Cameras Full crew $10,000-$20,000

Automated Production** 1 Fixed system $40-$100

Live or on-demand capture and delivery @ 25/30 FPS or 50/60 FPS Full-featured customizable OTT platform Video breakdown and stats

Graphics, ads, videos and post-match highlights Interactive mobile app for fan engagement Low-latency feed for data companies

svgeuropeupdate

BBC’s Barbara Slater wins SVGE Women Achievement Award 2020 Director of Sport rewarded for her continuing impact on women in sports TV BY WILL STRAUSS

VG Europe Women’s latest networking event was another huge success with more than 200 people attending the sports TV industry get-together at BT Sport’s studios in London on Thursday 30 January 2020. The second SVG Europe Women Winter Networking Event, held in partnership with BT Sport and Timeline TV, featured the live filming of ‘The Abi Stephens Show’ and included ‘The Big Debate’ which pitted the brains of engineers against educators on the subject of inclusion in engineering. The evening culminated in the presentation of the inaugural SVG Europe Women Achievement Award, recognising outstanding achievements in sports broadcasting by the BBC’s director of sport, Barbara Slater. More than 200 men and women from across the sports TV community attended the event, with representation from broadcasters, production companies, services providers, technology developers and more. Following drinks and networking, the event kicked off with an introduction from sports presenter Sarra Elgan who, in turn, invited Heather McLean, SVG Europe editor and the internal head of SVG Europe Women, onto the stage to discuss the initiative, its purpose, and where it is going. 38

SVG Europe Women Winter 2020

During the conversation, McLean described the initiative as being “about bringing more diversity into this industry” and generating “the momentum that is needed to maintain progress.” “If your workforce lacks women, you’re missing out,” she said. “Women need to be represented, and they bring a fresh, broad insight that we all need.” Next up was ‘The Abi Stephens Show’ which was filmed live – with audience participation – in a chat show format. Stephens interviewed BT Sport women’s football expert and former Lionesses goalkeeper Rachel BrownFinnis, newly appointed BT Sport OB manager Charlotte Winter, and Bob Clarke, founder and chief executive at the MAMA Youth Project. The guests discussed women and inclusivity, how to encourage greater diversity in sports broadcasting, and the importance of strong female role models. The production of the show was filmed by a crew from BT Sport and will be edited into a ‘making of’ programme that will be used by SVG Europe Women as an educational resource for young people looking to move into, or to learn more about, broadcasting roles behind the camera. After an introduction to the educational initiative Rise-Up from director Carrie Wootten, Elgan took to the stage once more with three engineers and three educators in a session titled, ‘The Big Debate: Engineers versus Educators.’ Speakers discussed, somewhat heatedly at times, what needs to be done to bring more women into both engineering careers within sports broadcasting and to develop the educational tracts to get them there. Topics included the disparity between the desire and the educational prerequisites that deter or prevent women from going in that direction, as well as the value of learning on the job. The finale of the evening was the presentation of the inaugural SVG Europe Women Achievement Award 2020. BBC’s Slater picked up the award, which was presented by Stephens, McLean, and Lise Cosimi, external head of SVG Europe Women.

Left to right: Lise Cosimi, external head of SVG Europe Women; Barbara Slater, BBC director of sport; and Heather McLean, SVG Europe editor and internal head of SVG Europe Women (Photos: James Cumpsty) SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

live production and networking solutions â&#x20AC;&#x201C; powered by arkona technologies www.arkona-technologies.de

Capture the Moment The Best Video Quality for Sports Events Broadcasting

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeuropeupdate

Sarra Elgan chairs ‘The Big Debate’, pitting educators against engineers

Cosimi commented: “Barbara Slater is a worthy winner of the first-ever SVG Europe Women Achievement Award. It was a hard decision for the SVG Europe Women Advisory Board to find the right person to present this award to. “However, Barbara stood out as a person who has not only enjoyed a long and incredibly successful career throughout years when it wasn’t necessarily simple to achieve what she has achieved as a woman, especially in the sports broadcasting arena but over 2019 she also spearheaded the BBC’s #changethegame women’s summer of sport. “That campaign showcased athletes, teams and presenters, and has really helped push women’s sport into the mainstream,” continued Cosimi. “Barbara is a figurehead and role model for all women looking to move into sports broadcasting or to push

SVG Europe Women Winter Event

SVG Europe Women Winter 2020

themselves further up the career ladder. It was our pleasure to present Barbara with this award,” Cosimi concluded. Slater took up her role as BBC director of sport in April 2009 having previously been head of production and head of general sports for the department. She is responsible for approximately 20,000 hours of global sports coverage across radio, TV and online each year, including live sporting events, highlights, sports news and magazine programmes. Her responsibilities include working with governing bodies to retain a broad portfolio of broadcasting rights, overseeing the planning and coverage of major sporting events and leading the sports journalism operation at BBC Sport’s home in Salford. Slater joined the BBC in 1983 as a trainee assistant producer in the Natural History Unit in Bristol, but has spent most of her career as a producer in BBC Sport, specialising in outside broadcasts and overseeing the production of a range of sports including tennis and golf. She was awarded the OBE in 2014 for her services to sports broadcasting. Slater, who grew up in Birmingham, was an international gymnast, competing for Great Britain at the Olympic Games in Montreal in 1976. Rounding the evening off before guests returned to the bar for more networking, McLean announced the launch of SVG Europe Women Speakers Corner, a managed database of female speakers that will be made available to the whole industry. Its purpose is to increase the number of women seen on stage across seminars and events in Europe. WATCH: The Abi Stephens Show

Speakers on the Engineering side L/R: • Roisin McKenir y, head of production technology, Timeline TV • Sandy Isnard, solutions architect, Telstra Broadcast Services • Carys Hughes, design engineer, emerging technologies, Sky Speakers on the Education side L/R: • Polly Hickling, course leader for the Media Technology Programme at Solent/University of Southampton • Susan Pratt, director of teaching and learning, Department of Music and Media, Film and Video Production Technology, University of Surrey • Dr Ajaz Ali, course director, Digital Television Technology and Degree Apprenticeships, Ravensbourne

WATCH: The Big Debate: Engineers versus Educators

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

Blackbird runs in any browser on just 2Mb/s What does your pro video editor need?

www.blackbird.video

Introducing the World’s Fastest Editor

New DaVinci Resolve cut page and editor keyboard let you work faster than ever! The new cut page in DaVinci Resolve 16 is the first major innovation in professional video editing in over 20 years! Designed for short quick turn around projects, the cut page is all about speed. Featuring a streamlined interface with intelligent new “smart” tools, the cut page and DaVinci Resolve Editor Keyboard are designed to save you hours of time on each job.

Learn more at www.blackmagicdesign.com/nl

SportTech JOURNAL AUTUMN 2020 Sports Video Group Europe_Resolve_Editor_Keyboard_V2.indd 1

DaVinci Resolve 16 .......................................................................................... Free DaVinci Resolve Studio 16................................................................... €269* DaVinci Resolve Editor Keyboard............................................... €895* *Prices subject to change.

41 1/7/20 2:58 pm

svgeuropeupdate

International Federations Summit

SVG Europe’s Ken Kerschbaumer (pictured, left), ITN Production’s Alastair Waddington (middle), and Richard Lawson (right) discuss the relationship between ITN Productions and World Athletics at the International Federations Summit

International Federations Summit puts innovation front and centre for OTT 2020 event in Lausanne focuses on OTT, fan engagement and esports BY KEN KERSCHBAUMER

he third annual International Federations Summit (IFS), produced by Major Events International (MEI) in association with SVG Europe, brought together dozens of federations and executives from related technology providers for a day of information exchange and learning in Lausanne. The focus of the event was to help attendees understand the current state of the federations marketplace as it relates to planning championships and events, finding a host city for an event, how to more effectively build their fan bases and athlete participation, and how technology like OTT and production services can make a difference. One of the highlights was a presentation by ITN Productions discussing its efforts as World Athletics 42

Productions, a joint effort with World Athletics (formerly the International Association of Athletics Federations) launched two years ago. World Athletics found itself in a post-Usain Bolt vacuum when it came to know superstars and working closely with ITN was key to improving that situation. “We have a deeply embedded relationship with the federation,” said Alastair Waddington, ITN Productions, director of sport and MD of World Athletics Productions. The presentation highlighted the evolving relationship between federations and their production partners. With World Athletics, ITN was providing everything from the live production to social media content, coaching video, sales promos, infomercials, branded content, and more. “There was a concerted effort from everyone to start from the same base and create heroes, improve storytelling, and create narratives that engage people with the sport,” said Waddington. “The possibilities of remote production are increasing by the day as the connectivity gets better. The days of a full OB rig on-site for seven days are ending.” That effort included the production side to work very closely with everything from the World Athletics communications team, event sports presentation, and more. “Athletics for the last 40 years has always been from a distance and shot wide,” said Waddington. “We wanted SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svg-halfpage-2020 (1).pdf

02/07/2020

13:26

Deliver powerful and profitable direct-to-consumer experiences and stream live sporting events with our scalable live streaming and OTT solutions.

CMY

System Integration Innovation for Broadcast and Media Environments. Telia / Streamteam Remote Production Hub, Helsinki

Future-driven approaches for content creators. IP-Based Production ST 2110 Remote Production Virtual Studios Content Management Workflows Cloud-Based Infrastructures

Full IP SMPTE 2110 OB Van

www.broadcast-solutions.de

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeuropeupdate

“Most fans are watching at home and we needed to fill the gap so we did that with our social media platform” ALEXANDRE MOLINA

to get up close and personal with lots about the faces, stresses, and strains of human achievement.” The athletes themselves are also playing a part, especially as social media continues to be a bigger and bigger part of their own lives and marketing. “The federations are getting much better at listening to their athletes and having them drive the profile of the event,” said Waddington. “They are no longer saying you can’t do this or that because that doesn’t work in today’s world.” Richard Lawson, ITN Productions, commercial production director, said the team produced films for the World Athletics Congress in 15 different countries without a single person needing to get on a plane, giving sustainability efforts a boost. “With our newsroom legacy and TV production expertise we can move very fast and deliver value,” said Lawson. Waddington added that a well-run production can also be cost-effective. “When we looked at the previous plan for our first event, we were able to take 25 per cent of the cameras out of the plan,” he said. “There is a tendency that more cameras equals better but as we move forward the cameras are getting more versatile. And the possibilities of remote production are increasing by the day as the connectivity gets better. The days of a full OB rig on-site for seven days are ending.”

Federation perspectives

The potential for growth in the Middle East and Saudi Arabia was highlighted by Alistair Gosling, founder and CEO of Extreme International. Exteme International has a media division, events division, and destination division where they consulate with governments to understand opportunities around extreme sports. “I liken Saudi Arabia right now to a rose as it is now starting to open up,” he said. “And a massive part of the country’s transformation is from sport which goes hand in glove with tourism projects.” Scott Over, commercial director of World Sailing, pointed to a huge year for the federation with the Olympics, the 36th America’s Cup, and the second year of the Off-Shore World Championship which looks to become an Olympic sport in Paris in 2024. “That’s a really big deal,” said Over. “The Olympics are the pinnacle of the regatta format.” With World Sailing, added Over, there is also gender equality (with mixed classes at the Olympics), and a real drive to get sponsors like Rolex and Hempel to get on board with sustainability efforts. “Partnering with a paint company is tricky when it comes to things like sustainability and we are working with Coca Cola so that any sustainability efforts at our 44

International Federations Summit

events are realised as things like climate change are important to us,” he said. Alexandre Molina, Formula 1, director of events, discussed the evolution of F1 since Liberty Media purchased it for US $4.6bn in 2017. “For the first time in 70 years we had a head of marketing, sponsorship, and digital,” he said. “When Liberty Media took over, we had never done research or a survey so did a big online research project to understand who our fans were.” The results showed that the sport had about a half a billion fans, and 250 million could be considered avid fans. But even with that many avid fans only four million actually could get to a race, meaning that less than two per cent had a first-hand love affair with the sport. “Most fans are watching at home and we needed to fill the gap so we did that with our social media platform so we could bring the sport to the fans as when people can touch and feel the sport you can convert them from one category to another,” he explained. “There is space for everyone, from the casual to the avid fan.” OTT turned out to be a big part of the engagement process as Molina said the avid fan wants all the information and will be willing to pay for it while the casual fan relies on free-to-air TV. “The biggest issue is if fans want something but can’t get it,” he said. “You need to keep things simple and then create steps to convert them from one category to the next.” The challenge all federations face (and their broadcast and OTT rights holders) is how to turn sports brands into something more akin to an entertainment brand. “Digital and connecting to the fan is the hot topic of the moment and you need to lay down a foundation to do that. OTT, CRM and web site development are all important digitally.” Those involved in esports, for example, understand how to build a weekend of music and other fan engagement activities around the core competitions. F1 has done something similar with activation zones in cities where the races are being held, walks on the track, and, yes, concerts. “The first focus is the fans and how to create a better experience for them,” said Molina. “They engage more when events are downtown at bars and hotels.You need to make parties where they celebrate their own relationship with the sport.” One key, said Molina, is to stop calling them fans and instead call them consumers. “When you call them fans you add in an emotional side that makes them more tolerant than a regular consumer,” he said. “A fan will be accepting of a lot more [shortcomings] than a consumer but that can also be more dangerous [to the relationship].You need a seamless environment.” SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

Live TV made simple Fast, secure delivery of your live UHD content, to and from anywhere in Europe. Find out more about our TV Outside Broadcast services at mediaandbroadcast.bt.com/svg

Media and Broadcast

101313_M&B SVGE_ad_125x189mm_v1.indd 1

BACK TO BROADCAST

26/06/2020 09:27

Whether itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s remote working, remote production or another way to get you on air safely, Calrec has a range of remote and virtualised options to keep you there, wherever you are. How remote do you want to go? #BackToBroadcast

calrec.com/remote-working SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeuropeupdate

Biathlon World Championships 2020

View of the Südtirol Arena situated at the end of the Antholz valley

Live from Antholz: Eurovision Services shoots clean for Biathlon World Championships 2020 in Italy BY ROBERTO LANDINI

ituated at the end of the Antholz valley in northern Italy, on the borders of Switzerland and Austria, and at an altitude of 1600m, the Biathlon Arena or ‘Südtirol Arena’ is an ideal venue for the Biathlon World Championships 2020. Set in a beautiful landscape among the mountains, forests and a lake, the arena can accommodate over 15,000 fans in a huge grandstand area that was extended for the occasion. A further 6,000 fans can follow the competition from the famous area Huber Alm, just opposite the stadium. It is a fittingly dramatic venue for the flagship International Biathlon Union (IBU) event which is currently mid-way through its ten-day run, and has already featured the highest-level cross-country skiing and rifle shooting action. Eurovision Services, part of the EBU, is the host broadcaster for the tournament and is the IBU’s service provider for worldwide distribution of all of its events. The live broadcast feeds from Antholz-Anterselva are being sent to more than 18 European members plus other 46

broadcasters worldwide, including channels in America and China. Rights licensees include ORF (Austria), BTRC (Belarus), CT (Czech Republic), TV2 (Denmark), ERR (Estonia), YLE (Finland), ARD and ZDF (Germany), RUV (Iceland), RAI (Italy), LT (Latvia), NRK (Norway), C1R (Russia), RTVS (Slovakia), RTVS (Slovenia), SVT (Sweden), SSR (Switzerland) and PBC (Ukraine).

Capturing the action

Eurovision Services is not only responsible for capturing and distributing all the necessary audio, video and data signals for linear TV but also the various bits of different content for specialist services and media. While visiting the site and following the broadcast operations along the shooting range, the start zone, the oval penalty loop and the mixed zone near the finish, SVG Europe caught up with Mathieu Miraucourt, project manager at Eurovision Services. “The complexity of this World Championship has called upon our expertise in many different areas,” he explains.“The TV compound had to host large number of SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

Biathlon World Championships 2020

svgeuropeupdate

vehicles and equipment for rights holders in a relatively small space, including office containers for the crews, the master control room, TOC and management offices.” A huge range of different tools are being used to capture the action at the Biathlon World Championships. There are 43 camera positions in total including a four-pole Movicom RobyCam above the stadium, a rail cam at the shooting range, a skidoo camera over a motor sledge and a drone. It doesn’t end there, as Miraucourt reveals. “We have also prepared several other zones: a giant LED wall facing the seats, several external TV studio booths under transparent tents, a dedicated roof studio for ZDF, a mixed zone by the finish line for some 20 broadcasters, plus reserve spaces, 23 fully or partially equipped commentary positions, a bigger studio for NRK in an elevated position near the shooting range, as well as some bulletproof cabins for cameras.” monitor, tablet, video feed, internet connection, power supply, return line, communications and IP codecs.” Warm and ready-to-use commentary positions All the signals are delivered to a commentary control room where Managing the commentary and the commentary positions requires a Lawo system, a computer and AEQ audio interfaces control and a lot of attention to detail, as broadcast engineer Etienne des Roseaux manage everything from mic levels and mixing to audio-over-IP explains. transmission and delivery. “My job is mainly to assist all Eurovision Services customers who “We have implemented two different transmission modes,” booked a fully or partially equipped commentary position. Each continues des Roseaux. “For example, some customers use a private journalist finds a warm and completely ready-to-use commentary optical fibre connection to Paris, while for others the transmission is booth facing the arena.We provide mic, headphone, commentary unit, relayed on the internet to avoid any possible network congestion.

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeuropeupdate

Biathlon World Championships 2020

The main TV compound was situated next to the arena

“The main idea is to avoid any possible issues since everybody here is using the internet, so we are supplying different symmetric 1.5 Mbps connections for each codec. This allows us to exit from Italy to Geneva on a protected path while leaving public internet free for all. “This hub allows us to easily handle high-quality audio over IP connections for all, from signal generation to final delivery.” Patrick Johanny: “In total we are covering more than 330 hours of live television on linear TV”

it took around eight months to be ready,” he says. “The main TV compound is next to the arena, but some other OB vans are set up at the Anterselva di Mezzo Medal Plaza, mainly for RAI, with a studio, the South Tirol House, and a show stage. These are linked to our main TV compound by fibre and from here we connect Anterselva to our main POPs on the Eurovision Global Network by double 10 Gbps links. “In total, we are covering more than 330 hours of Connectivity challenges from the live television on linear TV, with most broadcasters Antholz valley also offering supplementary coverage on their digital As with most events, getting data and signals in and out platforms.” The IBU Biathlon World Championships 2020 of, and around the venue, is key at the Biathlon World continues in Antholz-Anterselva, Italy, until 23 February. Championships. But being at the end of the Antholz valley means that the available connectivity is limited. Production facts and figures “We managed to find a solution for the last stretch from the nearest POP in Brunico, in the main valley,” says • For the whole event, Eurovision Services Patrick Johanny, supervisor events engineering. deployed a crew of 100 technicians and “Our multiplexer here guarantees the generation of the engineers three TV feeds, which include pre- and post-competition • A double 10 Gbps fibre connection linked the coverage: the World Feed Programme as a main feed, the venue to the Eurovision Global Network. Shooting Range plus graphics, and a third enhanced feed • Venue is equipped with double redundant plus graphics.” power supply everywhere, guaranteed by An SNG truck is being used either as a backup or as a two power generators, one serving all tech main unit depending on the technical parameters of the operations and the other dedicated to lighting transmission. This is judged daily, says Johanny. • Experienced biathlon director Ola Fagerheim The biathlon set-up is quite complex, he continues, from NRK is part of the production team, making note of the changing weather, but Eurovision which also includes technical crew from the Services has been producing and distributing winter Norwegian broadcaster sports events for many years and has lots of experience in • NEP supplied all the technical equipment, such matters. Planning started early for this event. rigging, cameras, eight people for the RobyCam “We started studying everything around one year ago and and the host broadcasting OB unit for some specific installations here like the TV compound, SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

Advanced Virtual Graphics Made Easy. chyronhego.com

Virtual Placement allows you to create and insert data-driven 3D graphics, virtual advertising elements and other sponsored enhancements on field or within live video.

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeuropeupdate

Coronavirus crisis: NAB and Football Summit

Crowds at NAB 2019 in Las Vegas: When will we ever see the like again?

Coronavirus outbreak: NAB and SVG Europe Football Summit join list of postponed industry events BY WILL STRAUSS

n what has been a tumultuous week for just about everyone around Europe, not just those working in sports broadcasting, the ongoing concern about the impact of the coronavirus outbreak has caused the postponement of both the NAB technology expo in Las Vegas and SVG Europe’s Football Summit conference in Berlin. On Wednesday evening (11 March) NAB president and chief executive Gordon Smith issued a letter to the

Delegates arriving for NAB 2019 at the LVCC in Las Vegas 50

NAB Show community explaining that the show would be moved to a later date citing concerns over the spread of the coronavirus and COVID-19. While SVG Europe announced on Thursday (12 March) that it had decided to postpone Football Summit 2020 and the accompanying eSports Focus until later in the year for the same reason. The postponements follow the cancellation of South by Southwest in Texas, the postponement of BroadcastAsia and the re-scheduling of CabSat in Dubai and Prolight + Sound in Germany. Similarly, major sporting events are being deferred or cancelled and various leagues and competitions are either being put on hold or playing matches behind closed doors due to the global pandemic. NAB president Smith said of the postponement of the Vegas expo: “In the interest of addressing the health and safety concerns of our stakeholders and in consultation with partners throughout the media and entertainment industry, we have decided not to move forward with NAB Show in April. “We are currently considering a number of potential alternatives to create the best possible experience for our community.” SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeuropeupdate

Coronavirus crisis: NAB and Football Summit

The decision followed a raft of announcements from major exhibitors, including AJA, Adobe, Avid and EVS, that they wouldn’t be attending NAB. Similarly, many sports broadcasters, production companies and service suppliers have placed travel restrictions on staff. The first NAB Show was held in 1923 in New York. The tech expo has become an annual pilgrimage for many involved in sports broadcasting and regularly attracts 100,000 visitors. More than 1600 companies were due to exhibit this year. NAB 2020 was due to take place on 18-22 April.

Football Summit 2020

SVG Europe’s decision to postpone Football Summit 2020 and the accompanying eSports Focus was made with the health and well-being of delegates, sponsors, speakers and staff in mind, the organisation said. A new date for the events will be announced in due course. SVG Europe chairman Alessandro Reitano explained: “With the impact of the coronavirus being felt around Europe, the decision to postpone was made as a precautionary measure to mitigate the health and safety risk for everyone involved in the eSports Focus and Football Summit.

“At the same time, with many speakers and delegates now unable to attend due to corporate travel restrictions, it also takes into account our perception that the quality of the event can no longer be guaranteed. By making a decision now, SVG Europe hopes to also provide some certainty for sponsors, delegates and speakers alike during what is a very fluid and fast-changing situation.” SVG Europe general manager Joe Hosken added: “It has become increasingly clear in recent days that asking people to travel during a global health crisis is not the right thing to do. The safety, security and good health of participants at SVG Europe events is of the highest priority.” Sporting events have been hit hard by the coronavirus outbreak. LaLiga in Spain has been suspended for the next two round of fixtures while the NBA season has been put on hold in the US. At the time of writing, UEFA was reviewing whether to suspend the Champions League and Europa League while England’s international friendly against Denmark at Wembley in March was expected to be cancelled. The Indian Wells tennis tournament and the FIS Alpine Ski World Cup Finals in Cortina were both cancelled due to coronavirus fears. Information correct as of 12:45 UK on 12 March 2020

“The decision to postpone was made as a precautionary measure to mitigate the health and safety risk for everyone involved” ALESSANDRO REITANO

Stay connected with Agent-IC ®

Remote broadcast production with a next generation mobile intercom solution

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeuropeupdate

EMG Italy puts disaster recovery plans in place BY ROBERTO LANDINI

hree Italian associates of the pan-European Euro Media Group — 3Zero2, Global Production and Netco Sports — have adapted quickly to the subject of disaster recovery. To overcome the current emergency situation due to the coronavirus outbreak they have implemented rigorous security, technological and logistical/organisational measures in order to guarantee continuity of service.

Production and engineering crews with facemasks in Global Production OB9 52

Coronavirus crisis: Disaster recovery

“We are certainly in the presence of a serious emergency but it has not caught us unprepared,” said Stefano Bianco, CEO of Global Production. “The current situation is that shooting of all Italian football matches is postponed — not cancelled — until 3 April. “We have started an effective collaboration with the City of Turin and the health bodies of Piedmont. We also shot and produced some videos for hygiene and health prevention, mini-documentaries that teach some effective hygiene rules against contagion, broadcast on various channels, on national, private and social TV channels,” he said. Davide Furlan, co-CEO of Global Production said: “I would like to underline that for several weeks we have guaranteed the maximum safety of our personnel operating on mobile vehicles, with rigorous hygiene measures. Despite the concern, [sport] TV production in Italy has suffered a temporary stop, which is necessary for prevention of the further spread of the virus. “But we agree with the main Italian broadcasters who speak of suspension and not cancellation of activities. In fact, all projects and productions are only postponed, and certainly not cancelled. “In practice, our official position is of realism and optimism: the situation is difficult and we are forced to stop for a while, but we will re-start with enthusiasm as soon as possible.” Claudio Cavallotti, general sales manager of Netco Sports said: “Even before the guidelines from the Italian Ministry of Health sanctioned the precautionary measures of isolation, we had already started to implement these procedures, including smart working and teleworking. “The two operational phases involved the application of extreme hygiene and safety measures for all employees, interpersonal distances, masks, sanitised supplies, hand washes and constant checks with thermometers. “Initially we managed part of the work remotely and part in smart working with minimum controls in the company and intelligent shifts of reduced staff. Then, two weeks ago, we physically closed the headquarters in via De Ruta and all operations continue with teleworking and remote production. “The slowdown is due to the temporary cancellations of football matches. So, at the moment, all the production activities of Netco Sports are continuing without significant decreases in our operations.” Mario Rasini, who at the start of March returned to the role of CEO of 3ZeroTV after an 18-month break, said: “I am happy to be back in the saddle, albeit at a rather delicate moment, in which Italy is in great pain due to Covid-19. I thank everyone — the internal and external staff of 3Zero2Tv, Netco Sports and Global Production — who are doing a great job to guarantee, as always, the highest quality and safety levels.” SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

VIRTUAL GRAPHICS FOR SPORTS IMAGE-BASED PROCESSING

VAR ADD-ON

DATA PROVIDER VIZUALISATION

AUTOMATIC PLAYER TRACKING 3D CAMERA FLIGHT

FAST CALIB

[DELTA-offside] [DELTA-highlight]

[DELTA-live]

ENHANCE YOUR LIVE AND STUDIO PRODUCTIONS www.deltacast.com â&#x20AC;¢ contact@deltacast.com Deltacast_halfpage_2020.indd 1 SportTechJOURNAL

AUTUMN 2020

3/07/20 11:02

svgeuropeupdate

Coronavirus crisis: OB production

TV Skyline built its own transparent plexiglass partitions between workstations

Partitioned TV Skyline Ü8UHD OB delivers live music evening for SWR BY FERGAL RINGROSE

here are no live sports events taking place in Germany but the OB team at TV Skyline is keeping trucks rolling with various music productions, an improvised coronavirus-inspired satirical weekly show for ZDF, and live televised church services at the weekends. TV Skyline joint CEO Robert Kis is finding a new atmosphere, a feeling of togetherness and solidarity, where television teams have managed to come together for any live productions in Germany during the coronavirus crisis.

Last week the team took flagship Ü8UHD on the road for a live music special, with transparent plexiglass screens separating workspaces and a rigorous cleaning and disinfecting routine in place to ensure every working surface on the truck was sanitised for the crew’s safety. “This was a music show in Germany which was broadcast live on SWR. Our client was Riverside Entertainment. There was a host and four musicians, all separated from each other,” said Kis.“Viewers could make requests on social media or on the phone and they sang SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeuropeupdate

Coronavirus crisis: OB production

the requested song. This show was a special edition, not a regular show. “We started on 8 April with rigging and rehearsing and the show was on Thursday 9 April. This was a two and a half hour show — there were a lot of requests for songs and there was also quite a good mood among the guys in front of the camera. “Something weird happened: it was like everyone on-site felt something really special — not normal — was happening. Things that used to be normal, like live production, this was all in a day’s work. Suddenly, a live production becomes something very valuable and very special. Maybe it sounds a bit weird, but a feeling of togetherness developed on-site. It’s really hard to describe. “And there were not very many cameras — it was not really a challenge technically. But all the preparatory meetings and telephone calls in advance become really important as there was such a great uncertainty on all sides in the current situation. We had just five operator cameras; not really a big production and not really anything to talk about,” he said. “We are quite fortunate to have big trucks. For this show we used the complete OB8 truck with all rooms — our trucks have a lot of space. We outsourced some workstations with monitors and intercom outside the truck, in separate rooms, for producers and visitors. “We also built, on our own, new transparent partitions between the workstations. This is our own development — nobody can buy this at the moment. We wanted something we could easily assemble and de-assemble; the partitions fit in any of our trucks and you can place them anywhere,” said Kis. “It was very important for us that the team members did not have the feeling that they were isolated. They could still communicate with each other and could see what was happening everywhere in the OB.” Each room in the vehicle also has its own low-pressure air conditioning system, which does not cause air turbulence. “This is an important element that nobody has talked about so far. We have not created all our trucks with this kind of air conditioning because of a virus coming in 2020. All our new big trucks since 2014 have had separate this air conditioning. “We’ve had a lot of feedback from clients over the years that they feel very comfortable in our OBs. Normally in an OB the first thing everyone does is put on a scarf and a big jacket. It’s so cold because of the technical areas. But we try to create trucks where people feel comfortable to be and to work with each other — and they want to stay longer.” All workplaces and work equipment in the truck were disinfected repeatedly during the music show production. “We disinfected every working space — everything you can touch while you work. Also the headsets for the camera guys: everything we could do, we think we did.” SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

New production spirit and way of working on OBs

“We also have some productions with live streaming,” said Kis. “There’s a new comedy format on ZDF called ‘Homies’ with two young comedians staying at home, one in Bremen and one in Berlin. We travel there with a small staff and small kit and all the signals come here to our home base in Mainz, and hundreds of fans are involved via the internet. This is a live production, a weekly comedy show about what’s happening at the moment with the corona crisis. “At the moment, live production only works if everyone takes better care of each other. Two weeks ago we made the final of German Idol, a live show in Ultra HD with OB8. All the experiences of the last few weeks, which also include broadcasting church services, we have the feeling that everyone — whether in front or behind the camera, client, customer, supplier — is taking better care of each other. “We have to change the ‘we always did it this way’ mentality: now we have to re-think all the processes as new. But this way of working is going to have to be the ‘new normal’ for a considerable period, as we try to restart live sports production. “Yes I think we will have to change our working routines for a long period — and maybe not all the new routines are bad. Maybe we will keep some of them, for example the partitions between the individual workstations. “Maybe that’s something we all wish to preserve, to keep, for the future. We all do what we love, which is to work on live television: you must be very crazy to work in the television industry! But we all love what we do and hopefully we can work on very soon and take care of each other. It’s a lot of fun and the result is great because everybody loves what they do,” he said. The biggest question in German sports right now is when and how the Bundesliga season can restart. Discussions about whether it can resume will not now be considered until at least the next round of government talks, which will take place on April 30. Meanwhile German political leaders have confirmed that big events will remain forbidden until 31 August. This means football fans will not be allowed enter Bundesliga stadiums until 1 September at the earliest. Robert Kis says TV Skyline will be ready to resume its role in Bundesliga coverage, whenever games resume. “We are quite relaxed because we are prepared, with modern trucks and big trucks, where we will have partitions between working spaces. I think they plan to deliver the type of signal we are all used to: I believe the aim of the Bundesliga will not be to show ‘some kind of football’, but a Bundesliga that all the spectators are used to seeing.”

“We have to change the ‘we always did it this way’ mentality: now we have to re-think all processes” ROBERT KIS

svgeuropeupdate

Coronavirus crisis: Distributed remote production

BT Sport’s Live: Early Kick-Off is now produced by a truly remote, distributed team

BT Sport radicalises channel operation with decentralised remote production Distributed team producing all content plus seven topical programmes for today’s audience BY HEATHER MCLEAN

T Sport has taken the radical step of moving its entire production operation out of its studios at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, East London, and in just three weeks turned it into a decentralised remote operation. Pushed by UK governmental travel and social distancing restrictions placed on the British public due to the coronavirus pandemic, BT Sport moved quickly to be able to run the entirety of its channel output with just five people on location at its studios in Stratford, while every other member of staff works from their respective homes. That channel output includes seven topical programmes produced live or nearly live with all on-screen participants working alone, based out of their own homes, connected to the production teams by broadband or over EE’s 4G mobile network. The broadcaster has spent the last three weeks working to enable this new, at-home, distributed way of working. Staff have remote access to its Main Control Room, with all editing, compliance, scheduling, access to media management, and everything else required to run a 56

network now accessible off site. All of this access has been created from scratch in the last three weeks, Jamie Hindhaugh chief operating officer BT Sport, told SVG Europe. “We’ve got our whole team still working on producing all the content that goes out from BT Sport, but not at Stratford. We’ve literally done all of this [through] daily calls and implemented all of it in the last three and a half weeks. “I was determined that we didn’t try and break rules and that if the government advice was that you shouldn’t travel to work, that we didn’t ask our people to. So apart from that core team [of five people] we’ve been successful in that.”

Creating a virtual distributed gallery

Early on in the crisis, BT Sport put in new protocols that allowed its studios to still be used, but when the government announced only essential travel was allowed, social distancing encouraged, and no meetings of more than two people allowed, Hindhaugh commented, “I SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeuropeupdate

Coronavirus crisis: Distributed remote production

Jamie Hindhaugh: “So what we have is a complete remote production capability that is a virtual gallery”

stopped it, I set a task”. He sat down with Andy Beale, chief engineer at BT Sport, as well as Timeline TV and Moov: “[I said] just to be clear guys, I don’t want any of our production teams leaving their homes, and I don’t want anyone working within more than two metres of each other. So if you think about that brief, and you think about how a gallery runs, you look at it and think that’s just impossible. “But Andy being the brilliant Andy, and Dan [McDonnell] from Timeline TV being ever-brilliant as well, went off [and made it work].” Hindhaugh stated BT Sport has managed to go one step further than the concept of remote production, to distributed remote production. He explained: “Remote is about centralising your back end operation in one place, but what we’ve done is created a virtual representation of that central gallery and put that across the UK. So on the front row normally in a gallery you have a PA, a producer, a vision mixer and a director; in our new world, they’re all in their own homes, all operating as if they were beside each other, but spread out across the UK. They’re in people’s garages, they’re in people’s bedrooms. “So what we have is a complete remote production capability that is a virtual gallery, that’s being driven across the UK, connected by broadband and bonded 4G, everyone on talkback, enabling us to have a production SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

team that can produce live output, while meeting the criteria I set around making sure we behave in the way the government is advising us. I don’t think it’s been done before; I think it’s amazing.” Hindhaugh noted that having on-screen talent working from home as well as production teams was important because the audience had to be able to see that everyone was playing by the same rules.“For me, as soon as you see someone in a studio, you know they’ve had to travel there, so that’s a no-no.You shouldn’t have more than two people in a studio — we had to remind some people of that — because of gathering [limitations] so we can’t do that.” For its on-screen contributors, BT Sport has provided them with cameras in their homes; either broadcast quality cameras that they can operate themselves or remote pan and tilt cameras that the crew can control, or even the new iPhone with an app built by Timeline TV to create a broadcast smartphone, all with talkback.“So now we are able to produce live shows with VT inserts, graphic overlays; exactly as you would in a normal show, but all being produced from a network of homes across the UK.”

Topical relevant content

Once the technical side was set up, BT Sport was then able to think creatively around what content it would produce that would engage people today. BT Sport is now doing 57

svgeuropeupdate

Coronavirus crisis: Distributed remote production

new series, Live: UEFA Champions League + One Year, which will be rerunning cut downs of previous season’s Champions League and Europa League games with British teams, with live wraps including people that played in those games and varied analyses. Said Hindhaugh,“you can actually watch it, and feel like you’re watching a live event”. He continued: “So every day of the week we have live programming going out that’s editorially relevant, that’s engaging, that gives people a break from all the shit we’re in at the moment. I think that’s phenomenally exciting and I’m very proud of all of the teams, the fact we’re able to operate Stratford like we do [now], but also the fact that we’re able to create this programming. I’m so lucky to have people like Andy in my team, and relationships with people like Timeline TV and Moov. “It makes me smile, because I’m sat here in my son’s bedroom in Dorset, pulling all these different levers, and we are absolutely breaking whole new ways of working yet again. I’m phenomenally proud to be honest.”

The way of the future BT Sport chief engineer Andy Beale worked with Timeline TV and Moov to implement the new workflow

“We will keep this agility and we will keep this sort of infrastructure” JAMIE HINDHAUGH

seven live or nearly live topical shows a week, all filmed and produced remotely. Those that are nearly live are filmed on the same day so they are able to address breaking news and remain current, and to get audience engagement. Those programmes are: The Football’s Not On, a comedy show that is back next week, with the likes of Ian Stone, Omid Djalili and other comedians giving their take on the current world of football from a football fan’s perspective; Rugby Tonight On Tour on Wednesday nights; and Rugby Today every Sunday. The live programmes are: Saturday’s Live: Early KickOff going out with Jake Humphrey hosting live from home as (last weekend the first programme made in this way was pre-recorded — read more here); Scottish Football Extra on Friday night with hosts across Scotland and the rest of the UK; Sunday’s Live: MotoGP The Greatest Race, a live show where each week the team discuss a selection of races before one race advances to the final after a public vote live on social media, hosted by Gavin Emmett in the UK and Suzi Perry live from France,“again, creating hours of absolutely relevant programming, and the response to that was amazing; people were saying thank you,” said Hindhaugh. “If that had been hosted from a studio I don’t think it would have resonated in the same way, because people would have looked at it [in a more critical way], saying, “why have you travelled in when I can’t?”.” Also live from next week on Tuesday evenings is

This way of working is the future for BT Sport. It is going to fundamentally change the way the broadcaster works going forward, long after the COVID-19 pandemic is over, stated Hindhaugh. “For me, everything we’re doing here is for the long term. It’s not just to get us through to, ‘thank god we’re all back again’; this is about changing how we work, this is about enhancing what we have been doing with remote, this is about creating a more inclusive workforce, because we can offer opportunities to so many people who maybe have dependents and can’t leave the house, or can’t travel, or need to work part time. “The exciting thing about is all of a sudden there’s huge positives coming out of this which will change the way BT Sport operates and works for the better,” he noted. “We will keep this agility and we will keep this sort of infrastructure.” He continued: “I said to you before, within four years we’re going to do everything remote. This reminds me of the big financial crash where before that, people used to have long lunches, and after that it stopped. I think there will be some cultural shifts around this, and I think things will change, and if we embrace them, it will be really exciting.” Concluding, Hindhaugh said: “I think it’s important to reflect audiences; it’s a lot easier at the moment to see what audiences do and don’t like and what they will tolerate and what they won’t. I think what I’m looking at is a way of creating brilliant content, but more for less, complementing our top end live stuff, but tapping into that diverse, creative input, [whereas] before it was very much that you had to travel to a certain venue to be able to work to create content for BT Sport; that’s going to go.” SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

Teams who work together win together. Powering teams for creative collaboration to deliver those special moments in every game. Visit us at https://editshare.live/wintogether to learn more. ÂŠ2020 EditShare LLC

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeuropeupdate

Coronavirus crisis: RTBF OB truck

First of two 12-metre trucks leased and used by Belgian broadcaster RTBF

NEP Belgium and Broadcast Solutions complete RTBF truck through lockdown BY FERGAL RINGROSE

he COVID-19 lockdown across Europe failed to delay the delivery of a full-length new OB truck built by Broadcast Solutions for NEP Belgium and destined for RTBF. The team dedicated to building the truck continued to work remotely from home offices when the lockdown came in mid-March, and succeeded in delivering the vehicle on time for its 1 April deadline. The 12-metre truck is the first of two that will be leased and used by Belgian public broadcaster RTBF, which delivers TV, radio and streaming services to the Frenchspeaking part of Belgium. RTBF will use these trucks for its wide range of sports and entertainment shows. Two years ago RTBF opened a tender to build new trucks with an IP core and NEP Belgium won the tender. The two identical trucks are built by Broadcast Solutions, with the second due for delivery mid-year 2020. RTBF will rent the OBs from NEP Belgium. Both are currently HD, with the option to upgrade to UHD. RTBF chose the SMPTE 2110 approach because they needed a scalable truck and to use the two trucks together and connect them to the RTBF building, which is also going to be built in SMPTE 2110. Within the full-length trailer are workplaces for three audio, five production, four slomo, four engineering/ 60

CCU and two unilateral spaces. It houses a Sony XVS8000 vision mixer, Lawo V Matrix C100 core processing, Arista 100G core network, Lawo mc256 audio console, Genelec and Fostex speakers, Riedel Artist intercom and Lawo VSM control. PTP and reference signals, as well as the scopes and network control devices, are Tektronix. Screens are a mixture of Konvision and Sony. The truck can use 16 cameras and three 12-channel EVS, of which three cameras can be up to 6x super slomos. The complete core of the truck is SMPTE 2110, though it has the possibility to connect 16 baseband CCUs and 32 external inputs over baseband. It also has 32 outputs via baseband giving full flexibility between the IP world and the baseband world. NEP Belgium technical director Geert Thoelen told SVG Europe, “The truck was due to be delivered on 1 April, and on 13 March corona came to visit and the lockdown started. So all teams — NEP Belgium, Broadcast Solutions, Lawo and Sony — continued to work on the truck remotely and we managed to finish it on time. “We went over to visit the [Broadcast Solutions] factory in Germany and drove the truck here, and now everyone is working remotely from their home office to finish off some small details. The truck is here rather than at RTBF SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

Live Sports Production. Covered.

NEW & USED EQUIPMENT SALES 4K & HD EQUIPMENT HIRE SYSTEMS INTEGRATION OB TRUCK SALES

Sales: +44 (0)1923 650 080 Systems: +44 (0)1733 214 888 Hire: +44 (0)1923 811 520 esbroadcast.com

ES_BROADCAST_SVG_Europe_advert_20200706.indd 1

06/07/2020 15:06:05

CONTENT HUB A new way to manage your live content

For more details: www.eurovision.net/content-hub

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeuropeupdate

Coronavirus crisis: RTBF OB truck

Front row in foreground with Sony XVS-8000 switcher: control is via Lawo V Matrix C100 core processing, Arista 100G core network and Lawo VSM

because their offices are closed down until 3 May. The same applies to the second truck: everyone is continuing to work. “I’m very grateful to the teams working on this truck. We’ve had a daily session with everybody involved, all of them in their home offices and some with their kids next to them! Wow — they really did a great job,” said Thoelen.

Flexibility is key for range of live productions

“Both trucks are built in a way that they can connect to each other and become a 32 camera and six-channel EVS truck with two production rooms and two audio rooms. That then becomes a very big truck, which can also connect to whatever data centre you like, to use the shared resources of RTBF or NEP in the future,” continued Thoelen. “This really gives you all possibilities without thinking ‘OK we need to pull 200 BNCs now to do something! The complete system is buil to be non-blocking with a base-connectivity of 100Gbit/s. RTBF wanted to be able to use it on a small church service where you only have six cameras, all the way up to elections where they could do two different programmes with one truck. IP 2110 is really the only way to go. “In the tender RTBF specified they wanted at least 62

a core in SMPTE 2110. ‘At least a core’ means an Arista switch and no baseband matrix — the matrix is the Arista. But they had existing Sony cameras and EVSs that were still baseband. So we built a bunch of Lawo V Matrix around it, to integrate baseband with IP. “During the project RTBF changed their EVSs to IP, so now only the CCUs are brought from baseband to IP and the rest of the truck is full SMPTE 2110. The only other thing there was that we needed to add a Lawo V Pro to do the Dolby E aligning in the truck. “Always when we build a truck we think of flexibility: how can we use it for a rock concert, a classical concert, a cycling project or a football project? You can do anything with this truck. “The two trucks will be leased to RTBF for eight years. When I started the design I asked myself,‘if I get this truck back in eight years what would it be worth?’ That’s why I think 2110 and the V Matrix are ideal as in eight years it is still worth something. And in eight years it is guaranteed to still be a powerful truck. “I’ve seen so many trucks being built that after three years need a rebuild, and after four years they definitely need a rebuild! If the truck comes back to us I want it to be able to stay for at least another four years without having to re-do half of it,” said Thoelen. SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

UNCOVER THE NEW REPLAY EXPERIENCE

evs.com/replay #NewReplayExperience

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeuropeupdate

Coronavirus crisis: IABM & SVG webcast

Sports TV broadcast sector speaks out on IABM SVGE webcast BY FERGAL RINGROSE

“You just see a lot of very creative elements come out of nothing, probably that you never would see in normal life” TIMO KOCH

early 700 industry professionals registered as IABM and SVG Europe joined forces to produce a live 60-minute industry webcast on Thursday 30 April, exploring the impact of the coronavirus on the sports production industry with broadcasters, OB companies and vendors. The event, titled ‘How the CoronaVirus is affecting the Media Industry — A View from the World of Sport’, was open to all IABM Members and SVG Europe members and sponsors via the Zoom video conferencing platform. It was streamed live and then made available on-demand on both IABM and SVG Europe websites. The session began with an introduction by IABM chief executive Peter White, followed by a business intelligence update from IABM head of Insight & Analysis Lorenzo Zanni. Powered by IABM’s data-driven insights on the business of media technology, this presentation explored the impact of coronavirus on media technology investment with a special focus on how sports is adapting to these unprecedented times. This was followed by two panels produced by the SVG Europe editorial team, one featuring broadcasters and outside broadcast partners and the other featuring leading industry vendors. On the suppliers panel were Kevin Cottam, vice president Global Sports & Live Events, Ross Video; Anna Lockwood, head of Global Sales, Telstra Broadcast Services; and Will Pitt, head of Sport at Imagen. The moderator was Heather McLean, editor, SVG Europe. The broadcaster/OB panel consisted of Brian Clark, director of Sales, NEP Major Events; Timo Koch, director of Operations, Euro Media Group; and Alessandro Reitano, director Sports Production, Sky Deutschland and chairman of the SVG Europe Advisory Board. This session was helmed by SVG Europe editor Will Strauss.

“I feel it as much as anyone: I’m used to being on the road and going to lots of events including SVG events. But things are going quite well: it is a new reality. In the future this is definitely going to change the way business is done, with less travel for sure. “We continued manufacturing through the beginning of the pandemic,” said Cottam.“We did close the plant for about two weeks. We were back up and running in early April, and we’re basically back to full capacity. “Obviously the world of sport has been affected by this pandemic, worse than anyone else maybe.We’re just trying to assist as well as we can. Tech Support has transitioned to working from home and that has gone very well — we’ve had a lot of feedback from customers thanking us for the effort of the Tech Support team. We’re all looking forward to getting back to what ‘the new normal’ will be,” he said. Anna Lockwood pointed out that “we do have a diversified business in Telstra. We serve a lot of media and entertainment customers, but the sports business has been the most rapidly growing sector for us, especially internationally. “After the coronavirus crisis we’ve seen two different impacts: the live sports business has definitely been impacted and many of our live events have been hit. Some are still going on in Asia and Australia, so we are still delivering live sports. “But most of the top tier sports we would have been working on have been cancelled. These include the WTA, the Americas Cup and the Olympics of course, which would have been a very busy time for us. “But connectivity is critical at this time, more than ever,” said Lockwood. “So we are seeing a very positive spike on our network, both from our traditional sports customers who are using the network to distribute nonlive sports, and then of course from the video games, streaming and esports side of the business. We have seen We’re all looking forward to getting a big acceleration there over the last few weeks. back to what the ‘new normal’ will be “Telstra has actually brought forward about 500 million “It looks like we’re beginning to see a little bit of light at Aussie dollars to the financial year 2020 to expand in the the end of the tunnel, and I hope everyone stays safe,” said network and also invest in our 5G capability. That has Kevin Cottam.“We’re all hoping to get back to normal just been a direct impact of covid on our network investment,” as soon as possible. The sooner the better. said Lockwood. SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

RED NET IS T H E TRUSTED Ao I P SO LUTIO N FOR B ROAD CAST From a single channel live stream to a 1000-channel globally televised sporting event, Focusrite's RedNet AoIP interfaces are chosen for mission critical broadcasts where failure is not an option.

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeuropeupdate

Clockwise from top left: Kevin Cottam, Anna Lockwood, Will Pitt and Heather McLean

“We’ve seen two key trends going on since lockdown,” said Imagen’s Will Pitt. “Trend number one is very obvious: those who have media asset management capability in place, particularly cloud-based, having been using it more.Yes to be able to find gaps to fill in schedules created by the crisis, but also to able to use those asset management tools, those cloud tools in order to manipulate that content and make the best of it. “Trend number two we have noticed is that the market is really using this time to investigate what is possible. So they’re using their time to look at what is out there in the market, what problems they can solve. “Interestingly, most are not trying to change their entire operation overnight with a catch-all solution; rather they are trying to address one or two key problems they had when the world was, shall we say, normal, and looking to solve those two or three big headaches they have, through the use of cloud-based asset management solutions,” said Pitt.

You can close all the doors: opening them again is more difficult

NEP’s Brian Clark began by remarking, “Thanks for the opportunity to participate: it’s the first time I’ve worn a shirt in about five weeks! “We’re fortunate in that we have three different workflows in place: live events, broadcast and media services. What we’ve seen is that live sports has been hit pretty hard across the board and across the geographies. So now we’re more in a position to help with non-live content, for clients such as DAZN who have been putting out other non-live content and we’re supporting through the virtual platform that we help them with and support. That’s positive. “We’re also quite well diversified, and have used live sports technologies in other areas, such as covering the UK parliament — which you could call the world’s largest live sport. MPs behave worse than football fans! “But they’ve had to move from a physical environment to a virtual environment, and we’ve helped them make that move. That’s not just putting MPs on Zoom — that does not work. It’s actually applying a number of technologies we’ve learned about from other parts of the division and transitioned them across. “This [lockdown] is accelerating different workflows in different ways,” said Clark.“People are deploying virtualised kit and virtualised edits and remote commentaries from home to add commentary to older material. It is a challenge,” he said. “Sports OBs may be our core business, but fortunately we are 66

Coronavirus crisis: IABM & SVG webcast

Clockwise from top left: Will Strauss, Alessandro Reitano, Brian Clark and Timo Koch

diversified over a few segments,” said EMG’s Timo Koch. “Since most live sports have been cancelled, it did give us the opportunity — or forced us, whatever way you want to look at it — to start developing some new workflows. “We are exploring all stages of remote productions, some we probably never thought about before. The whole situation has forced us to rethink workflows and, as they say, sometimes great ideas emerge under pressure. “Some of the experiments turned out to work really well, and I think are almost ready to be implemented in a live sports setting as soon as live sports picks up again. We have seen some very creative alternatives,” said Koch. “One example is the Tour of Flanders, which obviously did not happen physically but it did virtually, where 13 of the top riders rode the last 30 kilometres literally on their home trainers at home. We put a camera in their home and it gave the viewers an insight into their home training environment. The whole thing was broadcast where the positions of the riders was graphically displayed on TV, and we had commentators both on TV and radio, making it look almost real! “You just see a lot of very creative elements come out of nothing, probably that you never would see in normal life,” said Koch. “It has been a crazy journey so far for a sports broadcaster that has no live sports any more,” said Sky Deutschland’s Alessandro Reitano. “For us, we worked hard to create fresh and attractive content for our customers nevertheless. “We embraced the task of covering coronavirus on top of our regular sports news so we’ve become what you might call a more generic news channel in a very short period of time. It was really important that we employed a ‘safe house’ strategy. “It was to some degree a mental thing, how people embraced change and how they dealt with the circumstances. Obviously we sent our people home; but we needed some really clear technical guidance in place as we introduced the new way of working. “We wanted to have everyone safe and producing new types of content; but on the other hand we needed to think about the re-start scenario, which is much more complex,” said Reitano. “You can close all the doors; but to open the doors again is far more complex. So this is where we needed a really clear technical disaster recovery concept, which was able to introduce the new way of working. This brought us to a very good place, producing good content and a good policy for our customers who are paying their subscriptions,” he said. SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

Point Source Excellence â&#x20AC;&#x201C; From Nearfield to Main Monitoring Genelec The Ones monitors are revered every day in thousands of studios around the globe for their perceptual qualities, technical brilliance and spectacular design. Now introducing the new members of The Ones Family, 8351B and 8361, and the Adaptive Woofer System, W371: Unparalleled room-tailoring continued to the lowest octaves, for the most critical listeners and applications. You donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know how great your room can sound before hearing it with natural direct sound, controlled reflections and pure neutral low frequency response. genelec.com/theones

SVGE_july2020.pdf

06/07/2020

15:17

Even during the most challenging times, you can rely on us to ensure flawless events coverage

CMJ

part of the Orange group

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeuropeupdate

Coronavirus crisis: Sky Italia

Sky Italia adapts content and operations through the coronavirus lockdown period BY ROBERTO LANDINI

ky Italia director of production and creative hub Riccardo Botta has told SVG Europe how the broadcaster moved to remote working well before the lockdown in Italy and has now mixed various professional, prosumer and consumer technologies together to enable work to continue and shows to remain on air during the crisis. “Protecting our people has been, at all times during this emergency, our number one priority,” said Botta. “While doing that, we have been working to continue to provide our customers with the best content Riccardo Botta: “We deployed a hybrid model: everyone in post experience. and GFX works from home” “Sky has put almost all of its employees in smart working since 24 February, two weeks ahead of the governmentimposed lockdown on 8 March. From that day, the area of Content Tech and Operations that I manage has 90% of its people working from home.” What impact has the coronavirus emergency had on production and the supply chain of content at Sky Italia? “The impact varies depending on the content. So far, there has been no significant impact on recorded content since the series and movies had been finalised pre-COVID. “Live shows are the most impacted by the current situation. At Sky we did not have many of these type of shows planned for these months, although our Late Night Show (EPCC), which returned on air this month, goes live from a theatre without an audience.” Were programmes cancelled? “With the exception of live sport, we did not lose any significant content. On the contrary, Sky TG24 was strengthened with dedicated coronavirus content and programmes. “We used technologies to enable our news department to be even more effective in working remotely and from 68

different areas of the country, in order to be able to report thoroughly and timely all relevant news on this terrible disease. For instance, thanks to the use of technology, we have launched anchoring from home for SkyTG24 and, as of last week, two or three editions a day are fully anchored from home.” How did you adjust your programming schedule to make up for lost content (live sports)? “Clearly, the suspension of virtually all live sports has affected our sports schedule significantly. However, Sky Sport has immediately put together a new schedule, which includes a lot of interaction with our customers, allowing them to be much closer to sportsmen and commentators (Casa Sky Sport, Juke Box) and we used content from our library to create themed-days (e.g. dedicated to the national team’s greatest games). “Despite the emergency, some key shows like Calciomercato and Sky Calcio Club have returned on air on Sky Sport24 thanks to new formats specifically tailored in compliance with social distancing rules. The anchors are the only ones physically in studio and the immersive technology — Ledwall and Robycam – allows for a 360° view. All the guests are connected through LiveU, Skype and Facetime. “We also started broadcasting esports (Football, F1 and MotoGP) in an ‘interactive’ way and have given journalists the ability to perform live or non-live voiceover of events from home or hybrid (main voice on-prem, second voice at home). Finally we have experimented with some small new content produced directly from home from our sport talents (like CasaVanz).” What technologies did you put in place to guarantee production and distribution of content? “This emergency has accelerated some processes that were already in progress.We deployed a hybrid model: everyone in post and GFX works from home. “For studio ops, we adopted a hybrid approach with some roles on site and some roles at home: we have put in place a heavy use of cellular bonding newsgathering (mainly based on LiveU kits) and full integration of Skype, FaceTime and Teams in the production environment. “Parts of the gallery (EVS operations, editorial coordination) are operated remotely and we deployed a cloud-based gallery (as SaaS or Iaas) with Viz Verdi and SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeuropeupdate

Coronavirus crisis: Sky Italia

NewTek. In post production we have started to use PCoIP Solutions to enable editors to work 100% from home using the same workflows that they would use on-prem. We also use standalone post production SW, for editing, sound design and grading of high-end programmes like special features, art movies or documentaries and started to use full cloud based solutions in SaaS mode. “We strengthened mobile editing and created new workflows to be able to remotely operate critical operations like dubbing and EVS contribution.For MCR and International Commentary Area we activated remote control of most of the equipment, a hybrid model for operators and activated ‘meshed MCR’ with Sky Group and external partners. “For the playout we implemented a hybrid model with more than 70% of the workload managed from home. Operators can access their working station and receive the channels preview of multiviewer on low latency encoders streaming on SRT. “In general, we are working in a fully distributed mode and technology is helping a lot. We are leveraging on all the tools of the Office 365 suite and we use them to deploy a fully ‘digital native’ way of working. “For instance, in these days of emergency a journalist, an editor and a GFX designer can work simultaneously on the same news piece, each one from their own home but collaborating real-time. Thanks to these technologies, recently we also had our very first virtual press conference for Diavoli, using our studio to connect 60 journalists and the six key actors and directors.”

Was it difficult to implement these innovations in such a short timeframe? “Most of the technology and the internal skills needed were there. We did not create anything from scratch. What made the difference was being able to mix the available capabilities. “Content and broadcast technology is moving away from monolithic and one-size-fits-all operating and tech models. Today, it’s possible to mix and match tools and operating models according to each need. “Some of the use cases we created for this emergency are a mix of consumer, prosumer and professional equipment, SaaS, IaaS, on prem, studio, and work from home. These are integrated in single seamless workflows. Some of the technologies we are using are cheap and cost just a few euros whilst others cost hundreds of euros, and both are mixed in the same workflow. “Imagine a world of Lego blocks where you can build the service according to your needs. Everything, in technology and operations, can be fitted to the purpose.” How are you planning for phase 2? “Content operations and technologies essentially have never stopped. We switched gear a bit (on some areas like Sport), changed the work allocation and location and introduced new formats, such as anchoring from home on our news service SkyTG24. We also introduced strict rules in our Media Hubs.”

Remote production using Grabyo’s cloud-native video platform Remote production from anywhere, anytime Multiple guests with low-latency remote contribution Live playlisting and scene selection for live broadcasts Add graphics, live questions, and real-time comments 1080p / 60FPS for eSports broadcasts

@grabyo SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

grabyo

grabyo.com

hello@grabyo.com 69

svgeuropeupdate

Coronavirus crisis: Bundesliga return

DFL and DFB issue broadcast OB guidelines ahead of Bundesliga return BY WILL STRAUSS

he German Football League (DFL) and the German Football Association (DFB) have issued a revised set of health and safety guidelines for Bundesliga TV coverage as they look to protect production crew and allow matches to resume safely this weekend. The stipulations, published in a document entitled ‘The Sports Medicine/ Special Match Operations Taskforce Professional Football’, are based around three common principles: consistent hygiene, a sense of responsibility and minimal overlap in time and physical proximity. The DFL considers that ‘personal hygiene measures are the most important actions for protecting against infection.’ The Bundesliga is due to resume this weekend following an eight-week hiatus caused by the coronavirus pandemic and subsequent social lockdown with all matches to be played behind closed doors. The aim of the guidelines is to protect each employee and to completely separate TV production as much as possible from the sports side of the matches, the document says. But it acknowledges that the aim is not to “guarantee the 100% safety of all participants” as this is likely to prove impossible. Instead, the idea is to ensure a medically justifiable risk based on the significance of football in societal, sociopolitical and economic terms and on the development of the pandemic. All the measures are built on the strict premise that there is no resulting competition with the general population over COVID-19 prevention resources.

Key components of the guidelines for crew

• All crew will be tested before entering a stadium using a symptom questionnaire and body temperature measurement. If the health criteria are not met then access will be denied • All crew will be asked to sign and execute a “statement of health” including adhering to the hygiene rules 70

• All crew will observe basic hygiene measures including sanitising hands, cough and sneeze hygiene and distancing • For travelling to the ground, carpooling and the use of public transport will not be permitted • Face masks will be ‘generally required’ after entering the stadium exterior and in all areas. They should completely cover the mouth and nose • Observance of a minimum distance for camera positions and in the media stands will be required • Hand disinfection should be used before and after each use of shared equipment “especially broadcasting technology” • There will be on no on-site catering • Time spent on site will be reduced to the minimum required

Trucks and compound

The layout of OB trucks will also be different with significantly fewer work stations to comply with the rules on distancing and the use of Plexiglas partitions where social distancing is not possible. The guidelines say that “confined spaces should be ventilated three to four times a day for ten minutes each, with production ideally taking place with doors open.” At the same time, equipment surfaces and door handles are to be cleaned by the service provider with a surface disinfectant prior to the start of production and after setup on production day. Communications will be subject to limitations too with private conversations to be avoided “since they tempt you to undermine the distancing guidelines.” Discussions should occur via email, phone or the OB technology communication ring if possible. Discussions that are absolutely necessary should be “held in as small of a group as possible, be as short as possible, and held at a maximum speaking distance.” The report was authored by the Sports Medicine / Special Match Operations Task Force in order for German professional football to further deal with the impacts of the coronavirus. It was led by Prof. Dr Tim Meyer, Medical Director of the Institute of Sports and Preventive Medicine at Saarland University and team doctor for the German national team. The first Bundesliga matches of the re-started season will take place on Saturday 16 May. SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

WE MAKE LIVE VIDEO

STREAMING SIMPLE THE WORLD’S MOST ADVANCED LIVE STREAMING PLATFORM FOR EXCEPTIONAL QUALITY FROM SOURCE TO SCREEN. VOS®360 Live Streaming Platform optimizes your live video delivery to enhance experience—with flexible, real-time scaling to handle peak viewing. This fully managed solution leverages cloudnative infrastructures to meet the most demanding requirements for media processing. It runs on public cloud platforms across the globe, powering millions of simultaneous streams, thousands of live channels, countless video on demand requests and hundreds of petabytes of storage and delivery. For more information visit www.harmonicinc.com © 2020 Harmonic Inc. All rights reserved worldwide.

Next-gen tech never looked so good.

Take a virtual tour of Videe OBX, one of Europe’s most pioneering, uniquely comfortable UHD HDR OB trucks – and a masterpiece of Italian design. “The Selenio Network Processor will completely change system design.” Nicola dell’Asta, Director of Chromaline

Videe OBX is powered by Selenio™ Network Processor

Take the tour today at myimagine.tech/obx SVG_PrintAd_half-photo_ALTBLUE.indd 1

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

2020-07-10 4:18:03 PM

svgeuropeupdate

Katie Harrison, golf production manager at Sky Sports

From The Players to COVID-19 lockdown Sky Sports’ Katie Harrison on the golf front line as crisis escalates BY HEATHER MCLEAN

“Nothing like this had happened before. We were all trying to deal with it in the best way we could”

atie Harrison, golf production manager at Sky Sports UK and Ireland, was at the Players Championship in Florida in March when it was dramatically cancelled after one day’s play due to COVID-19. Here she gives us her written account of what happened in the US, and what her life is like now as a result of lockdown. In March, I travelled to Florida for the Players Championship, one of the highest profile golf events of the season. With COVID-19 spreading throughout the world quickly, we put some additional plans in place before leaving the UK and I contacted my PGA Tour colleagues and some of the crew that would be working with us. I asked them to stock up on cleaning products, disinfectant wipes and hand sanitisers. Cleaning is something we take seriously on our outside broadcasts, but we wanted to have more stock than usual to clean more vigorously than we normally would.

Coronavirus crisis: Sky Sports Golf

Once on site in the US, we worked our way through the set-up days and started doing pre-records for the preview shows on Tuesday and Wednesday. As each day passed, the virus was more and more on our minds, as it was obvious that awareness of COVID-19 in the US was rising rapidly. Everyone was making sure they cleaned their areas frequently, including the Sky Cart and Zone studio where players come to do interviews and demonstrations. Everyone was cautious and aware of their surroundings, how close people were getting to each other, what they were touching and how often they were cleaning their hands. Driving to the course on the Thursday, the first day of the tournament, there was talk on the radio of events being cancelled and advice that large gatherings should be avoided. At midday, the PGA Tour made an announcement that days two to four of the tournament would be played behind closed doors with no spectators on site. Throughout the day, more sports events around the world were being cancelled, news alerts were going off on our phones and tablets, and people started talking about what would happen to the golf. We left the course that day thinking Friday would be the same as Thursday, but with no fans on site. However, at approximately 10pm on Thursday night, we heard that the PGA Tour were officially cancelling the tournament and no more golf would be played. A large group of us were together in the hotel bar talking about what was going on around the world. Hearing the news that the golf was cancelled, a group of us had a quick chat about our plans for the Friday morning.We would need to be on site early to broadcast the PGA Tour announcement live, to explain the situation to our viewers. Whilst we sat in the corner of the bar, I had to contact crew to change the call time for Friday, liaise with the PGA Tour to let them know what our plans were, and let my production coordinators know that we would need to amend flights the following morning. I had help from some of the crew; they called the rooms of people who weren’t reading or replying to my messages, hoping that everyone would see or hear that we had to leave the hotel in a few hours. Once I was happy that everyone had the new call time, we called it a night and set alarms for early the next morning. Friday morning came around very quickly! It was still dark in Florida when we arrived on site at the golf course. Everyone made it on time and were in positions ready for a quick rehearsal before going live. Watching the broadcast, listening to what was being said, felt weird. Nothing like this had happened before. We were all trying to deal with it in the best way we could. Once we were off air, I had a call with the production SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

Coronavirus crisis: Sky Sports Golf

coordinators back in London who were four hours ahead of us. We ran through the list of crew who needed to get back to the UK, making a note of who would make the flight that night and who would have to be on the Saturday flight back to London. We had a total of 57 crew on site, with 30 from the UK. As the tournament had been cancelled, we would need to de-rig the kit, trucks, studio and Sky Cart set up. This would take time and with the airport a three hour drive away, it was likely a handful of us would not make the evening flight. Those who were finished once we were off air that morning managed to make the Friday night flight. This was a great effort especially as theme parks and other Florida holiday spots were also being closed. There were a lot of people trying to get back to the UK at short notice. The 24 hours that followed the announcement that the golf had been cancelled felt surreal. Friday afternoon, when Sky’s operation was all packed up, the small crew of us still at the golf course stood there in disbelief, trying to get our heads around what was happening. Saying goodbye to our American colleagues was strange. Not knowing when we would see each other again or when we would be allowed back in the US was unsettling. On the Saturday at Orlando airport I was surrounded

svgeuropeupdate

by people trying to get home. I found myself very aware of the situation I was in, how close people were standing to me, what they were touching, and with some people in face masks and rubber gloves. The flight felt quick and I landed back in London on the Sunday morning. Gatwick was the quietest I had ever seen it. It’s now been eight weeks since I returned from Florida. It took me a few days once I was back to realise that things were changing and people were adjusting to the new way of living.Working from home or on the road is something I’m used to, but this was a very different feeling. To try and keep some normality, I started a weekly ‘ladies night’ video call. When we are on the road, we have one night a week where all the women get together for dinner to catch up properly. We decided that we should keep this up whilst we all find our way through lockdown. These weekly calls have been a brilliant way to stay in touch and keep smiles on our faces. In the eight weeks I have been back from the US, seven PGA Tour events have either been cancelled or postponed and the Masters, the first major of the year, has been moved to November. Who knows how long it will be before live sport returns to our screens? Until then, we will stay safe and appreciate this time at home with our loved ones.

“I found myself very aware of the situation I was in, how close people were standing to me”

Get agile and build fan engagement Cloud connectivity for Sports Workflows

Find out how at www.interxion.com

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeuropeupdate

SVG Europe Sports OTT Forum

Sports OTT Forum 2020 in COVID-19 space: Eleven Sports, F1, Olympic Channel and WRC BY FERGAL RINGROSE business, Eleven Sports has had to take a very different approach to its output. In this session, chief operating officer Anouk Mertens discussed how and why Eleven has been focusing on esports, exploring new formats and archive programmes and using Skype-style tools like Watch Together to give fans the chance to watch sport together with their friends and family from home. The conversation, which was conducted by SVG Europe editor Will Strauss, also considered some of the things that Eleven Sports has been doing internally during the lockdown, including supporting the World Health Organisation and going free in markets like Italy and Portugal, before moving on to what happens postlockdown in the sports television market. n lieu of the Sports OTT Forum that was due to take place in London on 27 May 2020, SVG Europe produced exclusive OTT and streaming-related video content and made it available online to members and sponsors on the same date. Sports OTT Forum online, sponsored by Panasonic, featured on-demand interviews and live or ‘as live’ panels that were released in conference format, with each session being premiered at different times throughout the day. The video content was made available to both SVG Europe members and sponsors.

What’s on your mind, Facebook? In a special online presentation and live Q&A, Anna Chanduvi, head of Sports Media Partnerships at Facebook, took a look at how sports broadcasters and leagues and federations could use, and work with, Facebook both during the lockdown and beyond. The session covered best practice, use cases, Facebook as the ‘free-to-air funnel’ and niche sports as well as monetisation options across branded content and merchandise. It concluded with an outline of the social media giants’ sports priorities for the future, including the potential of Facebook Watch, and a live online audience Q&A.

Opening Remarks: SVGE and Panasonic

Virtual racing with F1 Esports Series

To open proceedings, we heard from Alessandro Reitano, Sky Germany’s director of Sports Production and the chair of the SVG Europe advisory board, and from the Title Sponsors Panasonic who provided a short use case featuring its new Kairos live video processing platform.

Formula 1 waved the chequered flag on the first season of its Esports Series in 2017. While its fourth season was delayed to later in the year due to COVID-19, the third season saw participation figures going through the roof. Anouk Mertens, Eleven Sports, COO In conversation with SVG Europe editor Heather Mclean, Session sponsored by Blackbird we caught up with F1 head of Digital Business Initiatives With the coronavirus impacting on every part of the OTT and Esports Julian Tan to talk about that growth. 74

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

ROCK IN RIO,Brazil

Getting the Thrill Across. HYPERX ESPORTS ARENA, USA

MediaParc, Switzerland RCN Win Sports+, Colombia

Arena OB Z, United Kingdom

GRANGER COMMUNITY CHURCH, USA

CUSTOMERSâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; IP PROJECTS

GEARHOUSE COLUMBUS, USA

http://j.mp/LawoCustProj

Watch them on YouTube. www.lawo.com

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeuropeupdate

SVG Europe Sports OTT Forum

• Mike Green, Brightcove, VP of Strategic Development and Alliances • Steve Miller-Jones, Limelight Networks, VP of Edge Strategy and Solution Architecture

Racing OTT with World Rally

World Rally Championship (WRC) holds rally events globally every year where teams compete to win the coveted title of champion driver. Each rally sees drivers tackling extreme conditions all around the world, in remote locations, with WRC+ All Live, a subscriptionbased OTT service for live footage of each rally, adding to WRC+, the WRC OTT platform, using remote and other broadcast production innovations. Here, WRC director of content and production Florian Ruth, talked to SVG Going OTT on the Women’s Game Europe Editor Heather McLean about how OTT has and is The Women’s World Cup 2019 in France was a key moment changing WRC’s fan base and reach, and how it has come in the growth of the women’s game. Following on from into its own during the COVID-19 crisis. that success, women’s football has now reached a tipping point when it comes to both viewership and media interest Olympic Channel with Mark Parkman around Europe. In this session, SVG Europe editor Heather In conversation with SVG editorial director Ken McLean talked to FA director of the women’s professional Kerschbaumer, Olympic Channel general manager game Kelly Simmons about how FA Player, the FA’s live Mark Parkman discussed how his team responded to streaming platform exclusively dedicated to women’s the coronavirus pandemic, how they tried some new football, is influencing the future of female players, the things, and made the most of remote production. The broadcasting of their games, building momentum and conversation then looked at the bigger picture for sports excitement for fans, and how it is supporting the women’s OTT and streaming and takes a peek at what might be game during the coronavirus pandemic. around the corner.

Taking OTT forwards post-lockdown

Session sponsored by Brightcove The use of OTT has come into its own since COVID-19 locked down the world and live sport ceased. Here we look at how the enthusiastic application of OTT has highlighted its challenges and helped its technological evolution before looking ahead to how and where it will sit alongside linear TV and live sports later this year, and how it has and will continue to impact on the future of live sports broadcasting. This panel session was moderated by SVG Click above or here to view Welcome and Opening Europe editor Heather McLean. Participants: Remarks on the SVG Europe YouTube channel: each of • Carl Furgusson, MediaKind, VP of Portfolio the other seven SVG Europe Sports OTT Forum sessions Development are also available to view here. 76

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeuropeupdate

SVG Europe Sports TV Awards 2020

Awards were presented for Achievements in Production, OTT Experience, Sustainability and Diversity. The five winners were:

Diversity in Sports TV: SVT Sport gender-equal coverage

SVG Europe Sports TV Awards 2020 revealed

Winners announced during ‘as live’ ceremony on YouTube on 27 May BY WILL STRAUSS

he winners of the SVG Europe Sports TV Awards 2020, sponsored by Canon, were announced during an ‘as live’ online awards ceremony on Wednesday 27 May. Hosted by sports broadcaster and presenter Abi Stephens, the ceremony premiered on the SVG Europe Youtube channel, SVG Europe Facebook page, and the SVG Europe Sports TV Awards website. The SVG Europe Sports TV Awards were scheduled to take place at Lord’s Cricket Ground on 27 May. Due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, however, the awards could not be bestowed in person at that time. The Sports TV Awards trophies themselves will then be handed over in person at a future physical SVG Europe event. After receiving nominations from all across Europe, covering many different sports and representing sport and media organisations big and small, the judges chose 23 entries across five categories that they felt had helped to push sports television forward within the 2019 calendar year.

The judges said:“SVT Sport has made not only a conscious effort to embrace diversity with its network, but has implemented tangible change to an astonishing effect, making them a standout entry in this category. The physical achievement of providing 50/50 representation for both men and women’s sport is the target all broadcasters should be aiming for.”

Outstanding OTT Experience: DAZN — Streaming sports revolution

The judges felt that: “The depth of DAZN’s service and its commitment to non-live event programme production — in order to make the case for a true OTT sport platform — had them at the top of this particular field”.

Sustainability in Sports TV: Sky Sports — #GoZero’

The judges described Sky Sports ‘#GoZero’ as, “an outstanding entry. One that showcased a clear vision for a sustainable sector that is already having a genuine impact. There was particular praise for the supply chain engagement, the efforts to educate staff and the pragmatic yet ambitious approach”.

Production Achievement — Innovation: Sky Sports, Sky Creative Agency, Mark Roberts Motion Control and Dimension Studio — Sky Scope

Judges said: “Combining volumetric capture and replay to great effect under difficult conditions, the judges said that Sky Scope was one of those innovations that make you wonder “how did they do that?” This is definitely the kind of thing that moves the industry forward.”

Production Achievement — Event: Rugby World Cup Japan 2019 Sky’s Jo Finon accepts the Sustanability in Sports TV Award 78

The Judges said: “IGBS and World Rugby produced coverage on a similar scale to other global sporting events, making it look like a huge tournament, but with a fraction SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

COVER MORE WITH LESS The Essential Encoder & Decoder for Remote Production

Matrox Monarch EDGE Enable cost-effective live REMI productions with multi-channel, lowlatency, 4:2:2 10-bit quality video transport over 1 GbE IP networksâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;all with next-generation connectivity, including 12G SDI and SMPTE ST 2110. Request a demo: matrox.com/monarch-edge/svge Call us: +44 (0) 1895 827220 Email us: video.emea@matrox.com

SVG_Monarch_EDGE_CoverMore_halfpage_0620.indd 1

29/06/2020 11:06:53 AM

Proven innovation in IP-based transport and workflow

REQUEST A DEMO

info@medialinks.com

MediaLinks_SVGYearbook_July2020_v1.indd 1 SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

www.medialinks.com 29/06/2020 16:15

svgeuropeupdate

SVG Europe Sports TV Awards 2020

Full shortlist of entries for SVG Europe Awards

World Rugby CMO Marissa Pace accepts the Production Achievement (Event) Award

of the resources. And they did it during the hurricane season in Japan! By raising production standards to new levels, adding consistency across match coverage and helping to attract the highest ever viewing figures for the tournament, they are a worthy winner of this award.”

Chair of the judges and then SVG Europe editorial director Fergal Ringrose, said: “We were overwhelmed by the quality and breadth of the submissions for the Sports TV Awards 2020 with entries arriving from many different countries, covering some of the biggest events, but also some unique and very interesting smaller ones. “The level of innovation and ingenuity demonstrated by the entries illustrates how exciting and forwardthinking the sports television industry in Europe continues to be. “As judges, we have looked to reward and recognise production and broadcasting excellence but also those projects that have led by example, experimented, taken risks and achieved results that can contribute to the forward momentum and success of the industry as a whole. “The selection process was tricky but I think we’ve produced a great shortlist. I would like to congratulate every single one of the companies that have made it through to the final stages of the Sports TV Awards 2020, and a sincere thanks to Canon from the entire SVG Europe team for sponsoring this year’s Awards.”

OUTSTANDING PRODUCTION ACHIEVEMENT (EVENT) • BT Sport, Timeline, Telegenic, Moov and Redbee – 2019 UEFA Champions League Final • FIBA Media – FIBA Basketball World Cup 2019 • ICCTV with Sunset+Vine– Cricket World Cup 2019 • SailGP, Oracle, Whisper, Timeline, TATA– SailGP remote production • SVT, Arista, Clear-Com, Grass Valley and Net Insight – 2019 FIS Alpine World Ski Championships remote production • Videohouse and Sunset+Vine– The INEOS 1:59 Challenge • World Rugby and IGBS– Rugby World Cup Japan 2019 OUTSTANDING PRODUCTION ACHIEVEMENT (INNOVATION) • BBC Sport, AE Graphics and dock10– Virtual reality studio • Pixellot and Sporttotal– Revolutionising the German sports market with AI automation • Sky Sports, Sky Creative Agency, MRMC and Dimension Studio– Sky Scope • DFL, netventure & TVN Mobile Production– Bundesliga Augmented Reality broadcast drone • TV2 Danmark, Promotheus – 3D Real-Time graphic system for analysing sports OUTSTANDING OTT EXPERIENCE • DAZN – Streaming the Sports Revolution • Eleven Sports and Reactoo– Watch Together • Endeavor Streaming with UFC– UFC Fight Pass • On Rewind, Orange Vélodrome & Olympique de Marseille and Netco Sports– Live Stadium @ Orange Vélodrome • Prime Video,Sunset+Vine and BT Sport– Amazon Premier League SVG EUROPE WOMEN AWARD FOR DIVERSITY IN SPORTS TV • BT Sport– Takeover • Rise with BT Sport, ITV and Clear-Com – Rise Up • SVT Sports– Gender-equal sports coverage ONE PLANET AWARD FOR SUSTAINABILITY IN SPORTS TV • SailGP, Oracle, Whisper, Timeline, TATA– SailGP remote production • Sky Sports– #GoZero • SVT, Arista, Clear-Com, Grass Valley and Net Insight – 2019 FIS Alpine World Ski Championships remote production

Click here to view SVG Europe Sports TV Awards 2020 80

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

The unique mobile stage for the creation of virtual humans in volumetric still, video & avatar form

To find out more: Email info@mrmoco.com or visit www.mrmoco.com/volumetric-capture/polymotion-stage

SPORTSTV AWARD WINNER 2020 – OUTSTANDING PRODUCTION ACHIEVEMENT (INNOVATION) MRMC_SVG EUROPE JOURNAL_POLYMOTION_AD_AW.indd 1

Design, develop & innovate

16/06/2020 14:27

“I wanted to say a massive thank you for all your help with the broadcast graphics for the Paddy Power Shootout.” - Ben Huxley

Broadcast Graphics

Sports Data Systems

Remote Production Graphics

Graphics Data Integrations

Brand Engagement Visual Lead at Paddy Power

“We thought they looked sensational on TV and we were absolutely delighted with the package you put together, especially under such tight timelines. Thank you for being so flexible and skilled with your design work and I sincerely hope we have a chance to work again in the future.

+44 (0) 1684 560 614 www.mstworld.com

MST SYSTEMS Sport Tech Journal 03072020 1-1.indd 1 SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

On behalf of us all at Paddy Power thank you for all your efforts.”

03/07/2020 10:48:57

svgeuropeupdate

Freelance diaries

The Freelance Diaries: Will social distancing measures suck all the fun out of working in sports television production in the future? BY NATALIE DIAMOND

“Days of chatting to other coworkers prior to TX while huddled around the tea urn eating biscuits will be a distant memory”

n this guest blog, freelance sports production manager Natalie Diamond highlights that while the return of live sport is welcome, freelancers are increasingly worried about their livelihoods and what their place of work might look like if/when they return. Like many freelancers, I’ve recently made a point of reading the industry-wide TV production guidelines that are now in place as a result of COVID-19. The text clearly states within the basic requirements of the risk assessment guidance: ‘3. Reduce the numbers of people involved.’ So, there it is in black and white. Our worst fears have been realised. Remote production is the way forward in these times too and I have read on Linkedin that two leading broadcasters will also make a significant reduction in the volume of studio productions they make. This will see a team of nearly 60 people reduced to only six or seven onsite. That is another significant cut in the use of staff and/or freelancers. The guidelines certainly make for interesting reading on how the industry will now create content and discusses the need for a feedback loop as this is unchartered territory for everyone. As the director of a limited company, I feel pretty much in the dark right now. After all, I am not a staff member learning about how her company will proceed in these times. As such, I need to be proactive in any possible way. Included in the guidelines, and what has become

increasingly apparent, is that there will be a need for training around health and safety practices regarding COVID-19. Therefore I probably need to reach out to the broadcasters to see if I can be tagged onto any training, at a cost to my company. My feeling is, if I don’t move with the times quickly I, like so many other freelancers may be tossed aside. Staff members will surely take precedence over the hire in of freelancers and in particular for my role as a production manager. As I had suspected, to reduce the threat of the spread of the virus, broadcasters will be relying heavily on local hires and what concerns me the most is the need to keep working teams (aka cohorts) together. This could also mean less work for all: if your name’s not down you’re not coming in! It may look positive with the green light of Bundesliga and the resuming of Premier League on the horizon but not everyone will be selected to work or line their pockets with those productions. So, for me, it is time for something new. I’m into the second month of a ten-month diploma which I decided to take up in April. I’m studying cognitive Hypnotherapy and NLP. The course is heavily theory-based and grounded in science and maybe a new direction for me to take postgraduation. It’s keeping me busy and my mood light. I’ve recently suggested to a few colleagues that they could perhaps do the same. SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

Freelance diaries

Courses don’t have to be expensive and there is a plethora of them available online. Now seems like a really good time to brush up on industry skills or learn something completely new.After all, there is only so much sitting around and waiting one person can do and you need to look after your mental health.

Understnding the freelance financial situation

On another note, it has taken some 140 appointments since 23 March for my accountant to get back to me. Like so many other freelancers I’ve waited an eternity to understand my financial situation. Therefore, I’ve only just made the decision not to furlough as both my taxes and corporation tax will increase significantly. Shortly after this realisation, I was hit with my corporation tax bill: you couldn’t write this if you tried! There has been almost no support for limited companies and it’s a good job I am currently not the main breadwinner in my family. Meanwhile, my fiancé is still working from his home office and it appears that it will be like this for the foreseeable. If the R rate is kept low it’s only a matter of months perhaps before he gets back on site but it probably won’t be for any international gig — or will it?

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeuropeupdate

From my perspective, the new measures will seek to suck the fun out of any working environment. Days of chatting to other co-workers prior to TX while huddled around the tea urn eating biscuits will be a distant memory. Colleagues who test negative will make their way to sterile compound environments and stay in their positions until the production is complete.What a strange world we now live in! Homelife is much the same for me, although the return of some children to school is a concern. I’m keeping mine back. I’m more concerned for their mental health. Pods of children and teachers unable to socialise with other pods and white lines being painted outside school gates scream of something out of a horror movie. I’ll take my chances, keep them at home and see what unfolds. With the infection rate slowing and the number and frequency of deaths decreasing, there is a gradual progression in the right direction so we need to take these positives and run with them. But we all need to play our part and be mindful of the rules in place. As Professor Jonathan Van-Tam, the UK’s deputy chief medical officer recently said when discussing the lifting of restrictions “don’t tear the pants out of it”. The same could also be said of sports television production.

“My feeling is, if we don’t move with the times we may be tossed aside”

svgeuropeupdate

Football Summit 2020 online

Football Summit: Broadcasting live football behind closed doors BY FERGAL RINGROSE

“Everybody who has worked in television knows we like to be together!” JENA MIHALOVIC

VG Europe is in the thick of the action as football leagues around Europe return to TV screens. Our online Football Summit 2020 on Thursday 18 June provided unique insight from leagues, host broadcasters and rights holders behind coverage of the German Bundesliga, Poland’s Ekstraklasa, Spain’s LaLiga, the English Premier League and Italy’s Serie A. A record 668 professionals registered to ‘attend’ the 90-minute event live yesterday afternoon – and taking into account both the live viewers and those that watched it on ‘catch up’ between 6pm and midnight (UK time), the total number of people who watched Football Summit 2020 was 707. The main event was presented on a vMix/Singular Live platform kindly provided by Sky Sport Germany, and SVG Europe also hosted a Zoom ‘watch together’ running concurrently with the event, to allow participants to chat together and discuss some of the issues raised during half time and at full time. With the re-start of leagues around Europe, the event allowed the broadcast community to come together online to share what they have learnt, discuss the situation, and formulate plans to achieve their joint goal; getting great coverage of matches to air without fans in the stadium while maintaining the safety and health of staff and crew — and avoiding any potential bottlenecks. Speakers who joined the event included Tim Achberger, Sportcast, head of innovation and technology management; Jamie Hindhaugh, BT Sport, chief operating

officer; Laurence Cawsey, Sky Sports UK, senior director; Dante De Iulio, Sky Italia, sport production and channel management director; Jena Mihalovic, Sky Sports UK, technical operations project lead; Seamus Neary, Sportcast, executive assistant; Emili Planas, Mediapro, chief technology officer and operations manager; Kevin Ramsey, director of studios at Sky Production Services UK; Marcin Serafin, Ekstraklasa Live Park, chief operating officer; and John Turnbull, NEP UK, deputy managing director. Football Summit 2020 was hosted by Sky Sport News HD and Handball Bundesliga Konferenz presenter Katharina Kleinfeldt, who began by introducing Serge Van Herck, the CEO of Title Sponsor EVS, to make the opening remarks. There were also Case Study presentations by Pixellot and TVU Networks, plus Session Sponsorship introductions by Signiant and VIDI. The first session was titled ‘It’s all gone quiet over there’ – Covering live football matches behind closed doors’, chaired by Katharina Kleinfeldt and featuring Tim Achberger and Jamie Hindhaugh. Unfortunately, Dante de Iulio’s home internet failed shortly after he joined the session and he was unable to participate. The next session was ‘You’ll Always Walk Alone? – Football Production in the ‘New Normal’. With social distancing restrictions set to stay in place for some time, how will the stadium operation and OB compound look and operate during football matches now and in the near future? Participating on this session, which was chaired by SVG Europe editorial director Fergal Ringrose, were Seamus Neary, Emili Planas and Marcin Serafin.

Sky Sports goes remote for Premier League re-start

Presenter Katharina Kleinfelft hosted the Football Summit from Sky Sport’s studios in Munich 84

Our final session was titled ‘Flying High’ – Inside the re-start of the Premier League on Sky Sports’. Marking the return of the Premier League season, three speakers from Sky Sports – Laurence Cawsey, Jena Mihalovic and Kevin Ramsey – were joined by NEP’s John Turnbull to provide a comprehensive overview of how Sky Sports has worked to get football back on air, covering remote production, crewing and staff protocols, social distancing and health and safety, and what life is now like when working on live football coverage. The Premier League returned to action last week after a SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeuropeupdate

Football Summit 2020 online

100-day hiatus because of the coronavirus. Sky Sports was the first broadcaster back on air on Wednesday 17 June with a double header featuring Aston Villa v Sheffield United followed by Manchester City v Arsenal. The next day, 18 June, several key members of the Sky production team including the Man City v Arsenal match director joined moderator Will Strauss to discuss the ‘new production normal’ at SVG Europe’s virtual Football Summit 2020. The discussion covered match directing, remote production, crewing and staff protocols, social distancing and health and safety, and what life is now like when working on live football coverage. “There was quite a lot of pressure on the whole Sky team last night, directing Premier League football remotely,” said Cawsey.“There were many things we did for the first time last night. The technical and planning teams have done an amazing job in enabling us to deliver everything. “What was it like to direct? Being away from the ground has its challenges. Obviously there were new camera and interview positions, and as a director you’re used to walking around before the game and obviously that is not possible when you are remote. “It was the first time I’ve directed a game with no fans, and I would say, coming away from yesterday, I had a real

Serge Van Herck, CEO of event Title Sponsor EVS, making his introduction

appreciation of how important stadium fans are to the TV viewing experience,” said Cawsey. “We rely a lot as directors on emotional shots of players in our storytelling, and these shots just don’t seem to happen as much with no fans in the stadium because the players don’t have fans to feed off. And normally you will hear the noise of the fans reverberate through the walls of the truck and that emits an energy to you and your crew. “I chose to listen last night with the natural stadium audio as opposed to the augmented audio that Sky was offering, and it was a challenge to keep the energy levels up.

REVOLUTIONISING THE WAY VISUAL CONTENT IS CREATED

T RACK I NG WI T HO U T L I M ITS Instant real-time and marker-less camera tracking that can be used indoors, outdoors and in any lighting conditions CREAT I VE CO NT RO L Placing real-time high ﬁdelity graphics even in the most challenging environments GRAPHI CS WI T H D EPT H Our unique solution Real Depth® allows subjects to interact seamlessly with their virtual surroundings

www.ncam-tech.com +44 20 3167 3868 | studio@ncam-tech.com

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeuropeupdate

“But the one massive bonus of remote production is to be able to be home within ten minutes of the end of my shift, rather than a four-hour drive down the M6.” “The first thing we led with was health and safety,” said Jena Mihalovic.“We always want people to be safe, but this is a very unique situation, having people coming back and working two metres apart. “Everybody who’s worked in television knows we like to be together! We lean on each other and work in very dense spaces. “So the first thing we had to figure out was how to give each person what they needed to do their job in a safe way. That meant deconstructing how we normally work.

Football Summit 2020 online

“So we created four separate graphics hubs, so that our graphics operators and stats people could operate at a safe place outside of the gallery. We looked at ways to limit the number of people on-site and people at Sky so that everybody can be kept safe. John can speak about that from the stadium side. “In addition to graphics are the replay rooms. EVS operators like to operate shoulder to shoulder. It’s very hard to separate them out! So we built an entirely new replay area -- still side by side but a little bit further away then they would like to be. “We also pulled our lighting directors out of the gallery and located them at another safe station at Sky. So it was really about unpacking our usual work spaces in a safe way. “Remote production has been with Sky for I think about five years now,” added Mihalovic. “We’ve touched on it for previous productions. But last year we made a commitment to take the EFL remote, so we transformed the gallery and added connectivity, working with NEP Connect, to get connectivity at all of the grounds. “We did about 50 games with the EFL and that has truly prepared us for slipping into the Premier League. I don’t think we could have done what we’ve done as easily without the experience we gained from doing the EFL day

Open up new ways to produce live sports and eSports Net Insight is defining the future of media by empowering our customers – such as the service provider The Switch – to build up new business models and strategies. Leveraging the open and virtualized Nimbra portfolio, The Switch tailored a scalable, reliable and future-proof network. They managed to transition live sport and eSports production and delivery to online events, using successful distributed or remote workflows. Learn how The Switch navigates the post Covid-19 era with Net Insight on netinsight.net.

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeuropeupdate

Football Summit 2020 online

in and day out and learning from that as we went. That was really important. “So while it wasn’t ‘easy’ it was an easy decision to make to go to remote production and keep our people safe by moving Premier League into the gallery we created for EFL, and then moving EFL, with a slightly reduced spec, into another gallery – adding the remote connectivity we needed there. “The gallery still looks the same and acts the same to the production staff, which is a great comfort and also helps with the transition,” she said.

Overcoming obstacles without compromising safety

be the weak link that undermined what went to air. So what was really important to us was to work very closely with our Sky Sports counterparts in a very collaborative way to find high quality solutions without compromising the safety of our people,” said Ramsey. According to John Turnbull,“It does feel different in the stadium. The crowd plays such a big part in sport.You feed off that: the feeling of enjoyment people are getting in the stadium, and of course at home. “From a technical point of you are very focused on the delivery, so sometimes you don’t even know what the score is as you are checking to ensure everything is hitting air properly. But hopefully, in the near future, we can welcome people back again to stadiums. “Each match presents a different set of challenges,” said Turnbull.“After each game we’ll review it to see what worked and what hasn’t worked. But I think the positive feedback we’re getting from people is that the overall approach has worked. People are back covering live sport, and live sport is back on television: we will continue to adapt our processes to meet that challenge.” Following the fulltime whistle on 90 minutes, the event moved into extra time as the conversation continued on the Zoom ‘watch together’.

Kevin Ramsey began by saying,“Well first of all I need to change teams after the Arsenal result last night! It goes without saying that Sky’s production teams have incredibly high standards and expectations in the work they produce. “As the department that supplies both facilities and operational crews for Sky Sports it can be incredibly rewarding working side by side with people who push the boundaries. But there’s a flip side to that in the amount of graft it takes to support their visions! “Especially at this time when there are so many logistical obstacles in our way. We clearly didn’t want to Click here to view Football Summit 2020 on YouTube

“In a positive sense I think it probably opens up entry points and avenues for people wanting to get into the industry” KEVIN RAMSEY

It’s time to make the switch to IP Open Broadcast Systems is Enabling Spor ts Contribution over IP Without Sacrificing on Qualit y • Native Uncompressed IP Encoding and Decoding using COTS hardware • High-qualit y, low latency contribution and deliver y • Setup in ver y shor t timeframe • Tried and tested for spor t s contribution around the globe

www.obe.tv

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

t: +44 (0)20 3051 1695

e: sales@obe.tv

svgeuropeupdate

Coronavirus crisis: LaLiga re-start

View of FC Barcelona’s Camp Nou stadium with no fans

LaLiga re-start: “We’ve come a long way and it has only been two weeks!” BY WILL STRAUSS

peaking to SVG Europe, LaLiga head of content and programming Roger Brosel outlines the improvements that have already been made to match coverage since Spain’s top two divisions returned to action, discusses the thought process behind the augmented pictures and sound and hints at what might happen next season. Top-flight football returned in Spain on 11 June with Sevilla beating Real Betis 2-0 in LaLiga at the Ramón Sánchez Pizjuán Stadium. It was a comfortable win for the home team on the pitch but off it things were very different, of course, with no supporters present. Some TV viewers (had they been living under a rock for the last couple of months), however, might not have

noticed any difference as the stands were full of colour and the match sound fitted the action. That is because while some leagues opted for a ‘natural’ approach to their match coverage, LaLiga augmented its production with virtual fans and virtual sound. “Fans are irreplaceable. But we wanted the viewer watching on TV to see something that seems like a full stadium — but it’s not real fans.” Keeping players and stadium personnel safe, and being able to finish the season, were the ultimate priorities for LaLiga, of course, explains its head of content and programming Roger Brosel, but when it came to the TV output, there were other considerations. “For the viewers, it’s a bad experience to watch a behindclosed-doors game,” he says. “So we wanted to try to compensate for that with technology and find a formula so that the viewers were not focussed on how empty the stands are — but are focussing on the game.” This manifested itself in two main ways: the virtualisation of sound, which was done in conjunction with the games company EA Sports; and the virtualisation of supporters in the stands. The latter development uses Vizrt technology and has been adapted to the characteristics of the 42 different stadiums in LaLiga’s First and Second divisions, and takes into account changes in light and the architectural features of each ground. The league’s host broadcaster, Mediapro, carried out SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

POWER ESPORTS PRODUCTIONS OF ANY SIZE AND SCOPE

AK-UC4000

Live immersive experience, Broadcast quality, Scalability.

AW-UE150

KAIROS AW-UE4

business.panasonic.eu

The wait is finally over The impact that the Covid-19 crisis and subsequent shutdown had on many businesses in our sector, and continues to have in some cases, has been devastating for many. And this business impact, difficult as it has been for many organisations, has been far outweighed in human terms by the unprecedented toll on lives and health and its specific effect on the freelancer community that many of us belong to, embrace and rely on. The sudden and total cancellation of the plans that we all had for an international year of sport has grounded us all. But here at Presteigne we want to make it absolutely clear to all our clients, suppliers and our freelancer community too, that we stand fully prepared and ready to move forward into the rest of 2020 and into 2021 with determination and optimism. We are genuinely excited to finally be able to support our customers again in their continuing activity, as the clouds clear and everyone races to catch up on postponed seasons - and to bring much loved and missed sport back into all of our homes.

Kick-off was only postponed and weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re ready to get back into the action. Presteigne_SVG_Europe_HP_advert_189x125_v2.indd 1 SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

+44 (0)1293 651300 | presteigne.tv

24/06/2020 17:27

svgeuropeupdate

the operational side. Editorially, however, as Brosel continues, there were some big decisions made about the virtual supporters. “We have what resembles fans in the stands,” he says. “But we didn’t want to try to imitate 100% real fans. We wanted to create for the viewer the sensation that there was nothing too different from our regular broadcasts but we didn’t want to impersonate real humans. “Fans are really important to the game. Nobody had to tell us before but now everyone realises that watching a game with empty stands is very different from watching a crowd that has chanting for 90 minutes. It really makes an impact. We didn’t want to substitute fans as if they were replaceable. We know they are Roger Brosel: “If you listen carefully to the games, there are now irreplaceable. But we wanted the more reactions [to the action]. The sound is bigger and fuller” viewer watching on TV to see something that seems like a full stadium but it’s not real fans.” The result is not photorealistic but instead is a bed of “We want the colour and shapes that, at first glance, looks like a busy stadium. In the two weeks since Seville beat Real Betis, sound to be things have moved on further still. supportive of the “We have come a long way and it’s been only two weeks home team. But since that game,” enthuses Brosel. “The graphics are now more reliable and stable. We we don’t want have learnt where the problems were and have tried to to editorialise reduce or fix them, in the programming of the graphics. – where is the “We’ve also learnt a lot about how to apply the perspective in some of the stadiums — each stadium is beginning and different and of course we don’t just do [virtual fans] for where is the end the first division but also the second division. That is 42 of that?” different stadiums that range from 100,000 seats at Camp Nou to 5,000 seater stadiums in the second division.” ROGER BROSEL While the virtual visual backdrop may be helpful for viewers, it is the augmented soundscape that really aids the enjoyment of the match coverage. “The sound is the most important thing. If you watch a game with no sound for a full 90 minutes it seems like a pre-season friendly.” Different sounds follow the flow of the game as certain situations occur, such as a goal or a foul, creating what is being referred to as Atmospheric Audio. “The sound is the most important thing,” argues Brosel. “At the end of the day, if you watch a game with no sound for a full 90 minutes it seems like a pre-season friendly. You hear the echoes and the screams of the players. We didn’t want that for the remaining 11 match days in which 90

Paris Marathon & Paris-Roubaix

several teams will have lots to play for. We wanted those games to have some kind of atmosphere.”

Cultural variations between different LaLiga stadiums

The audio has also improved since Matchday 28, he adds. “If you listen carefully to the games, there are now more reactions [to the action]. The sound is bigger and fuller.We feel comfortable and happy now.We are introducing more chants and more general atmosphere because we feel more comfortable with the technology. Everyone agrees that it is a big improvement. We’re making the sound louder too. Even the casual fan can hear the difference.” Mixing the audio is not just about adding reactions, however. The engineer also needs to take into account the cultural variations between different stadiums and different sets of supporters. “All our sound engineers are very experienced,” says Brosel.“You need an experienced [operator] who can play the sound at the right moment. They know which chants are sung at certain moments in each stadium. Plus the great advantage we’ve got with our partnership with EA Sports is that they have all the sounds logged in a way that makes it very easy for the mixer to find the correct sound. “We create a general atmosphere and the system automatically plays and mixes in the chants and [other things] but not the reactions. Then, whenever there is a specific chant [required] or a goal is scored, for example, that is when the human factor comes in.” One thing that isn’t added is catcalls, booing or whistling if a decision on the pitch doesn’t go the way of the home team. Brosel says that decision was quite deliberate. “We want the sound to be supportive of the home team. But we don’t want to editorialise — where is the beginning and where is the end of that?” he says. With LaLiga matches now in full flow and the new broadcast systems and processes tweaked, thoughts are starting to turn to next season when the ‘new normal’ could be different again. LaLiga is optimistic that some fans will be allowed back into grounds for 2020-21, maybe filling as much as 30 per cent of stadium capacities. This could see the TV output combine real and virtual fans on the terraces. “At some of our recent games, there are clubs that wanted to have physical banners in the stands, as they do in the Premier League, so we’re mixing the virtual fans with the real flags and different things that the clubs wanted to include. So yes, it is a possibility [to mix real fans with virtual fans]. “It’s still a long time until 12 September [though],” he concludes. “Three months ago it seemed impossible we could resume our competitions and here we are. In another three months, let’s see what happens. The last goal is to finish the season with everyone healthy and put on the best show we can for our fans.” SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

A TRUSTED PARTNER TO SOME OF THE WORLD’S STRONGEST MEDIA BRANDS AND BROADCASTERS, AS WELL AS NEW AND INNOVATIVE BUSINESSES, ENTREPRENEURS AND NICHE CONTENT OWNERS.

redbeemedia.com

ACCESS SERVICES

CONTENT DISCOVERY

DISTRIBUTION

LIVE & REMOTE PRODUCTION

MEDIA MANAGEMENT

OTT

PLAYOUT

POST PRODUCTION

BOLERO

WIRELESS

INTERCOM

· As a standalone solution or integrated in digital matrix intercom systems · Up to 100 Beltpacks, 100 Antennas · 12 Partylines and unlimited point-to-point connections · Advanced DECT with seamless handover · Simple registration via OTA (Over The Air) and NFC (Near Field Communication) · Integrated web server for easy setup · Daisy chain or redundant ring antenna network · Redundant antenna power · Up to 300m CAT5 cable between Antennas · External 4-Wire and GPIO Interface box www.riedel.net

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeuropeupdate

Coronavirus crisis: ITV Sport horse racing

ITV Sport PA Vicky Andrews working from home

ITV Sport reveals remote production behind its Royal Ascot racing coverage Editing, media asset management and graphics distributed to presenter and operator homes BY FERGAL RINGROSE

wo weekends ago ITV Sport resumed live horse racing with all presenters at home and a remote production in place for races from Lingfield, Newcastle and Newmarket. Last week brought the high-profile Royal Ascot meeting with lead presenters Ed Chamberlin, Francesca Cumani and Jason Weaver safely distancing back in the paddock and other colleagues presenting from zones around the racecourse. The ITV Sport production team has left no stone unturned to present the best possible show in the safest environment, and there can be no better illustration of how much coronavirus has changed the landscape than the fact that this was the first year the Queen did not attend the annual Royal Ascot meeting in her 68-year reign. Challenged with connecting a distributed presenting team and production crew across ten locations two weekends ago, facilities partner NEP made use of low 92

latency encoding technology and bonded networking solutions to deliver a secure platform capable of real time communication with robust and reliable contribution facilities. However the production hub, two weeks ago and last week, was the Equinox truck, built for the bespoke needs of ITVâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s horse racing coverage. Based at Royal Ascot throughout, Equinox provided the firepower to drive the first weekendâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s distributed remote production, and of course did not need to be de-rigged following that groundbreaking first weekend of live racing before being pressed back into action for the Royal Ascot OB. To understand the complexity of the new workflows and production operations involved in delivering live horse racing over the past two weeks, SVG Europe sat down with Daragh Bass, NEP UK, head of sales; Jon Harris, NEP UK, technical projects manager, Horse Racing; Rob Oldham, ITV Sport, technical manager; and SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeuropeupdate

Coronavirus crisis: ITV Sport horse racing

Roger Pearce, ITV Sport, technical director. “For the first weekend we had to look at the constraints of the racing venues,” said Pearce. “Our thinking was around creating a hub — a safe hub. That would be the place we actually present from, and it would have the traditional connectivity of a main and a backup feed out to ITV Presentation. “We would try to hook on remote elements from there, connected via the internet. The big problem is the internet, and whatever you put on there you need to back up — or be prepared to lose. “That was our planning,” said Pearce.“We went through every little element and worked out how to back it up. We wanted to be able to keep that core working so if we lost the director, editor and PA via the internet we had someone at the hub who could take over.” “Equinox is our established set-up for horse racing coverage,” said Harris. “When we put this proposal and plan together we didn’t know what was in front of us, other than the fact that Royal Ascot was going to happen in the middle of June, more than likely behind closed doors. We very much wanted to get our foot in the compound here and get this ‘hubbed infrastructure’ in place. “The timelines fell into place in that we could introduce a remote hub approach for the first weekend’s racing,

Sean Mehmet, NEP solutions architect and Dan Massey, NEP EIC working in NEP’s Equinox OB

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

Re c

en V od t e irt RO uc ve ua n lS I a tio ts et t t n, ha s & he IP ve RT A & R t p S op c u th of l t o e tw of u re pr hig ar th d-b m od h e e a ot ag se e uc est pro en d w & d tio qu vi d da o is n al e in ity so . rkfl trib an g lu ow ut y rap tio s a ed en h n s nd vi ic ro s f for nm or p en an rod t. y uc in g

Ta ct i

K ey

ss i

rla

while at the same time rigging Royal Ascot here with all the cameras.And it has now been deemed appropriate, we can now bring the presentation team to Ascot and have them on site. “The schedule for horse racing doesn’t contain much slack,” said Harris. “There are 94 programmes a year, so you’re never more than five days away from your next OB. “We’re quite adjusted to the fact that we’re going from one event to another — and efficiency is the key to all of this.A working environment with a hub approach was the best option really, rather than trying to build it from the ground up.”

svgeuropeupdate

Coronavirus crisis: ITV Sport horse racing

Paul McNamara, ITV Sport director, working from home

Three timing planes for contribution and production

“The brief for Royal Ascot this year was to try to get as many crew off-site as we could” ROB OLDHAM

“For the technical approach we took some inspiration from the world of esports,” said Bass. “Within an esports environment the players need to compete real time, and latency is critical. But you still have to broadcast that. “So the original concept was that we could backhaul each presenter to a hub, create a multiviewer, and send them a return feed. But even on the best low latency encoding you’re still talking — ballpark — one second in each direction plus a little bit of processing. “We knew we needed to do something different. We set up a couple of different timing planes. “To ensure real time we used cloud mixing and cloud video conferencing tools, and that basically enabled all the talent to communicate in real time with visual cues, nods and thumbs up — and they had open talkback into each other’s ears to create mix-minus feeds. That was challenging enough in itself, creating all the different audio feeds — Jon and the team in the truck did a fantastic job QC-ing and bringing it all together,” said Bass. “And then at the next level we took discrete feeds of all of the individual cameras and microphones and took them to the truck. So the hub probably operates on a slightly

different timing plane of about a second behind the real time comms, but it has proven not to be an issue because as long as the talent can communicate in real time in their world and get fed the cues, contributed sources and VTs from the truck, we can create this discrete mix out of the truck and produce it. “And there’s a third timing plane to factor in.You’ve had the contribution side up to now, but the production side is also something of a feat of engineering, in that it’s using low latency encoding to take multiviewers and program feeds out of the truck and send them to seven or eight different pods around the country for different shows. So that’s low latency encoding going out with different multiviewers and program feeds, at the same time ensuring they’ve got full talkback,” said Bass. “Connectivity and communication is key to this workflow ” said Oldham,“We spent a lot of time getting it right in testing and that gives you a platform to build on. We are working for a BAFTA award-winning production team and once confident in the technology they start pushing the boundaries of what is possible — like inviting every owner in a race to a Zoom party so we can be part of their celebrations if they win. “We knew whatever we built shouldn’t limit their SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeuropeupdate

Coronavirus crisis: ITV Sport horse racing

imagination or the technical possibilities to put in the right backbone to support those ideas. And we were starting from scratch. It was good to be able to tackle the challenge, and the NEP guys delivered,” said Oldham. “And I think one of the key things is we wanted to make people feel they were in a serious TV work environment,” said Harris.“For PA Vicky Andrews at home, for example, as soon as she sat in with the monitor and talkback panel and confidence call of all the other people she would normally sit next to, she said ‘this is like being in the truck’. It felt purposeful. “We are remoting the production into people’s homes. I’m pleased with what we’ve delivered.” “Jon mentioned extending the reach of the truck: we’ve essentially extended the network,” said Bass.“We’ve created an SD Wan environment, using bonded cellular and domestic internet to extend the reach of the truck. “That opens up a whole host of possibilities, and by opening up those possibilities we can pick and choose what services to run on that remote end, because we can create the appropriate VLAN tunnel all the way out. Whether that’s PTZ control for our camera, or router panel, or talkback matrix — whatever way you want to go you’ve got that whole suite of possibilities. “The brief for Royal Ascot this year was to try to get as

Oli Bell, ITV Racing presenter in his home studio

many crew off-site as we could,” said Oldham. “Normally we would have 44 cameras 17 of them RF, with wirecam, tracker cam, car mounted jib, drone, jockey cams and tower cam. That is scaled back this year due to lack of crowd and BHA restrictions and we have remoted operation of our edit, media management and graphics to operators’ homes.”

75 Years of Sennheiser.

We look back on a rich history of seven and a half decades of innovation, expertise and attention to detail. Discover all stories, magic moments and special offers. www.sennheiser.com/75years

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeuropeupdate

Bundesliga re-start on Sky Sport

Bundesliga re-start on Sky Sport: ‘The corona crisis forced us to quickly throw old ways of thinking overboard’ BY ALESSANDRO REITANO

ollowing the successful completion of the Bundesliga season on 27 June, Sky Germany vice president of sports production Alessandro Reitano outlines what his team did to overcome the challenges posed by COVID19 and reveals what they have learned from the experience. No one expected COVID-19 to hit all parts of the live sports business as hard as it did. There Alessandro Reitano: What was clear to us from the beginning was wasn’t a time in the past 50 years that if we were to use Fan Atmo, it had to be really good where the entire sports world came to such an abrupt halt as it did during the past few months, which posed great challenges for all live broadcasters. But nonetheless, every crisis has its opportunities and the urgent need to re-think a lot of processes gave way to important and major innovations in our Bundesliga broadcasts and therefore for our customers. The Bundesliga was the first major league in the world to re-start and it did so on 16 May with the so-called “It was a very ‘behind closed doors’ or ‘ghost’ games. intense period We understood the fans being torn between wishing of time where to see their team play while having the desire to actually we had to ‘experience’ the matches. Therefore we came up with a couple of enhancements create a new to supercharge the 90-minute football match and beyond ecosystem that while keeping a very high hygiene standard in place and was technically making sure that we keep our people safe on-site in the stadium but also in our broadcasting centre. stable” Especially around the broadcasting centre, we deployed a ‘safe house strategy’ and brought the necessary disaster recovery concepts in place to make sure that we were absolutely ready for the ‘what if?’ cases, either by moving out of the broadcasting centre due to a complete lockdown or if we had a suspected case within the crew during live operations. We started our thinking around how to be best prepared in the very early stages of the crisis to make sure that we could cover all the necessary steps: remote access to all relevant core systems in our HQ; deployment of re-shaping of workspaces and accesses; intense talks 96

with Bundesliga and Sportcast [the host broadcaster] regarding their security concept of the OB vans on-site; and partially re-functioning of our Sky Sports News SNG fleet for disaster recovery purposes. It was a very intense period of time where we had to create a new ecosystem that was technically stable and allowed us to both secure our free-to-air 24/7 sports news business and create a new and meaningful programme for our pay-TV customers while live sports paused during the coronavirus pandemic. From a product perspective, we set ourselves some ultimate goals for the Bundesliga re-start. We created a dedicated ‘Sky Stadium Atmo’ for each Bundesliga match and for our most-watched product, Bundesliga Conference, where we switch live between all Bundesliga matches on a Saturday. On top of that, we doubled our number of Ultra HD games per matchday, increased fan engagement with a dedicated fan‘watch along’ feed, offered a fan commentary feed for certain matches and enhanced match coverage with augmented reality to cover the empty stands where possible and appropriate with additional data and facts. All the additional features mentioned above had to be developed, tested and implemented in the shortest possible time and under coronavirus safety conditions. From the idea to going live, we had just two weeks to develop the specific Sky Sound Atmo and especially with the very sensitive topic of ‘artificial’ crowd sounds or Fan Atmo as we call it. What was clear to us from the beginning was that if we were to use this feature, it had to be really good.

How does Sky Sound Atmo work?

For every single match on every matchday, we extract the sound-file from previous encounters between those two teams — paying attention to the exact formation in regards of ‘Home and Away’. From this ‘old’ sound-file we then create multiple dedicated sound-samples of match-situations and how the fans — if they were in the stadium — would react. eg.‘Goal Home Team’,‘Goal Away Team’,‘Missed Chances’, ‘VAR Situations’,‘Foul Home Team’,‘Foul Away Team’ etc. All of these samples are then made available on an Akai MPD 226 sound controller and then played out at the exact SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeuropeupdate

Bundesliga re-start on Sky Sport

situation when it occurred during the match by an operator. Since the samples are mixed live, it requires a high degree of concentration, especially for the Sky sound producer. I really believe that our approach to Sky Sound Atmo has been so well received by our customers and fans because you notice that the audio mix is live and that someone is deliberately following the game for 90 minutes and can, therefore, anticipate the course of the game and thus the ‘fan reactions’ in the stadium accordingly. This gives the fans the feeling in front of the screens that they were at least ‘experiencing’ the matches and not just ‘watching’ it. Of course, from the first game of the re-start until now we have been working continuously on the further development of the right audio mix. The learning curve was extremely steep! Around fan engagement, we started a new show in parallel to the match of the week called #CouchKurve, where two fans together with our Sky host watch the game, comment on it and exchange opinions. With Twitter and Instagram, we get opinions from outside and call for polls. The whole product is produced live in the cloud. As a production unit, we use the Windows-based vision mixer vMix, developed by StudioCoast, with graphics added via Singular.

As I mentioned at the beginning, the coronavirus crisis has forced us to quickly throw old ways of thinking overboard and to use the re-start phase as an innovation offensive to offer our customers the best possible programme and to make the lack of fans in the stadiums a bit more bearable. Sky Sound Atmo can only be a temporary solution, whereas we see the issue of fan engagement, the even greater use of augmented reality and the integration of more data as a great opportunity to make further efforts there for the new season. Alessandro Reitano is the vice president of sports production at Sky Deutschland and the chair of the SVG Europe Advisory Board

TAKE YOUR STORY ANYWHERE Amplifying the value of live and premium content - anywhere We work with the world’s largest sports, news, and events organisations to provide end to end sports media solutions. With a dedicated sports focused media unit that distributes more than 620 hours of live sports and events every day, we manage and deliver superior viewing experiences from any venue to any screen and platform. Learn more at ses.com

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeuropeupdate

COVID-safe Test cricket

CTV OB camera crew prepares for day’s play at the Ageas Bowl

Innovations abound as COVID-safe Test cricket returns to Sky Sports BY WILL STRAUSS

nternational cricket returned this week with the start of the first Test between England and West Indies, a game that was made possible thanks to the teams, match officials and TV crew staying in bio-secure bubbles. But the health and safety regulations and social distancing that have been put in place because of the coronavirus pandemic didn’t just impact on how and where players could train and play. They also prompted the host broadcaster and UK rights holder for the series, Sky Sports, and its facilities suppliers, to come up with new and innovative COVIDsafe ways of providing the TV coverage for viewers at home: something that has taken an awful lot of planning and preparation and not a little ingenuity. 98

Crowd sound

One of the issues Sky has had to deal with, of course, is the lack of crowd, and therefore natural atmosphere, inside the grounds. To compensate, a sound bed is being added to the live output that features background chatter, general atmosphere and the odd champagne cork being popped. That bed is actually taken from a Lord’s Test match, and is dubbed the ‘Lord’s hum’. “A cricket crowd is difficult to emulate, especially the appropriate reactions to things like a dropped catch [for example],” explains Sky director of cricket Bryan Henderson speaking to SVG Europe on Day 2 (9 July) of the match which is taking place at the Ageas Bowl in Southampton. “But I’ve gone 180-degrees on this. At first, I wanted to be totally authentic [and add no sound] but I actually feel the hum makes it more authentic [for the viewer]. We use it at a very low level.” Henderson admits that he would have loved a more expansive augmented audio crowd system, like the one used on Premier League football, which adds sounds that were originally captured for use by EA Sports on the FIFA video game. But that facility isn’t available for cricket. “I’ve watched the football with and without the SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeuropeupdate

COVID-safe Test cricket

augmented sound and I much prefer it with the crowd diaries, we took the time to have noise,” he adds. a think about how the future of sporting events would look from ‘Little Wardy’ a broadcast perspective in this Also in use is a Buggy Cam or as the Sky team have new COVID-19 world. It quickly christened it, ‘Little Wardy’ in honour of presenter Ian became apparent that the usual Ward who is famous for his diminutive stature. norms, even simple things like a The remote-controlled trackless dolly system originally player interview, could become developed by Motion Impossible is operated by Batcam problematic for broadcasters. (who call it Batcam Drive). “So we started thinking about For this series, it has been adapted to include a full how people’s habits have changed foldback speaker system and onboard monitor and is and a 2-way video chat was providing shots and capturing sound on the outfield suddenly the norm. What better where handheld cameras, reporters and presenters are way to interview a player than not allowed as part of the health and safety regulations. using this type of technology but On Day 1 it was used to cover the coin toss at the with a broadcast upgrade? We put beginning of the match and for the subsequent interviews down on paper how we thought The Sky production team have christened the Batcam Drive ‘Little with the two captains. The screen on the front of the vehicle we could achieve it and showed Wardy’ after presenter Ian Ward allowed the players to interact with the interviewer. The the team at Sky Cricket a mock-up of how it would look. audio was outputted from speakers onboard the system “In essence, it is a remote control vehicle with a riser so they could converse openly. to raise the level of the camera to eye level with a remote The idea came from the experience of doing video control camera gimbal onboard. They were immediately conference calls, as Batcam founder and chief executive interested to learn more and it’s a testament to Bryan and Jon Hurndall explains. his team that they are always open to pushing boundaries “In the height of lockdown with zero bookings in our and testing new ideas.”

Beyond Fast File Movement

SVG_Europe_Journal_Ad_2020_HP.indd 1 SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

6/29/20 11:20 AM

svgeuropeupdate

COVID-safe Test cricket

COVID-safe production areas in CTV OB truck for Sky Sports Cricket

Flying cameras

“The behindclosed-doors element has meant we have been able to push the boundaries of our usual flying zones” JON HURNDALL

While having no crowd inside the stadium takes away some of the magic of live sport, it does have its advantages from time-to-time. At the Ageas Bowl, for example, an aerial Batcam system is being used. This is a new version that can fly for longer periods, up to 20-minute continuous spells. “The behind-closed-doors element has meant we have been able to push the boundaries of our usual flying zones,” adds Hurndall. “This has refreshed the shots we can offer: we have even been flying directly over the pitch when the teams go on and off the field of play. Something that we’ve always wanted to do but have been unable to do around large crowds.” A 100-metre long Batcam Wire system has also been installed that runs directly over the pitch, parallel to the wicket. This is offering a unique look at the empty stadium and fielding positions in and around the slips. It is fitted with a 3-axis stabilised gimbal, a Sony P50 camera and Canon 18x lens.

Player Zone

With close-up player interviews not possible, Sky Sports has introduced The Player Zone. Visually, acknowledges Henderson, it looks like the diary room from the reality TV show Big Brother but this small studio-like space provides a place for live remote access interviews and for players to do technique demonstrations. For Player Zone, Sky Sports’ OB facilities provider CTV 100

Outside Broadcasts has installed Panasonic AW-UE70 PTZ remote cameras which are always on. There is a small PA system for the audio. This means no crew are required in the room. As well as for interviews, reveals Henderson, players will also be able to use The Player Zone to join in with the commentary and have conversations during play, similar to the ‘watch along’ shows that Sky Cricket did during lockdown with archive matches.

90 Zoom calls for planning and preparation Making the production COVID-secure took a huge amount of preparation. Bryan Henderson estimates as many as 90 Zoom video calls in fact. “It’s been an exhaustive planning process, discussing everything from PPE and hand sanitiser to perspex screens in the trucks,” says Henderson. “We even have an ioniser to make sure the microphones are sanitised [between commentary stints].” He praises everyone involved for their work in getting Test cricket back on the air, including director of production Phil Marshall and CTV. Even if government guidelines change, Henderson expects the production set-up for Test matches to stay this way throughout the summer, with the bio-secure bubbles remaining in place to ensure player safety.

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

EMPOWERING CLIENTS WITH VIRTUAL SOLUTIONS CHANGING WITH THE GAME WWW.SMT.COM

PROVEN

FLEXIBLE

UNLIMITED

The complete platform designed to deliver virtual advertising in live sport Commercially proven; delivers to the highest quality standards and integrates seamlessly with live televised sports productions, in venue or fully downstream. One platform, many applications; overlay existing physical advertising on LED perimeter boards; create new inventory using virtual placements in and around the ďŹ eld of play; or combine both to maximise value.

www.supponor.com

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

@supponor

101

svgeuropeupdate

SVG Europe Women virtual event accentuates the positives of project re-start and the ‘new normal’ in OB compounds BY WILL STRAUSS

Clockwise from top left: Katarzyna Humska, Chrissie Collins, Victoria Rudling and Heather McLean

“With having no public there, you can get home a lot quicker when the OB is finished!” KATARZYNA HUMSKA

102

SVG Europe Women Virtual

While Telegenic unit manager Chrissie Collins described the preparation that went into getting BT Sport, Amazon Prime and BBC Sport’s coverage of Premier League matches on air, an experience she described as “manic”. The production technology and health and safety elements of the discussion were clearly integral to their respective projects, and to the virtual event itself, but the overall theme of the get-together was of positivity and pleasure at being back to work. “Getting people to wear masks and social distance [is a challenge]. I had to use a lot of pink gaffer tape to mark out the social distancing!,” said Rudling. “But the virtual working has brought everyone at Sky together. I get to see people I wouldn’t normally see which is a real bonus.” Does it feel strange? “Yes, it does,” acknowledged Collins. “There is a lot of paperwork. Lots of COVID declarations. You have temperature checks every day. On TX day you have checks and need to wear wristbands. It is hard work to keep people socially distanced and ensure people clean their workstations. We can’t even give people a cup of tea. But it is good to be back to work and good to see live sport back. It is only a matter of time before punters are allowed back in.” There are plus sides too, she said. “With having no public there, you can get home a lot quicker when the OB is finished!” “It is very fulfilling,” concluded Humska. “We’ve done very good work in these strange conditions.” Humska’s professional career has always been attached to MediaPro and specifically to football. She has been part of some of the company’s major projects including Al Jazeera for BeIN Sports, and producing special coverage for long-term MediaPro client at LaLiga, plus UEFA Champions League matches. In 2015 she became part of MediaPro’s Nodal Audiovisual Sport team, which is dedicated to LaLiga match production where she supervises the coordination of logistical and technical information both for the Clubs and technical providers. The team coordinates around 1,000 different productions each season. She also coordinates on-site producers around the country. Humska has been a key part of creating the ‘new normal’ within stadiums in terms of health and safety protocols for LaLiga and MediaPro crew since lockdown restrictions eased in Spain. She also tested and introduced VIZ Arena virtual fans into LaLiga transmissions. The event concluded with a networking ‘hangout’ in which the discussion turned to the importance of freelancers to the industry, the role of remote production and the sometimes thorny issue of skills and training.

ealth and safety, remote production and even pink gaffer tape were all on the agenda last night as SVG Europe Women got together for another hugely successful virtual event — but it was the overwhelming positivity in the room that had the most lasting impact. The intimate Zoom gathering featured a strong line up of speakers all discussing what it is like being back at work in the ‘new normal’. For the first time, it was followed by a virtual ‘hangout’ in which participants were able to chat openly about life and work during and post lockdown. To kick things off, three guest speakers shared their experiences of what it is like to be back to work in sports TV production. Sky Sports News production manager Victoria Rudling discussed how Sky has adopted cloud-based tools for the production of live programming such as The Football Show and for pre-recorded vodcasts. MediaPro production coordinator Katarzyna Humska outlined how Mediapro had solved the problem of having no fans inside stadiums when LaLiga returned to action, The SVG Europe Women virtual event and hangout took before detailing the complicated health and safety regimes place on Thursday 16 July at 4pm UK time — click here to and their importance. view on YouTube.

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

Video Security

Hackers are finding new ways to devalue your content. That’s why you need constantly-evolving security solutions to protect your video. Secure your content and your service with proactive security measures. Detect and disrupt piracy whenever and wherever it happens. We’re Synamedia. We help companies like yours protect the value of their content.

Find out more at synamedia.com

THE AUTOMATED LIVE SPORTS SOLUTION

MULTI SPORT CONFIGURATIONS ANY SPORT, ANY FEED ONE CLICK PUBLISHING TO ANY DESTINATION MANAGE, ENRICH, PRODUCE AND DELIVER LIVE EVENTS CONTENT REPLAY DETECTION CONNECTS INTO YOUR EXISTING LIVE PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENT

For more information request a remote demo: www.tedial.com E U R O P E · U S A · M E A · L ATA M · A PA C

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

103

svgeuropeupdate

The Motorsport Show 2020

The Motorsport Show 2020: Back on the track with F1, Nascar and MotoGP BY HEATHER MCLEAN with Stephens, Valks said: “Corona has a very big impact on all of our lives. From a broadcast point of view, the gallery…. the first thing is to make it safe for everyone.We bought a lot of people to their home offices very quickly.” On the production of F1 Grand Prix now, Valks added: “At the moment we have just two people at the track and all the rest are [working on the F1 productions] remotely. But we use footage from Sky UK and Italy. If a pandemic is coming up, you have to [make sure] everyone’s life is safe.” Meanwhile, Schumacher discussed what it is really like to live and work in an F1 bubble for Sky Deutschland, coining the term,“bubble life”. He said: “In a bubble, life is pretty normal. I started to Ralf Schumacher: It’s a challenge to get across to people where we are and what we’re doing” work with Sky last year; with this new life, you can just go out with your mobile phone [at the track and film]. It’s a he Motorsport Show 2020 on Thursday 6 August challenge to get across to people where we are and what showcased how some of the top names in this area we’re doing.” have got their coverage back on track with live broadcasts of races and championships. Nascar on proving remote works Returning to the paddock is not an easy task, however. Steve Stum, Nascar Production’s vice president of This event, sponsored by LiveU, enabled SVG Europe to operations and technical production, discussed how examine how motor racing is being brought back to TV different US broadcasters have approached Nascar screens following the coronavirus pandemic and how coverage, outlined the various remote production motorsport coverage might develop in the future. workflows being used and highlighted the impact of Formula 1’s Dean Locke, director of broadcast and COVID-19, both positive and negative. media, discussed how this premier form of racing “I’ve never been more proud to work for Nascar,” he has returned to the track, how it will move forward said, in a one-to-one conversation with SVG editorial over coming months, and what is needed to push that director Ken Kerschbaumer. innovation ahead. “We put a lot of thought and effort into how we keep Locke spoke in a live conversation with presenter of the people safe. [With remote production] we had to do it. Motorsport Show, sports presenter Abi Stephens. On F1’s We had to do something. We had to reduce the amount remote production, he said: “We’ve made that jump and of people on site. we’re really happy with it. We’ll add developments over “It forced everybody to look at remote at large events. coming seasons to push that out even further.” To do that on your own takes a lot of planning and you He also spoke about F1’s COVID procedures given that have to have a good reason. COVID-19 was a good reason. last weekend at the British Grand Prix, Sergio Perez tested We’ve proved that we can do these shows at scale. And positive, and how that was contained, as well as how the proved we can do it in multiple different ways.” fans of this motorsport have been gripped and engaged by In what was a common theme during the event, Stum the racing action so far. also made note of the use of data and statistics within Locke was followed by Sky Sport’s Karl Valks and former motorsport coverage and how it can be used to aid Formula 1 driver, Ralf Schumacher. Again speaking live storytelling.

104

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

105

svgeuropeupdate

The Motorsport Show 2020

Photo: Artem Lepesin • Creative Commons Licence

Yamaha MotoGP factory rider Valentino Rossi at Winter Test 2020 in Qatar

MotoGP and The Greatest Race

We didn’t have any other ways of making programming, so we decided to go for it” KEVIN BROWN

106

North 1’s Kevin Brown, MotoGP series editor for BT Sport, explained how North 1 worked closely with BT Sport to,“explode the gallery” to get its lockdown concept programme, The Greatest Race, on TV screens within days of arriving at the idea. When BT sport suggested the idea of decentralising the gallery so the broadcaster could still produce MotoGP programmes during lockdown, Brown said he thought, “what have you got to lose? We didn’t have any other ways of making programming, so we decided to go for it.” Speaking to SVG Europe editor, Heather McLean, Brown continued:“The usual TV gallery, which we weren’t able to put together physically, we did remotely. We had people in various parts of the country; an EVS operator in West London, we had myself in Norfolk, we had our VT co-ord in Kent, we had graphics in Essex, we had our presenter Gavin in Yorkshire. We had all the elements in various parts of the country, all held together with some clever engineering and some broadband.”

He added now that MotoGP is back on track, North 1 is focused on taking fans, “to the event” while protecting crew. It is working with a remote presentation hub at Triumph while using the same remote production as for The Greatest Race with home workers and restricted numbers of staff allowed into any studio space. “BT [Sport], from the outset [of the coronavirus pandemic], have always said that their number one priority is safety of all of the staff. Of course COVID protocols are in place everywhere, but the safest place for everybody is still at home.” He concluded to say that this increase in the use of remote production will continue to happen going forward,“for sure”. Next up was Gravity Media’s Ryan Campbell, talking all things motorsport, what it is like on location today, augmented reality possibilities, and name dropping Lewis Hamilton. Abi Stephens then rounded up and waved the chequered flag on the first SVG Europe Motorsport event. SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

Join SVGE today www.svgeurope.org

svgeurope

Sponsor Update

2020 SPONSOR UPDATE Who could have predicted that a coronavirus called COVID-19 would completely alter the world of sports production earlier this year – an altered state that still pertains. Our reporter Ian McMurray has spoken to Platinum, Gold and OB/SI sponsors about how their business has been affected as a result.

808 Talent

positive and quickened our work in the remote Connectivity is key, Baily believes, and AE Live production space. is building Graphics Operation Centres at AE Live CEO AND CO-FOUNDER campuses in the UK and India, both of which are 8 0 8 Talent specialises in online with major connectivity partners. recruitment, talent consulting Aerial Camera Systems and coaching within the global MATT COYDE broadcast and sports media technology industry. SALES DIRECTOR “We’ve been keeping close to our clients and candidates and to industry trends as much as This year held great promise for humanly possible,” says the company’s CEO live sport — but 2020 had other and co-founder Ben Swanton. “That means ideas… Time to look forward. consulting and understanding what their “Our crews started back first with ITV’s challenges are, and pain points, and how they coverage of the horseracing behind closed doors are seeing COVID-19 impact their business and — and it was great to be out on the road again,” what that could mean for future staffing and smiles Matt Coyde, sales director at Aerial hiring cycles.” Camera Systems. “Since then, elements of our With live sport beginning to return, Swanton football and other regular UK commitments sees his company’s role as continuing to act have started to come back. We are now swiftly to help with any short term staffing issues “Clearly, the COVID-19 crisis has accelerated looking ahead to the rest of the year and, more that companies have. that remote workflow although, from an significantly, 2021 and 2022, where we are seeing “As a business, we are there to help AE perspective, it has been a big part of our a number of larger projects that were delayed by support them through company restructures, offering for some time now due to two of the outbreak. At the moment, it’s a constantly redundancy programmes, and to help as our key markets, India and Australia, being evolving scenario.” many people as we can with career advice and fairly advanced in that space,” he continues. According to Coyde, Aerial Camera Systems mapping out their next opportunities as we all “Traditional on-site broadcasting isn’t going to is investing heavily across its range of services collectively navigate what the industry looks like disappear overnight, though, and we still need — including upgrading to the latest broadcast post pandemic,” he adds. to be able to support our clients in that way too. camera, the Sony HDC-P50. “And, since IBC2019, we’ve grown our They are still likely to require significant onsite “We are also further expanding our coaching and consulting practice,” Swanton services for the foreseeable future — so we need SMARThead robotic inventory as well as continues. “We see it playing an even bigger to be as flexible as possible.” complementing it with a brand new in-house role now in supporting leaders and their teams Baily says that his company has also been designed 12G SMPTE fibre transmission within the sports broadcast community to revisiting the way that it captures, processes system,” he explains. “As well as this, we achieve their goals and accomplish what it is they and distributes data and is currently developing recently took delivery of a new Cineflex Pro need to do, without the risk of stress, overwhelm a cloud-based platform that will enable AE Stabilised mount for use on helicopters for or burnout.” Live to offer data as a managed service to its aerial filming, wirecams and the ACS railcams clients. or tracking vehicles, and can also offer a Cinema AE Live “We’ve also done significant work around Pro (RED) solution which is ideal for any large NICK BAILY analysing where we can add value in the OTT format sensor production requirements.” CEO and digital space and have invested in a company AJA Video Systems In common with many of its called LIGR that means we are now able to offer BRYCE BUTTON peers in the industry, AE Live has our own integrated solutions using web-based DIRECTOR OF PRODUCT MARKETING taken advantage of the enforced rendering,” Baily goes on. “As well as being able downtime by prioritising its R&D pipeline. to provide graphics for events that are streamed Every dark cloud, they say, has a “We had a number of big developments directly to the web, we can offer cost-effective silver lining — and Bryce Button, nearing completion when the pandemic struck optimised feeds for OTT users, curated graphics director of product marketing at and had to put a lot of that on ice,” notes for different audience demographics and multi- AJA Video Systems, sees reasons for optimism. CEO Nick Baily. “Our revised focus was a real language graphics channels.” “While a difficult period, we view this as

BEN SWANTON

108

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeurope

Sponsor Update

an opportunity for growth as an industry,” he says, “with the continual evolution of remote production environments, OTT delivery and a transformed broadcast experience.” AJA has released a range of 12G-SDI products that are designed to streamline workflows and enhance flexibility for sports and live production professionals working from any location, whether remotely or socially distanced on set. “All of AJA’s 12G-SDI devices offer the advantages of single-cable simplicity for high raster content, reducing the overall cost in cabling, and remote control and configuration,” Button explains. “Optional fibre for transmitting video and audio long distance further aids with on-set physical distancing to keep teams safe during production.” Button’s company also recently debuted the new Ki Pro Ultra 12G, a single-channel 4K/ UltraHD recorder and player or 4-channel HD recorder, featuring 12G-SDI connectivity for high bandwidth workflows. Said to be suited for a range of production environments, whether on set or in a live venue, the Ki Pro Ultra 12G supports single-channel 4K/UltraHD up to

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

50/60p recording and playback to and from Apple ProRes or Avid DNxHR, or up to four channels of simultaneous HD recording up to 1080 50/60p with independent Apple ProRes codec profiles per channel. “IP, 12G-SDI and fibre technologies are driving remote workflows and allowing production teams to maintain safe distances while on set or in venue,” Button believes. “Integrating IP technologies into sports production workflows reduces personnel on set by enabling teams to control and configure technology remotely from virtually anywhere with Internet connection. As productions ramp up and teams return to work, 12G-SDI and fibre are critical to keeping equipment and staff physically distanced while on the job.”

Aldea Solutions LIONEL BENTOLILA CEO

2020 was supposed to be a great year for sport. But now, the major sporting events everyone was looking forward to have shifted back a year.

2021 will be a great year for sport. “We have continued to invest in our network, expanding our points of presence, along with bandwidth enhancements,” notes Lionel Bentolila, CEO of Aldea Solutions. “We also look to work to continuously adapt our solutions and services to be able to provide turnkey solutions to customers’ ever-increasing needs in regards to live events. We look forward to working with our customers when the Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics, UEFA EURO 2020 and Copa America 2020 resume in 2021.” Established in 2000 in Montreal, Canada, Aldea offers fully managed transmission services using its fibre and partner teleport facilities. Services include full time and occasional use services, video as file, HD encoding and other production and transmission services. Complementing its connectivity throughout the Americas, Aldea’s network extends into Europe with dedicated fibre connectivity into the UK, Spain and France as well as partner agreements for fibre and teleport services into the Nordic region, Asia, sub-Asian continent and Australia. “Thanks to the tireless commitment of

109

svgeurope

Sponsor Update

our employees,”Bentolila continues, “our AMP Visual also produced all the graphics for development resources, in the knowledge we operations were uninterrupted during the the entire Formula 1 championship for a French can help them deliver an incredibly powerful and pandemic, allowing our customers to benefit broadcaster using at-home production as well as engaging UI for their fans.” from a transparent experience.” all the Iron Man 2019 stages through to the final Arena TV in Hawaii.

AMP Visual TV

STEPHANE ALESSANDRI EXECUTIVE VICE-PRESIDENT, INTERNATIONAL OPERATIONS

The esports market is growing at close to 20% per year — but that forecast may change in light of the pandemic, which has seen ‘real’ sports move online. Take the FIA World Touring Car Cup (WTCR) and Le Mans 24 hours, for example: both saw the best simracers and real life drivers compete, and both attracted audiences in the tens of millions. That coverage was made possible in part by AMP Visual TV.

“We were able to support the continuity of certain sporting events thanks to at-home production, notably in motorsports and therefore e-motorsports,” says the company’s executive vice-president — international operations, Stephane Alessandri. “This is a real boost for at-home production: we have completed a total of six races for the e-WTCR thanks to high performance and secure connections from the four corners of the world to our media centre. In addition, the Le Mans 24 Hours Virtual 2020 was carried out in one of our studios on the Champs Elysées in Paris — and found a cumulative audience of more than 63 million on TV and digital platforms.”

110

DAFYDD REES

Applicaster JONATHAN GIBSON

VP, SPORTS SALES, EMEA AND APAC

As a SaaS company, Applicaster believes it is fortunate in that it is used to working remotely and can continue to support its global customers without being affected. “We’ve identified opportunities where Applicaster can support sports companies in the ‘new normal’, such as an app management platform that can be accessed from anywhere,” says Jonathan Gibson, the company’s VP, sports sales, EMEA and APAC. “We can deliver tremendous flexibility and agility in deploying instant updates to DTC sports apps, ensuring the apps respond to — and even anticipate — unexpected changes such as replacing cancelled live events with VOD archives or introducing new subscription packages sensitive to the changes in programming. And we can increase team efficiency and speed with ready-to-go, development-free tools.” There are two main developments that Gibson believes will have a real impact on what his company can offer the sports industry. “The first is our relationship with Stats Perform,” he says. “We now have a very close partnership as well as an already-built integration, allowing us to offer rights holders the ability to bring data to the fan without having to build or develop. Less complexity and speed to market can help organisations deliver the best in breed app and technology but without the cost or development time.” The second, Gibson notes, is the launch of Quick Brick, a new app development framework within Applicaster’s app development platform, Zapp. “The new toolset turbocharges video app development, enabling companies to shrink time to market, reduce development and maintenance costs, and increase post-launch agility,” he explains. “The new capabilities now available in the Zapp platform include streamlined UI design tools. Zapp Studio’s new design toolkit provides direct control over hundreds of design attributes. This allows us to talk to sports organisations, with varying

DEPUTY DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS

It’s been a busy and productive year for Arena TV — and the company’s development plans have, says deputy director of operations Dafydd Rees, been accelerated by the pandemic “We made a significant investment in the autumn, building a highly versatile remote production fly-pack which comprises modular pods that can be scaled to suit any production,” he recalls. “The pods have Net Insight Nimbra IP processing integrated into them which allows us to be self-sufficient and can be deployed either standalone or within the OB trucks to provide a hybrid traditional/remote concept.” Arena TV has also been transforming its Redhill base by building an advanced remote production gallery and flexible working spaces. “Even during lockdown, with live sports off the calendar, this facility was busy providing esport coverage,” continues Rees. “We built this facility with flexibility in mind. It can operate as a full remote facility, or for certain remote elements, like replay or graphics, just be an equipment hub with operators at other sites — their home or offices, for example. Different productions will use different configurations of remote and traditional workflows, so we have to be, and are, nimble and flexible in our approach.”

ATEME REMI BEAUDOUIN

CHIEF STRATEGY OFFICER

By 202 2, the cost to the industry of piracy is expected to reach $52 billion. In response, the European Broadcasting Union — in collaboration with companies including ATEME — has developed BISS-CA, a protocol that enables real-time entitlement management for content streams over any network. As an open, royalty-free standard, BISS-CA can be used on any production equipment, from decoders and encoders to multiplexers and transcoders. The UK’s BT has already partnered with ATEME on the technology. “BISS-CA implementation in sports will be significant as it will prevent the piracy of live SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeurope

Sponsor Update

streams of games,” notes Remi Beaudouin, chief strategy officer at ATEME. “We’ve seen further enhancements to BISS-CA for securing sports distribution to affiliates, as well as the introduction of SMPTE-2110 for full IP workflows.” ATEME has also been actively developing advances in latency reduction — which, believes Beaudouin, put sports OTT transmission on a par with broadcast. Beaudouin also notes that the coronavirus pandemic may have had some advantages as customers take advantage of a quiet time in sports broadcasting to invest in their future. “We’ve seen almost no impact from COVID19, other than that some orders have been cancelled due to the cancellation of major sports events — but this has been limited,” he says. “Our customers — including some major players in sports — have kept investing in our solutions to modernise their video operations. In fact, as COVID-19 has inspired many companies to accelerate their migration to software and cloud, we’ve seen some projects being fasttracked.” Beaudouin also sees investment in encoding

as a major trend as it is helping to improve bandwidth efficiency without impacting video quality. This, he believes, could give broadcasters a competitive edge at a time when video content is proving to be of significant value to audiences.

AWS GEOFF STEDMAN

ENTERPRISE MEDIA STRATEGIST

The move to cloud-based live production, necessitated by current events, is changing how people are looking at sports production workflows and accelerating the move to more flexible solutions, believes Geoff Stedman, enterprise media strategist at AWS Elemental. The challenge is to make the new paradigm as easy as possible to implement. “We recently introduced AWS Elemental Link,” says Stedman, “a small, easy-to-deploy device which greatly simplifies camera-tocloud workflows for live sports broadcasts. Elemental Link creates a secure, cloud-managed connection for capturing live footage from a venue and sends it to our cloud-based services for processing and distribution of the live stream

direct to viewers through Amazon CloudFront.” He believes that the success of several recent sports and esports events using the cloud has reinforced the viability of moving these workflows to the cloud going forward. Traditional production tools like editing, graphics and even live production switching are, says Stedman, all moving to the cloud at an accelerated rate, in part driven by how sports production has adapted and in part because the performance and latency of working in the cloud delivers a user experience that is functionally similar to what had been done on-premises previously — just with none of the production staff in the same room. Stedman goes on to note that his company has also developed reference architectures for machine learning-assisted asset management and editing in the cloud, utilising a variety of AWS networking, security, processing and storage services along with solutions from AWS Partner Network (APN) partners such as GrayMeta, Teradici, and EditShare. “The AWS solutions for production in the cloud support a broad set of creative tools, data and workflow management applications,”

Audio. Control. Power

SNMP

for Any Application

REMOTE & LIVE PRODUCTION

MOS & NEWSROOM INTEGRATION

Providing tools, expertise & knowledge so you can remain focused on making great content.

SPORTS & STADIUMS

Camera Control

Monitoring By keeping our ear to the ground and working alongside our customers, TSL continues to design products and solutions that empower our customers, allowing them to take ownership of their systems and benefit from extended life-time value.

CONFERENCES & EVENTS

With a development roadmap steeped in engineering and R&D excellence, TSL continues to work alongside technical leaders and initiatives such as SMPTE and AMWA to supply eco-systems that are intuitive and powerful across SDI, hybrid and

Logging

Tally NMOS

www.tslproducts.com

LISTEN

READ

COLLABORATE

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

OB TRUCKS

ESPORTS

fully IP infrastructures.

WATCH

MASTER CONTROL & TRANSMISSION

Router Control

E. enquiries@tslproducts.com T. +44 1628 564 610 T. +1 818 898 3380

111

svgeurope

Stedman explains, “for workstations and demand as live sport returns but social storage, all with the security and compliance distancing and travel restrictions remain required for protecting valuable sports content.” in place,” says the company’s CEO Ian McDonough. “Even following the lifting of these BATCAM measures, we believe that the acceleration to JON HURNDALL remote production methods will mean Blackbird CEO will gain market share.” For many, the worst thing about According to McDonough, Blackbird is the past few months has been focused on integrating with as many technology the uncertainty. partners as possible so that its web-based editing “With the return of sporting events and the tools work seamlessly in a fuller end-to-end ever-changing way broadcasters had to adapt solution. in this new world, we were unsure how our “This year we have developed a joint business would be affected,” says Jon Hurndall, solution with Zixi and LiveU as well as with Tata CEO of BATCAM. “Fortunately, we have come Communications,” he notes, “all of whom have back to an extremely busy period covering huge footprints in live sport. Also, adding RTMP Premier League football, boxing, cricket and as an input format has increased Blackbird’s horse racing in the months since lockdown value to the sports production world.” ended. McDonough envisages a rapid acceleration “The behind closed doors element has of workflows moving fully to the cloud as sports had positives for our BATCAM Fly product in organisations begin to further appreciate the particular,” he continues, “meaning we have significant benefits of scalability, collaboration, been able to push the boundaries of our usual flexibility and cost efficiencies it delivers. The flying zones. The feedback from our clients has move to remote video production will also been really positive and has led to an increased become widespread, he believes, as state of the level of bookings.” art cloud-native video editing platforms enable Recent developments have seen the BATCAM sports content to be edited and published at Fly now using a larger system which can fly speed from home — or indeed anywhere else, for longer — up to 20 minutes, carrying a 7x as long as just a basic internet connection is stabilised zoom camera onboard. available. “We’ve also been trying to address how “The need to adopt sustainable video broadcasters can achieve the usual access to production workflows using truly green tech players without breaching social distancing will also become increasingly mandatory,” guidelines,” continues Hurndall. “We have he concludes, “as the sports industry seeks developed a revision of our BATCAM Drive to become carbon neutral in as few years as buggy system — a remote control vehicle with a possible.” stabilised camera onboard that can move about Blackmagic Design freely in and around players.” CRAIG HEFFERNAN BATCAM is also currently working on a TECHNICAL SALES DIRECTOR EMEA remote camera operator to control cameras from an offsite location. Increased demand and the need for remote content from Blackbird contributors and journalists IAN MCDONOUGH has, according to Craig Heffernan, technical CEO sales director EMEA, seen a surge of interest in B l a c k b i r d ’s m i s s i o n i s Blackmagic Design’s range of ATEM production straightforward: to increase switchers for both HD and 4K. the value of video, whether “We’ve worked with customers to find this be monetary value or usability value, by solutions that allow them to continue to deliver hyper-accelerating the speed at which live and news, programming and sports coverage non-live video can be accessed, viewed, edited whilst limitations on studios and attendance at and published — from anywhere. Blackbird’s matches are in place,” he says. remote professional editing platform requires “Our new ATEM Mini Pro has been in high only 2MB/s bandwidth and a normal laptop. demand, and improves on the entry model with “We have found Blackbird to be in high a new streaming engine to allow direct program 112

Sponsor Update

streaming to any network or immediate connection to Facebook Live or YouTube,” he continues. “With broadcast quality HD processing, adaptable H.264 encoding and an advanced chroma-key, it has been a popular tool for remote production, or linking presenters and pundits from their homes back to the studio, or providing additional content for VOD or YouTube channels.” Blackmagic Design has also announced a new update for its Pocket Cinema Camera range to pair them with the ATEM Mini over HDMI. This new software, explains Heffernan, allows customers to use his company’s affordable digital film quality cameras for productions, and accesses the Blackmagic Design ATEM CCU to offer remote camera and vision control to balance or match cameras — and even uses the camera’s record light as a presenter tally. For Heffernan, virtual production and VR are very interesting fields of development and ones that Blackmagic Design has been working on with a number of specialist providers. “They offer unique ways of experiencing sport, reliving amazing sporting moments or just being with your team and being part of an event if you can’t be in the stadium — something we are all acutely aware of right now,” he says. “It’s likely we’ll see a growing use and demand for these technologies, and Blackmagic Design is working to assist and realise this.”

Bridge Technologies SIMEN K FROSTAD CHAIRMAN

Bridge Technologies says that it has seen a ‘new normal’ — unrelated to social distancing — developing in the field of sports broadcast for some time now, and has been focusing on ways to facilitate remote broadcast in sport and improve data quality along the full broadcast chain. “For remote broadcasting setups to work effectively, they need to incorporate all of the expected monitoring solutions that would be expected back in an MCR, providing the same high levels of insight and analysis whether out in the field or in a fixed location,” believes Simen K Frostad, chairman of Bridge Technologies. “This means that, increasingly, we have been working on developing our products to ensure that they are suitable for use in OB vans.” He cites as examples Bridge’s Widglets and SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeurope

Sponsor Update

Power-over-Ethernet Instrument View Kit, which not only maintain form factors suited to tight working environments, but — by virtue of being HTML5-based — are designed specifically for users who are geographically dispersed. “The intuitive nature of the way that both Widglets and Instrument View present data from probes means that the information is accessible and usable by all — even to those without a deep understanding of network behaviours,” Frostad continues. “This means that ‘creatives’ such as camera painters can make use of the visual information Instrument View generates to assess whether packet behaviours are within normal parameters.” As well as working to improve remote production monitoring, Bridge Technologies says it has also increasingly recognised the importance of interlinked, end-to-end monitoring solutions in the field of sports broadcast — and in response has increased the sophistication of its monitoring probes, and the intuitiveness of its analytics and visual outputs. “Perhaps more than any other area of content consumption, watching sport calls

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

for immersion in the experience,” concludes growing importance. Frostad. “Our solutions are helping broadcasters “One impact of COVID-19 has been the ensure they’re delivering what fans want — and re-packaging of video catalogues and shoulder keeping them as customers.” content,” she says. “In some cases, this has required technical solutions for adding or Brightcove updating huge amounts of metadata to help ROBERTA CAMBIO power the recommendation engines that users ACCOUNT DIRECTOR have come to expect. The pandemic has focused “Another trend,” she goes on, “is the much of the industry’s attention continued rise of HD mobile views driven by on how content is created increasing device quality and availability of 5G. and delivered — but not so much on how it’s The associated bandwidth and cost implications consumed. have been balanced by the variability of viewer “A portion of the ‘new normal’ will likely see situations. This has needed closer management a faster shift to OTT viewing habits,” believes of content encoding and variable bitrate Brightcove account director Roberta Cambio, delivery.” who points out that her company’s perspective Brightcove’s capabilities include content starts a little later in the production workflow. protection, monetisation and scalability — but “Previously driven by cord-cutters, but now Cambio notes that her company was especially accelerated by what has been described as ‘the well-positioned to help sports organisations biggest disaster to hit the sports world in 75 meet the rapid need for OTT services with years’, Brightcove will continue helping sports Brightcove Beacon. organisations lean into this trend and to engage “Our latest OT T service has allowed their audiences with broadcast-quality video.” organisations to deploy feature-rich OTT She sees two trends that she thinks will have video on very short timelines,” she asserts.

113

svgeurope

“Brightcove Beacon provides an alternative to taking months to build a DIY solution through multiple vendors or launching a service without the features audiences expect.”

Broadcast Rental FRANK STEENBEEK COO

Among numerous developments in its offering over the past 12 months, Broadcast Rental has added the BMW GS1250 to its fleet. In-house developed and fully equipped, the company says it made a serious investment in ensuring that the right materials were used for live sports coverage.

“We listened to all the advice from the people who will ultimately work with it,” notes COO Frank Steenbeek. “It features specially designed steps for the cameraman, for example, for extra grip as well as to maintain a stable standing position.”

Sponsor Update

Broadcast RF CHRIS BRANDRICK COMMERCIAL DIRECTOR

production companies will still need production tools like OB vans, studios or remote production facilities as well as the consultancy services provided by a systems integrator like Broadcast Solutions.” The past year has seen Broadcast Solutions develop two large 16-camera fully-IP-based OB vans together with NEP Belgium for Belgian public broadcaster RTBF. The vans are based around ST2110-20 for video and ST2110-30 for audio, and are equipped with a 100Gbps Aristapowered network core for audio, video and matrix. “With our years of experience in the construction of OB vans, Broadcast Solutions, in cooperation with NEP/RTBF, was able to make many individual coach building, workflow and detail adjustments, making the work of the crews much easier and more pleasant,” Kampe continues. “With extensive measures in our production facilities and many remote sessions, we were able to deliver the OB truck without delay, even under the special conditions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.”

When there’s not much going on in the outside world, it can be beneficial to turn your gaze closer to home. “Lockdown life has been harsh on us folk in the live events/sports broadcasting industry,” frowns Chris Brandrick, commercial director at Broadcast RF. “However, our group [Euro Media Group] has been very supportive during this period, and we have seen collaborations between the EMG UK companies — BRF, ACS, CTV, Telegenic — to create some pretty remarkable solutions for remote production at our new remote operations centre based in High Wycombe, UK.” Broadcast RF has picked up some significant new contracts in the new football and rugby seasons. “They’ve kept us on our toes,” Brandrick laughs. “Our updated development on the chest-mounted referee camera for Rugby Union and the evolution of the polecam running the BT Media and Broadcast touchline has been quite a step forward.” DOMINIK WRONA According to Brandrick, delivering UHD/HDR OUTSIDE BROADCAST MANAGER pictures via RF has now become commonplace for Broadcast RF. The pandemic has brought with “It’s very reliable,” he says, “and we can now it a renewed focus on remote deliver UHD/HDR HEVC RF images at an even production — but Dominik lower latency — 20ms end-to-end — than the Wrona, outside broadcast manager at BT Media previous HD MPEG4 RF cameras.” and Broadcast, is clear that there are multiple models of remote production.

Broadcast Solutions RAINER KAMPE CTO

Broadcast Rental has also developed a desertproof 4x4 which saw its first deployment for the Dakar Rally 2020. “Our two crew members had to live in and broadcast out of this van for over two weeks,” Steenbeek smiles. The company has also seen continuing success with its new modular and UHD-capable fly-pack system. “It’s an ultra-compact portable solution that delivers a powerful workflow to simplify and support complex live productions anywhere in the world,” Steenbeek explains. Broadcast Rental has also put Axon’s Cerebrum control and monitoring platform centre stage in its OB flight-pack system — “to get the most out of it”, according to Steenbeek. 114

The coronavirus pandemic hasn’t resulted in a decrease in sports and live TV projects, according to Rainer Kampe, CTO, Broadcast Solutions. “We’ve seen an ongoing demand for production tools like OB vans and studios, with some projects just being delayed,” he says. “Right now, nobody can foresee what the live and sports industry will be like after the crisis, but I’m sure sports will still have a great attraction. Even if attendance at a football match in the stadium is reduced, the leagues, rights owners and broadcasters will develop new formats to enrich the experience of viewers at home. It could be that large sports or live events will need to be produced in a whole new way. However, to create extra, second or third screen content,

“There’s managed remote production, in which individual camera feeds are sent to the studio or remote operations centre,” he explains. “With minimal kit onsite, the customer can mix, edit and then release the complete programme in their studio before it’s sent to the playout centre. We manage the camera feeds and network, while the focus is on the actual production and creation of the programme. “Then,” he continues, “there’s fully managed remote control production. All kit remains on site, but operators are in remote locations. We SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeurope

Sponsor Update

bring back the multiviewers, EVS screens and High Wycombe which he says plays a key role in the finished programme comes out of the truck, enabling these remote production methods. through BT Tower and then on to the playout “Because of the foundations that we already centre. had in place, we were able to provide flexible offerings to broadcasters depending on how hands on/off they wanted their solution to be,” he says. “Whether it’s centralised or de-centralised remote production, our teams, skills and high-capacity network work with all methods.”

Calrec DAVE LETSON “Beyond those, there’s also rapidly deployed remote production,” Wrona goes on. “That sees high quality, low latency data paths from the venue to the studio or remote operations centre. This gives customers the flexibility to control their camera feeds remotely, but we still manage the network. They finalise the programme in their studio before it’s sent to the playout centre.” Wrona’s company has formed a strategic partnership with Euro Media Group UK to build a dedicated remote operations centre in

VP OF SALES

been and will remain front and centre,” he goes on. “This isn’t to say that traditional production is dead; far from it, especially at the Tier 1 level. But, from our perspective, it’s about understanding each situation, as we are seeing huge variation in requirements, from both technical and logistical angles. We have developed a very good realworld understanding of the complexities of remote working — not only in the broadcast space, but in esports, too.” Calrec’s RP1 remote technology is already widely deployed across traditional sports, with companies like Sky and the BBC, as well as with broadcasters like Riot Games.

Who would have thought that, one day, remote workflows and remote production might mean working from home? But these are exceptional times… “Smaller consoles like our compact Brio console are being used in sound operators’ homes to provide live on-air mixing,” smiles Dave Letson, who is VP of sales at Calrec. “Without a doubt, remote production — and remote ways of working more generally — have

Providing leading technology and service solutions

tyrellcct.com

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

video editing

storage and archiving

asset management

streaming and encoding

audio and intercom

ﬁle transfer

workstations and servers

animation and VFX

video servers

115

svgeurope

The company has also set up initiatives to provide new and potential customers with ways of demonstrating these technologies, hosting virtual demonstrations of Assist to broadcasters across the globe. “We are uniquely positioned to enable customers to deploy a variety of remote production and remote working solutions” Letson continues, “and our ability to remotely commission installations has developed since the onset of COVID-19, which is a key adaptation to current needs.” Calrec Assist is a browser-based virtual console environment with multiple versions available for a variety of Calrec technologies, including Apollo, Artemis, Type R, VP2 and RP1. Assist works over TCP/IP and allows users to set up shows, memories, fader layouts, patching, bus setup, labelling, input and output levels, input channel parameters (including mic gains), routing and more — without needing to be in front of the console.

Camera Corps BARRY PARKER

COMMERCIAL MANAGER

One of the phenomena that has characterised the pandemic has been the so-called ‘Zoom Boom’, in which we have become used to interacting with each other remotely. And ‘remote’ has become the watchword in the sports broadcast industry.

“Although controlling camera equipment remotely has been part of our offering for some time, we are now seeing a much higher demand for this way of working,” says Barry Parker, commercial manager at Camera Corps. “Over the last few months, we have been delivering high quality content to audiences using new, innovative methods of working. This has included deploying a range of our robotic camera systems in a variety of locations, remotely controlled.” According to Parker, camera demand for miniature high motion cameras and mini robotic 116

Sponsor Update

systems remains high within sport generally, in and around the field play. His company’s new Qx camera mini robotic camera continues to grow in popularity, he says, and is being increasingly used in a variety of applications for sporting events. “The Qx design has become a favourite with broadcasters all over the world due to its flexibility and ease of rigging,” Parker continues. “That means it is ideal for commentary cameras, dressing rooms or any area a main camera cannot be rigged.”

Canon GRAHAM PAYNE

PRODUCT MANAGER, PROFESSIONAL IMAGING PRODUCTS AT CANON UK & IRELAND

2020 was supposed to be such a good year for sport, with the Tokyo Olympics and the Euro 2020 football tournament. “It was due to be an exciting few months for us, but those plans are on hold for now,” frowns Graham Payne, who is product manager, professional imaging products at Canon UK & Ireland. “Although Premier League football returned, there are a limited amount of cameras allowed in to the stadiums, so production teams have to work with a smaller crew and more remote cameras, while still aiming to produce great quality content. On a broadcast and stills level, we are supporting with new product and service. We are adapting as guidelines are altered or eased. For now it is just good to see sport return.” As sports broadcast has moved towards 4K UHD, Payne expects to see the growth of 8K production and workflow. “It is in its infancy as of now, but Canon strove to shoot most of the 2019 Rugby World Cup and the upcoming 2020 Tokyo Olympics in 8K,” he notes. “Canon is also working on volumetric video. In simple terms, this is the process of capturing moving images of the real world that can be used to create free viewpoint video, a naturally moving dynamic 3D model reproduction from any angle and at any moment in time. It gives the viewer the ability to choose the view point or the subject they wish to follow. The exciting developments in this area will completely transform the way viewers can watch sports.” The past few months have seen Canon introduce two new UHD lenses with its CJ18 models, bringing the company’s UHD broadcast

lens line up to 18 4K UHD. Compact and lightweight, they are aimed at documentary makers and sports broadcast.

CenturyLink CLAUDIO SCOLA

HEAD OF PRODUCTS AND SPECIALIST SALES, EMEA

Many in the industry note that the pandemic is accelerating the adoption of IP-based remote/at-home production to produce large scale live events. Among them is CenturyLink. “There is now a heightened need for content providers to accommodate multiple endpoints with a high capacity connection and robust IP workflow,” believes the company’s Claudio Scola, who is head of products and specialist sales, EMEA. “Whilst the initial vision of ‘remote production’ had a predominant theme of centralisation, the impact of the past six months has been to shift this more towards distributed teams of contributors — with the network bringing them together. “We have been preparing our network for a world where remote production is the norm,” he continues. “CenturyLink has continued to invest in high-capacity fibre builds at key sports and eSports venues, bringing more venues on-net and augmenting capacity to support remote, including at-home, production workflows.” According to Scola, CenturyLink’s digital content delivery is built on the most connected network in the world. “Our ability to monitor usage, add capacity and reroute traffic means that our network is prepared for new and sustained levels of elevated internet traffic and continued high performance,” he says. “Our CDN is directly connected to the CenturyLink IP backbone with over 120 Tbps and 120 PoPs globally, providing the muscle power to handle both a steady stream of new traffic and traffic spikes.” The past year has seen CenturyLink launch CDN Edge Compute, which is designed to provide developers with the flexibility to choose software that best suits their innovation needs, creating a completely customised edge environment. In the same timeframe, CenturyLink acquired Streamroot and its content delivery models that enable connected consumer devices to participate in the serving of content through a secure and private mesh delivery. “CenturyLink can now achieve performance SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeurope

Sponsor Update

during large-scale events and peak viewing “Content providers will need to remain hours not otherwise feasible with conventional competitive, keep costs low, and scale quickly,” CDN delivery methods,” Scola notes. he adds, “so I think many will start to see the benefits of IP solutions in this regard.” Cerberus Similarly, he thinks that some broadcasters CHRIS CLARKE will have been assessing their remote production CEO infrastructure after the experience of struggling Sometimes, there are things to access their archived content during you really don’t see the point lockdown. of — but then you experience “The live sports drought will have taught them first hand, and your opinion changes. broadcasters the value of their archive and many That, believes Chris Clarke, CEO of Cerberus, of them will be implementing cloud-based is what has happened with IP as a result of the storage to leverage this, as well as building in pandemic. contingency for a potential resurgence of the “Over the coming year, content stakeholders virus,” Clarke goes on. will be exploring new ways to move their content Cerberus has continued to develop its Livelink whilst complying with social distancing,” he says. cloud teleport solution, and, according to Clarke, “IP distribution is the logical choice and many it has become ideally placed to meet the need broadcasters have experienced the agility of within sports broadcasting for cost-effective live this method for the first time during lockdown. contribution, and will be well placed to offer a I cannot see those stakeholders returning to the flexible solution to deal with what will likely be old infrastructure, especially as the restrictions unpredictable sporting schedules. to working practises are likely to last for months “Over the next year,” he concludes, “our plan to come. Internet-based distribution is a more is to deliver a host of new services to the market flexible alternative to fibre and satellite. on a SaaS basis. This will represent a big shift in

the way that content owners approach rights management, manipulation and distribution.”

ChyronHego NIALL HENDRY

PRODUCT PORTFOLIO DIRECTOR

The past year has seen ChyronHego launch a host of new products, such as Click Effects PRIME 3.5, which is interoperable with the company’s PRIME CG engine for venues; Paint 8.1, which has a heavy focus on remote operations using HTML5 interfaces; and Virtual Placement 7.3, the focus of which is to facilitate the usage and implementation of virtual graphics in remote and downstream workflows.

The best seats in the house aren’t always at the game. They’re wherever your fans are watching. We make streaming every size and type of live event, from sports to concerts, eﬀortless with an integrated solution that covers the full event life cycle – pre-event to VOD. Let us show you how easy it is to build audiences by streaming your live event with us.

CMY

info@verizondigitalmedia.com +1.877.334.3236 | vm.mp/verizonsvg20

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

117

svgeurope

“We have been both listening to clients and pre-empting their needs for production that is more separate and remote,” says Niall Hendry, the company’s product portfolio director. “With that in mind, we are working closely with existing clients and cloud vendors to adapt our current suite of products and create a whole new interconnected cloud-based sports production workflow. Fundamentally, the shift in the market has seen the acceptability of cloud and remote production become less of a ‘what if’ and more of a reality — and we’re gearing up to meet that reality head on.” For Hendry, the big technology change is now remote — “or shall we say, dispersed”, he smiles — workflows. “The big tech trend to look out for, when you are a vendor such as ourselves in the live sports space, will be the acceptability of new baseband video standards and products in the cloud with accompanying networks that have the capacity to support them,” Hendry believes “I’ve also said this before, but once broadcasters tap into the potential of rule-based automation for sports production — which is already prevalent in news — we’ll see a shift in how shows are produced. This isn’t even new tech, but it has the ability to hugely simplify how a sports show is produced.”

Cingularity DAN POPE

MANAGING DIRECTOR

Time was when we would just jump on a plane and not think twice about it. No more. “Our company has been built with flexible working practices at its core, so day-to-day operations have not changed much due to COVID-19,” says Dan Pope, managing director of Cingularity. “The main area where we anticipate long-lasting change is in international travel; we expect to challenge our travel needs more carefully in the future than we would have previously.”

118

Sponsor Update

Pope is acutely aware that, in the current environment, there isn’t always enough bandwidth to go round — and addressing this has been the focus of his company’s development activities over the past several months. “We have developed our remote production solutions to be able to utilise bandwidth more flexibly,” he explains. “Whereas previously, we would have defaulted to J2K encoding for remote productions, we have been forced to get creative by bandwidth limitations in certain regions. We have five vendors in our lab at the moment where we are testing various high density ultra-low latency platforms.” Inevitably, Pope notes, remote production is playing an increasingly important role in the reduced travel and socially distanced Covid world we have found ourselves in. “Cost savings alone have not always been sufficient to justify remote productions,” he believes. “However, with sustainability having become an increasingly critical factor over the past few years, together with the current Covid impact, more projects are looking feasible.”

“Individuals have also been required to learn how to use specific intercom equipment that they never would have come into contact with prior to today’s situation,” he continues. “For the NFL 2020 Spring Draft, for example, players and coaches had to learn to use remote intercom panels and smartphone clients like Agent-IC, so that they could actively participate in the event from their homes. In these situations, we need to ensure our user guides are as concise and straightforward as possible to avoid potential misuse.” Clear-Com is, however, planning for a pandemic-free future. FreeSpeak Edge is a newly-developed product that Sandford believes will be highly significant to the sports market once conditions return to normal. FreeSpeak Edge is a digital wireless intercom that features 12 kHz audio with ultra-low latency, utilises the 5GHz band — allowing optimal bandwidth for audio and data — and is designed to operate in the most challenging high multipath environments. The new Eclipse HX version 12 update supports SMPTE 2110-30 and AES67 third-party interoperability and now works together with Clear-Com FreeSpeak Edge. For very large systems, it now STEPHEN SANDFORD includes a Cross Ring IP Bridge (CRIB), which SENIOR PRODUCT MANAGER is a new intercom trunking scheme that links As customers find themselves separate, distant Eclipse-HX intelligent fibre needing to learn new ways rings over IP trunks. of doing things, the need for Cloudbass supplier support becomes even greater. STEVE KNEE “Clear- Com has been aiding remote MANAGING DIRECTOR production workflows in the ‘new normal’ of sports broadcasting,” says the company’s senior There can be little doubt: product manager, Stephen Sandford. “This is the COVID-19 pandemic has requiring our staff to be a little more hands-on presented great challenges, with our partners and end-users who have not but also great opportunity, in rethinking the experienced these workflows before. We’ve approach to all forms of live broadcasting. developed new system application diagrams “Cloudbass has used this time to invest in based on our IP solutions within Eclipse-HX and both facilities and people to be ready to deliver all using interfaces like LQ, hosting weekly training forms of distributed and remote production with webinars on the tools, as well as webinars related rigorously tested workflows for every aspect to specific use-cases. of live sport acquisition,” says the company’s managing director, Steve Knee. Many of these strategies will be deployed in the resumption of Cloudbass’ work throughout the UK and beyond, he continues, with every OB now being connected. “This builds on the industry-leading work recently completed on Sky Boxing’s new UHD truck, CBOB9, which saw a unique ‘best in class’ truck design deployed in record time,” Knee adds. “Cloudbass became the first company SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeurope

Sponsor Update

in the world to create a truly end-to-end, multivendor UHD IP HDR outside broadcast vehicle based on the ST2110 standard and with Axon’s Neuron signal processing technology at its core.” The new initiatives, notes Knee, will see IP production and delivery extend beyond the onsite OB to workplaces and remote working locations, greatly improving the environmental impact of live outside broadcast, as well as bringing great benefit to work/life balance for all those involved in live sports production. “Cloudbass is proud to be leading these “IP is going to be vital going forward and changes,” Knee concludes. 100G will be uppermost in everyone’s mind,” he believes, “but SDI is far from dead. It will be Cobalt Digital a vital component in the near future as baseband CHRIS SHAW equipment and converters will be required EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT to interface with the new IP technology. OF SALES AND MARKETING Cobalt’s current range of equipment includes With all the discussion of IP an extensive series of openGear cards that and its relevance to the current is consistently augmented. That leaves us environment, it would be easy to believe SDI is well placed to meet the challenges of new no longer important. Not so, according to Chris broadcaster applications in this era of ‘new Shaw, who is executive vice president of sales normal’”. and marketing at Cobalt Digital. Over the past year, a number of new products

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

have been added to the Cobalt Digital range of openGear cards to meet the growing needs and challenges of OB production truck applications. Highlights include the addition of the 9992-DECHEVC-4K decoder card that partners the 9992-ENC-HEVC-4K encoder card, and the new openGear 9915DA 12G distribution amplifier that is available as 1x16, 2x16-XPT, and 4x16-XPT. “Another notewor thy development that impacts sports production is Cobalt’s 9904-UDX-4K processing card,” says Shaw. “Producing HDR broadcasts with a mix of HDR and SDR sources has never been easier due to Cobalt’s implementation of Technicolor’s Intelligent Tone Mapping (ITM) and SL-HDR technology. With the 9904-UDX-4K, SDR can be turned into HDR dynamically without operator intervention. Similarly, HDR sources can be fed to SDR trucks or facilities if the production was shot in SDR.” Cobalt has also launched the 9942-RTR SDI/ ASI/MADI router, a high-density card-based solution that offers flexibility, ease-of-use and integration making it an exclusive within the openGear platform.

119

svgeurope

“Stay tuned for some exciting announcements,” Shaw smiles. “Cobalt developers are hard at work leveraging industryleading baseband processing engines to expand our ST-2110 product line.”

Creative Technology STEVE PURKESS HEAD OF SPORT

Sponsor Update

CTV Outside Broadcast ADAM BERGER

CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER

As soon as the implications of the pandemic became clear, CTV Outside Broadcast invested in new tools that allowed broadcast contribution over the internet.

Organisers of all kinds of live events — from music festivals to gala dinners — are wondering whether their future is a real one, a virtual one or some blend of the two.

“We have been focusing our efforts on broadening our connected event solutions to meet growing demand and can see streaming technologies becoming more central to live events in the future,” says Steve Purkess, head of sport at Creative Technology. “The impact to our business has been significant, with the majority of our services built around large gatherings of people. “The live events business will be one of the last to return to ‘normal’ and so we have adapted our services to account for this,” he continues. “Our customers still want to get their messaging and products out to the public so smaller, streamed events have become the best way to fulfil their needs. The method for delivering these events has also changed with workflows moving to a centralised model.” As sporting events begin to take place behind closed doors, it is clear, Purkess notes, that the lack of fans and the atmosphere that they create is a big miss — so NEP Broadcast and NEP Live Events have developed several virtual audience solutions, giving options to broadcasters, clubs and federations to generate the atmosphere using traditional audio and video technology alongside video conference platforms and interactive phone apps. 120

“Remote production isn’t about compromise, it isn’t about reducing the number of people,” believes the company’s COO Adam Berger. “It’s about driving the efficiency of those people involved, by refining their work/life balance, by eliminating unnecessary travel, by improving our sustainability and social responsibility. The overall benefit of all these factors will be maximised value on screen.” Berger notes that CTV’s target was a Remote Operations Centre — something he says his company could not realistically achieve alone in a short timescale. “CTV is an EMG UK company that has ACS, Broadcast RF and Telegenic as its members,” he explains, “so CTV and Telegenic teamed together to design, build and operate one. Build time was just three weeks, and the EMG UK ROC delivered its first remote OB on 20 June in UHD HDR for BT Sport, who were pivotal in our decision making to build the ROC. “Every gallery and work area at the ROC is agile,” he continues. “Chosen OB trucks and Flypaks from our fleet can be remotely controlled over fibre networks. We call it Remote Surface Production.”

CyanView DAVID BOURGEOIS CEO AND FOUNDER

Some companies were able to transition to life under the pandemic more easily than others. Take CyanView, for example. “We were already used to working from home, so we didn’t have much to adapt to,” smiles CEO and founder David Bourgeois. “Even though we’re developing hardware and

camera control, all our technology is based around IP and remote support. We’ve always supported our customers over the internet, even for the bigger shows. We now benefit from that technology for remote control of cameras as well.” There are, Bourgeois notes, very few systems that are meant to remote control cameras over the internet. Latency is a concern, he believes, as not all protocols play nicely with VPN — and not all companies can or want to deploy a VPN. “We’ve adjusted our products on a project basis to provide our customers with solutions for different use cases, from controlling a PTZ placed in a house to controlling 12 cameras on a golf course in another city,” Bourgeois discloses. For CyanView’s CEO, the current situation is all about doing more with less. “Now that we have the capability of controlling many more ranges and types of camera, it gives customers more chance of fitting the budget while still being able to get pretty decent camera matching,” he says. “In the same vein, for budget — and safety — reasons, it makes sense to send the minimum equipment and operators: remote control of cameras makes that possible.” CyanView has been busy over the past year, adding support for robotics including Camera Corps Qx, Q-Ball and Minizoom, MRMC heads, Egripment Minishot and gimbals. This capability was used by Gravity Media to control 30 robotic cameras in the jungle on I’m a Celebrity, and 60 robotic cameras on the Australian Open. The company is also adding support for RF links in order to integrate its control system into RF workflows.

Deltacast LIONEL DUTILLEUX

INTERNATIONAL SALES MANAGER

The pandemic was welcomed by very few — but Deltacast was, it seems, an exception. “COVID - 19 revealed itself as a nice opportunity for Deltacast,” says Lionel Dutilleux, international sales manager. “It accelerated the transition towards remote and cloud operation. Most Deltacast products are now available for remote operation and several applications will start in this mode when the new football championships start again in some European and American countries. “With our expertise in IT systems, Deltacast managed home working very efficiently,” he SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeurope

Sponsor Update

adds, “not only for software development but “In terms of the trends we see, cloud also for our test and validation activity.” technologies and the increasing popularity of IP infrastructures are key elements for the future of sport production workflows and Deltacast has adapted most of its products to this evolution,” continues Dutilleux. “The other technology trend is clearly AI, a word that is used by a lot of people in the TV broadcast industry — sometimes correctly and sometimes abusively. Several Deltacast products have been using deep neural networks for three years already. The past 12 months have seen Deltacast In parallel, other AI technologies are under launch DELTA-cg, which Dutilleux describes development and will be the basis of some new as a highly intuitive character generator that Deltacast products, expected in 2021.” generates high-end graphics for any live event Deltatre production such as sport, news, election, ANDREA MARINI studio, mobile, stadium and entertainment. DEPUTY CEO AND Several versions of DELTA-cg are available — CHIEF COMMERCIAL OFFICER Easy, Social, Sport&News, Stadium — allowing the user to select the product in line with A recurring phrase on many requirements and budget. people’s lips as we see yet The company has also developed a new another football match on TV played out in an version of DELTA-offside, its VAR add-on empty stadium is: “The game is nothing without product, which is now provided with 3D fans”. It’s perhaps a shame that too many capabilities. are only just recognising this. Not Deltatre,

however. “Deltatre is working alongside its clients in planning, building and executing end-toend platforms across OTT, digital, broadcast and data, to ensure that their offerings are as innovative and engaging as possible — with the fan experience at the heart of everything we do,” says the company’s Andrea Marini, who is deputy CEO and chief commercial officer. “Deltatre is perfectly positioned to help clients adapt to the boom in streaming technology, especially in sport, with a packed 2021 schedule to look forward to.” The secret to success in the digital world, Marini believes, is that understanding and acting upon data is crucial. “But it’s not just understanding your users,” he continues. “It’s having the right tools in place to act on your insights in real time. Relating to this theme, Deltatre’s ‘mtribes’ — launched this year — is a SaaS platform for real-time, data-driven UX targeting. ‘mtribes’ plugs into an existing sport technology stack and gives operators full insights into how their audience is interacting with a service, as well as the power

FROM CHALLENGES TO RELIABILITY

IF IT‘S CHALLENGING—MAKE IT VIDI Our mission is to support clients in meeting the toughest challenges in the ﬁeld of converging broadcast and telecommunication technologies. We combine technical consultancy, project planning and turnkey fulﬁllment, as well as comprehensive additional services, all under one roof.

more information on

www.vidi.eu SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

121

svgeurope

to customise the features, design, and content shown to each user. “Personalisation is the key for the future,” he goes on. “Fans want greater control, and they want to shape and tailor their viewing experience to their own preferences and tastes. For example, Deltatre’s ‘DIVA’ is an advanced OTT player, synchronising real-time data with rich interactivity, allowing fans to access live game stats, social media integration, full DVR with visual timeline, and multi-camera viewing.”

Densitron MARTYN GATES

GLOBAL PRODUCT DIRECTOR

Few companies’ plans have not changed or been accelerated by the pandemic. Take Densitron, for example. “Through our IDS product range, we’ve been developing solutions related to IP video streaming for remote and distributed production workflows,” notes global product director Martyn Gates. “We have significantly brought forward developments on our roadmap due to the imperatives imposed by COVID-19 and the consequential adjustments being made by the industry.”

Sponsor Update

dedicated multi-viewer. It could be of particular “We want our products to be as close to the interest for remote production or OB truck action as possible — to catch every tear and drop installations, where space is limited.” of sweat,” smiles Stephane Ducobu, worldwide director of sales for broadcast products. disguise In pursuit of that goal, Dream Chip recently TOM ROCKHILL added the ATOM one SSM500 to its range. A CHIEF SALES OFFICER super slow motion camera capable of recording It is probably true to say that 500fps in full HD resolution, the ATOM one sports broadcasters have never SSM500 measures only 190mm x 60mm x been as challenged as they have 60mm and weighs just 900 grams. been over the past few months. “There is currently nothing else on the “Producers and their teams are waking up market that matches the specifications, to the solutions available to them to engage outputs, cost-effectiveness and ease of and captivate audiences in new ways, such as integration of the ATOM one SSM500,” says augmented, virtual and mixed reality,” believes Ducobu. “Super slow motion is an amazing Tom Rockhill, chief sales officer at disguise. “We tool for analysing player movements or are in a time where creatives can go above and team plays as well as for adding emotion and beyond what was previously thought possible intensity to a production.” in broadcasting elements of AR, MR and xR to Dream Chip has also announced Barracuda, create engagement, especially with so many a streaming device that can transport up to five audiences now watching from home. This can be 1080p30 SDI streams or four 1080p60 or a single achieved through our xR technology, to deliver 4Kp60 over LTE, Ethernet and ASI. content that stands out and makes an impact. EditShare Interest in and demand for our xR technology LEE GRIFFIN has seen a rapid increase since lockdown.” DIRECTOR OF PRODUCT MARKETING Release 17.2 of disguise’s production toolkit allows users to create simple AR screens without According to Lee Griffin his the need for other tools so they can quickly company hasn’t adapted to ‘the test out ideas for AR experiences, making it new normal’ — because it didn’t possible to render layers separately. Users can have to. also experience better overall performance and “Collaboration and remote production are at a cleaner workflow. disguise also has a new the core of EditShare platforms,” he says. “Our ‘spherical camera’ for rendering 360 video for systems are designed precisely for this moment engaging online audiences, which is compatible and, as an organisation, we are well prepared to with VR headsets. help every sports customer make the pivot they need today to step into the workflows using the Dream Chip Technologies tools they love.”

STEPHANE DUCOBU According to Gates, Densitron’s major WORLDWIDE DIRECTOR OF product development of the past year has been SALES FOR BROADCAST PRODUCTS the ability to monitor and perform detailed analysis of SMPTE 2022-6 and SMPTE 2110 video According to Dream Chip streams — a solution developed in conjunction Technologies, the company’s with Bridge Technologies, using Bridge’s VB440 goal — and the heart of its development process network probe. — is to enable its customers to tell their story in “We generate low latency — sub 2-frame — a different way. previews of those streams, along with rendered vectorscope images, and other rendered waveform images and distribute those through an HTML5.0/WebAssembly/Javascript platform using Bridge Technology’s Widglets,” Gates explains. “By embedding these Widglets previews and images in IDS, they can then be delivered to IDS end-points. “This,” he goes on, “has advantages to customers who would no longer need a 122

However, he believes, cloud production is often seen as a stop gap — and says that EditShare is addressing this issue, thereby fixing one of the biggest objections sports companies had with cloud: the economics. “With EFSv seamless proxy editing, we have dramatically reduced the costs, making cloud editing economically viable for sports,” he SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeurope

Sponsor Update

explains. “When we say dramatically better, we mean reductions in the region of 50-75% compared to current cloud implementations. “When it comes to editing video, you need your central storage to appear as though it is just another drive directly attached to your workstation,” he continues. “You need the simplicity to open the file in any editing software you want to use. You need to be able to manage access to the files via standard users, groups and permissions. To work collaboratively, NLEs need the ability to lock project files. “These are all features realised today through the use of block storage solutions,” Griffin goes on. “Object storage — such as AWS S3 — removes the features needed to create a real file system and focus more on simplicity, scalability and reliability. By limiting the features of object storage, cloud providers can offer significant cost savings. “Customers have long been asking for workflow flexibility,” he concludes, “and with the rapid pace of our EFSv innovation, EditShare delivers the agility they’ve been requesting for a long time.”

ES Broadcast BEN MURPHY

MANAGING DIRECTOR

Remote production — something that was already a realit y for some sports broadcasts — is, of course, a hot topic currently, and distributed production even more so.

“Many of our partner manufacturers have accelerated plans that make it possible for operators to be in different locations and several of our clients have embraced this way of working as it reduces the issues that are immediately present when trying to produce an event in a small space such as an OB truck,” notes Ben

Murphy, managing director at ES Broadcast. Over the past year, ES Broadcast supplied equipment for, and integrated, Cloudbass’s OB9 unit, a 20-camera UHD IP HDR truck built on the ST2110 standard. “This was a best-of-breed multi-vendor build which uses Axon’s Neuron signal processing technology to integrate technology from Grass Valley, Evertz, Sony, Calrec, Arista, Reidel and others,” explains Murphy. “The use of IP allows the truck to be used in a highly flexible way, facilitating services such as providing downconverted feeds for other broadcasters on site — as well as removing a significant amount of hardware and glue, reducing space and weight demands.” The company’s system integration team also built a TX, MCR and NOC facility for OTT sports streaming and content provider DAZN at DAZN’s new media centre in Leeds White Rose. The centre features an 18-desk TX facility, MCR with a gallery made up of 14 55” screens and space for six operators and three engineers to monitor and control content distribution worldwide, and NOC with five operator

Vislink’s wireless camera transmitters and receivers offer both LMS-T and DVB-T modulations as well as support for dual pedestal operation. With this multi-mode capability, users have the flexibility required to achieve robust, high quality video transmission at range, whatever the scenario.

EMAIL: SALES@VISLINK.COM I PHONE: +44 (0) 1442 431300 SVG _2020 Journal.indd 1

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

17/07/2020 13:28:49

123

svgeurope

positions and a further seven 55” screens. ES Broadcast has also expanded its rental fleet in record-breaking fashion with the acquisition of 151 Grass Valley LDX 86N UHD camera channels and 15 Kahuna switchers. “That was part of our continuous efforts to ensure we provide premium technology solutions to the UHD sports market,” says Murphy.

Euro Media Group FRANÇOIS-CHARLES BIDEAU CO-CEO

The coronavirus pandemic has undoubtedly accelerated certain trends. A clear example is working from home: companies have rapidly discovered that perhaps they don’t need all their employees to come to the office. Another — relevant specifically to the broadcast industry — is remote production. “Adapting to the new normal for us has meant accelerating the move to remote production,” reveals Euro Media Group co-CEO FrançoisCharles Bideau. “This is something we had already anticipated, but the new normal is definitely making the switch to these types of workflows much faster than before. “The new normal also means we have to be more creative with the workflows we are offering to our clients,” he continues. “Sometimes, great ideas emerge under pressure — and we’ve definitely seen it happen at the heart of the COVID crisis.” He notes that his company was especially glad to have several remote operation centres available in Italy, France the Netherlands, France, Belgium, and the UK to cover Euro Media Group’s clients’ needs. These, says Bideau, definitely helped to adapt to the new normal. “We are working on expanding that part of our business more and more,” he discloses. “Our main focus is now on our advanced diPloy technology,” Bideau adds, “which allows for the most flexible and modular set-up, on-site, remote and hybrid.” diPloy — Euro Media Group’s new IP system — is, says Bideau, clearly his company’s most important product development in relation to sport of the past year. The lightweight set-up will, he believes, offer his clients not only true 360° connectivity but also an unparalleled modularity and scalability — making interlinking venues easier and faster. “It is ready now and we can’t wait to show it to 124

Sponsor Update

the world,” he says. As well as the accelerating trend towards remote production Bideau also sees a trend towards simplified production. This, he thinks, will allow lower tier sports and federations to produce their content, which he believes will undoubtedly impact the entire image value chain.

content, bridging the gap between production and distribution by allowing them to aggregate all their live assets, personalise the content according to audience, adapt the quality to the medium, package and store it and distribute it over any type of network,” says Tinnirello. “This is all part of our philosophy of taking away the hassle of broadcast operations and allowing content owners to focus on their events.” Eurovision Services As part of the Content Hub service, Eurovision MARCO TINNIRELLO Services is, for example, integrating audio over IP CEO for live commentary. Times of challenge are often “On the one hand, this is needed because times of opportunity. That, at legacy ISDN lines are being phased out,” least, was the case for Eurovision explains Tinnirello, “but it also means that Services. broadcasters can now get all their connectivity from a one-stop-shop, rather than having to contact a local telco for phone lines at each event.”

Evertz MO GOYAL

SENIOR DIRECTOR, INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT, LIVE MEDIA SOLUTIONS

Following a series of customer conversations to find out what challenges they were facing as a result of the pandemic, and how they thought things would look in the future, Evertz took the opportunity to review the priority of its product developments.

“We realised that our relationships with broadcasters and content owners alike put us in a unique position to help both sides in a period when there was no live sport available,” recalls CEO Marco Tinnirello. “We created WorldFeed+ Sports as a dedicated signal available worldwide that carried a schedule of rights-free sports content. It allowed broadcasters to experiment with new formats and new sports at a time when they desperately needed sports content, while sport federations and content owners could increase their reach by making their content available free of rights.” In another initiative, Eurovision Services has been presenting its Content Hub service to some “We introduced VUE and DreamCatcher of the company’s partners. Anywhere for these applications/production needs,” says Mo Goyal, senior director, international business development, live media solutions. “These are web-based browser applications that can be deployed in other rooms/locations over a local LAN or remote from home over the WAN. Both technologies provide the operators the full user experience of VUE or DreamCatcher as if they were in the control room.” “Since there is no ‘one size fits all’ solution for The other topic that came up in the live sports events, we have created the Content discussions, notes Goyal, was production in the Hub to give content owners the maximum cloud. In addition to the potential of new social possible flexibility in how they manage their live distancing conditions, Evertz realised that the SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeurope

rescheduling or postponement of some events had created an enormous backlog of events for the second half of 2020. “The challenge of getting equipment and people to handle the compressed schedule has forced companies to accelerate plans for production — or elements of production — from the cloud,” Goyal says. “Prior to the pandemic, discussions that centred around using IP in the facility have evolved to ‘what can you do in the cloud?’. In this case, our plans for moving the DreamCatcher production suite of tools into a virtualised environment were accelerated.” Over the past 12 months, Evertz has expanded the DreamCatcher product line, including DC-BRAVO, which allows for collaborative production of lower-tiered sports or E-Sports and enables sports broadcasters to create more high quality content with smaller teams. The past year has also seen the development of Evertz’s JPEG XS products — for ultra-low latency, high quality, visually lossless UHD feeds — including on the SCORPION Smart Media Processing Platform.

EVS NICOLAS BOURDON CMO

The deployment of remote workflows is, says Nicolas Bourdon, CMO at E VS, an ongoing process that has simply been accelerated by the current pandemic. His company has taken the opportunity to gather best practices among its customers — and adapted its offering accordingly.

“We’ve defined a series of recommendations to transform existing production systems

into remote production infrastructures,” he explains. “This initiative — named ‘Live Production Anywhere’ — integrates a series of advanced IP-based workflow solutions as well as a distributed/cloud-based infrastructure. “The various remote production models we offer can be adapted to suit each of our customers’ needs,” he continues. “In the coming months and years, it’s likely the level of distribution of equipment and human resources will continue to increase, and we’ll be seeing many more remote production models compared to what is available today.” Bourdon believes that IP and infrastructure virtualisation are the key drivers for new types of workflows that are better adapted to current and future demands in live production. “The adoption of remote production is changing the way production crews collaborate, creating more efficient workflows for the coverage of live events,” he adds. May saw EVS acquire Axon while, on the new product introduction front, plenty has been happening at EVS over the past 12 months. The company is focusing on integrating automation

We make sports look amazing

Image courtesy Polsat

Sponsor Update

Whether in the studio or in the stadium Vizrt’s market-moving innovations power the sports experience for every game – under any circumstance. These include Virtual Stadium (pictured), which allows in-studio Presenters and Analysts to extend a virtual view outward and above the stadium, giving fans a spectacular bird’s-eye view of the action on the pitch below.

Sports And our latest innovation, the Virtual Fan Experience, is a unique

opportunity for broadcast rights holders to add virtual fans in-stadium,

instantly creating a familiar and entertaining experience for viewers while focusing the attention where it belongs – on the athletes.

Learn more about how Vizrt can make your sports productions amazing: vizrt.com/sports

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

125

svgeurope

into production and creation processes, which it sees as a significant opportunity for broadcasters. An example is the Overcam autonomous camera system, which uses AI and increases the number of camera positions at a fraction of the cost. Meanwhile, the LSMVIA introduces “a new replay experience to the industry”, working together with the XT-VIA server and relying on the company’s VIA microservices ecosystem. It has native IP connectivity and software-defined technology onboard to make it adaptable for future live production demands.

Fanview JIM IRVING

MANAGING DIRECTOR

Sponsor Update

not to be — and the Fletcher Group was among those disappointed by the turn of events. “The end of last year and the early part of 2020 had been an exceptionally busy period for the Fletcher Group, with the rest of 2020 looking like being one of the busiest of all years,” says the company’s head of European operations, Richard Hingley. “Sadly, like the rest of the worldwide broadcast industry, COVID-19 has caused a temporary pause to productions. This hiatus, however, has allowed us to re-evaluate and push the innovation boundaries of equipment even further with new remote production workflows with network connected equipment such as robotic and tracking cameras.” 2020 has also seen The Fletcher Group — now a part of the Broadcast Services division of NEP — team up with other NEP brands such as BSi and AVS to form the Speciality Capture Group. “This new and exciting collaborative group within NEP will work closely together with clients to develop and offer new, innovative capture options,” Hingley continues. “The depth of experience and knowledge within these three companies means an exciting future.”

With a CAGR of 20% between now and 2025, according to Mordor Intelligence, there is little doubt the esports market is thriving. It’s a great market to be in, as Jim Irving, managing director of Fanview, testifies. “Fanview is in the fortunate position that a sizeable percentage of our clients and projects are in the esports sector, and so the transition to the cloud for those ongoing projects has been easier than for other forms of content,” he says. Focusrite “Our immediate focus — in addition to ANTHONY WILKINS our Esports projects — is in two areas,” Irving DIRECTOR OF EMEA SALES continues. “We’re innovating to enable our clients to be able to create more atmosphere The transition to IP is perhaps at their venues when sport happens behind most discussed in relation to closed doors, and facilitating cloud-based video — but it has no less effect, production workflows using standard internet of course, on audio. connectivity.” According to Ir ving, 5G will have a “seismic effect” on how sport is produced. The technology will, he thinks, facilitate new workflows that are cumbersome and expensive at the moment. He is also watching developments with Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite constellation. “The system could well be ready in many parts of the world before 5G — and it will have an enormous impact on sport and live production “We are seeing a definite shift towards ‘full in general,” Irving believes. IP’ infrastructures with less and less reliance on traditional audio formats and cabling,” notes Fletcher Group Anthony Wilkins, who is director of EMEA sales RICHARD HINGLEY at Focusrite. “Full IP production typically offers HEAD OF EUROPEAN OPERATIONS advantages in terms of cost reduction, greater Many in the sports broadcast flexibility and allows operators and contributors industry were looking forward to work from diverged remote locations — to 2020 with what promised to but still with full access to all resources on the be 12 months of high profile events. It was, alas, distribution network.” 126

This growing emphasis on remote production is, inevitably, guiding Focusrite’s development efforts, seeing the company focusing on providing audio transport solutions that combine the ability to handle legacy formats such as analog/MADI/AES3, along with Dante audio over IP networks. “Many of our RedNet devices offer AES67/ SMPTE 2110-30 compatibility, along with redundant power supplies and dual etherCON network connections to ensure zero downtime, and to interoperate with Ravenna- and Livewirebased equipment,” Wilkins explains. T he pa st year ha s se en continue d enhancement of Focusrite’s RedNet Control software that is designed to make configuring and controlling the company’s range of RedNet modular audio over IP devices quick and simple. “The intuitive and customisable user interface allows for remote control of all devices on the network, along with status monitoring of signal metering, clock status, power supply state and primary/secondary network connection state,” Wilkins says. “In the case of mic pres, such as Red 4Pre and RedNet MP8R, all the functions of the mic pre can be remote controlled from the software, such as gain, input impedance, phantom power, high-pass filter, pad, gain compensation and more.”

FOR-A MASAHIRO SOGA

DIRECTOR, OVERSEAS SALES AND MARKETING DIVISION

FOR-A says that it continues its focus on IP technologies within its product development to enable remote sports production, and to assure the health and safety of the company’s customers and their production teams. The outcome of this focus can be found in REMIBOX, an IP-based remote production solution that the company has under development. “REMIBOX is a compact audio, video, and data transmission solution that supports up to four SDI, 16-channel AES I/O, and an optional storage solution for record and playout,” explains Masahiro Soga, who is director, overseas sales and marketing division. “With REMIBOX, there’s no need to send large OB vans with sizeable crews to the venue. More people and equipment can remain in the central facility or home while a reduced technical staff and camera operators are present at the SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeurope

Sponsor Update

venue. REMIBOX makes it easy to provide live streaming while following social distancing guidelines.” FOR-A’s new MV-1640IP multi-viewer supports up to 16 IP inputs (SMPTE ST2110 and ST2022-7) in HD or four IP inputs in 4K. It also offers HDMI and SDI output options, with an intuitive layout manager and up to 16 window display. The company’s IP roadmap also includes its HVS-6000/6000M 4K/HD HANABI 2ME or 3ME vision mixer. The HVS-6000 offers all IP I/O or mixed 12G-SDI and IP per I/O slot, with support for up to 80 input/32 outputs. Designed to support live HDR production, the FA-9600 multi-purpose signal processor now supports SFP/SFP+ inputs/outputs with an optional card. The processor supports 3D LUT for advanced colour grading and Sony’s SR Live workflow. “The FA-9600 processor is ideal for converting SDR content to HDR, providing the highest possible quality with the reliability of a true broadcast product,” says Soga. “One key feature of the FA-9600 is in UHD/HD simulcast

StoryBot

GAME SUMMARY

applications. It provides UHD, HDR and Wide “The compact point source design of The Ones Color Gamut support and conversion of multiple has been warmly embraced by broadcasters, formats.” since each model can be calibrated to any acoustic environment, minimising the listening Genelec room’s influence on the sound and enabling the HOWARD JONES user to produce mixes that translate perfectly to PR DIRECTOR other systems, from stereo to immersive. It’s been business (largely) as “As channel counts go up and mixes become usual for Genelec, with the more complex, studio monitors with controlled company’s PR director Howard directivity and a wide, uncoloured sweet spot Jones noting that his company has been well are essential for making fast, accurate mix positioned to fulfil orders and maintain levels decisions. When you’re having to deliver mixes of production. Genelec’s service and technical to a very tight deadline, while working in small support teams have also been fully operational. spaces with difficult acoustics, The Ones are World events haven’t stopped the company unsurpassed.” introducing new products, either, with an Jones goes on to note that, for Genelec, extension — the 8351B and 8361 3-way coaxial immersive audio and audio-over-IP have been monitors, along with the complementary W371 the two technology growth areas in broadcast. Adaptive Woofer System — of Genelec’s ‘The “In terms of IP, our 8430 model allows direct Ones’ series of studio monitors. monitoring of AoIP streams and was the world’s “This means that The Ones family now first IP studio monitor,” he smiles. “Based on brings precision listening to a much wider the Ravenna protocol, with full AES67 support, range of room sizes, listening distances and SPL we’re seeing more broadcast facilities each year requirements, from ultra-nearfield through adopt the 8430 as they move towards an all-IP to main monitor applications,” explains Jones. infrastructure.”

BEST OF PLAYER

PLAYER BATTLE

BEST OF GOALS

SEASON’S RECAP

YOUR OWN STORY

BOOST HIGHLIGHTS PRODUCTION FOCUS ON YOUR VIDEO STORYTELLING, LET OUR STORYBOT DO THE REST.

wildmoka.com

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

127

svgeurope

Globecast OLIVIER ZANKEL

VP, COMMUNICATIONS GROUP

Sponsor Update

Grabyo

Grass Valley GARETH CAPON CEO

There is, believes Globecast, As the company’s partners pressure across the sports have been forced into remote broadcasting market for more working, Grabyo says it has content more of the time, to affiliates and continuously rolled out enhancements and viewers. That’s why, a year ago, the company updates to ensure minimal disruption to their launched Globecast Managed Cloud Network workflows — often improving them. (Globecast MCN).

“This requirement for more content means the need for as many feeds as possible from events, as cost-effectively as possible — and will see a further increase in the use of the cloud,” says Olivier Zankel, VP, communications group, Globecast. “Globecast MCN is designed for this. As the market begins to return, it’s vital that we, as a service supplier, have a range of contribution options available that can be deployed at speed. Alongside satellite links via our SNGs, we’re also expanding our use of cellular bonding technology from the leading suppliers. “Of course, all of these are connected to our global backbone network so we can bring that content back to our connected hubs for processing e.g. with our Digital Media Hub and its modular suite of content processing services. These content processing services — both close to real time (for example for social media clips/ highlights) and for VOD content creation — will have a major role to play in satisfying the demand for additional content.” Zankel provides an example of how Globecast MCN could work in a tennis tournament by allowing multiple additional feeds to be fed into the cloud at the nearest POP, transported across the world in the cloud and then received at an affiliate’s nearest POP. This allows the affiliate to air the content — following matches they choose — without the additional cost of more fibre-delivered feeds. “As competitions move from location to location,” Zankel explains, “this also provides a very simple way to deliver content without the need for onsite installation, with the processing and management complexity handled in the cloud. We can also take care of last-mile connectivity too.” 128

“This has meant changing our roadmap slightly and pedalling hard to provide new features that enable our partners to work effectively and efficiently from anywhere in the world,” says CEO Gareth Capon. “One example of this is our enhancements to our remote contribution app, Producer Guest, which allows talent to appear on a broadcast using just a single browser link. This was an important update with presenters and talent working from home rather than from studios; they are now broadcasting from home using Grabyo.” Other enhancements include multi-person video support — which now allows up to 12 people to appear on a live broadcast using only a laptop/PC. Guests are able to see and talk to each other while viewing the program return for a seamless and dynamic viewing experience for the audience. This feature has applications for high-quality remote commentary and hosting virtual sports chat. Guest also now includes the capability of creating a virtual green room, allowing producers to do audio and video checks for guests before they go live. The hardest challenge, according to Capon, has been the need for everything to happen so quickly, including changes and updates to Grabyo’s platform to support its clients. “Our first esports event with Electronic Arts — its Apex Legends Global Series online tournament — happened within ten days of the first phone call to our team,” he recalls. “There was not a lot of time for testing. We have had to adapt to working faster and more efficiently than ever before, collaborating across all of our offices in the Americas, Asia and Australia.”

MARCO LOPEZ

SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, LIVE PRODUCTION

For over a year now, points out Marco Lopez, broadcasters like SVT in Sweden, Star Sports in India and sports leagues like the NFL have all been leveraging the agility that remote workflows deliver with great success. Production services providers like NEP have also added centralised production services to their portfolios to give clients added flexibility. “The global pandemic has served to accelerate the drive towards remote production,” he believes. “For broadcasters, production companies and OB operators looking for ways to support live events while minimising the risk to staff, this approach makes a lot of sense. Having fewer staff on site and reducing the need to travel is going to be the norm for some time to come; a remote workflow makes this possible. “Grass Valley provides a suite of solutions and industry knowledge to facilitate our customers’ adoption of standards-based remote production workflows,” Lopez continues, “from our native IP-enabled cameras and IP switchers to our highlights and replay systems along with all of the IP networking infrastructure for both mobile and fixed studio installations alike.” The past year has seen Grass Valley launch its cloud-based software as a service (SaaS) Agile Media Processing Platform (GV AMPP), which Lopez says is one of his company’s most important product developments. “This solution unlocks the power of elastic compute for live sports, helping broadcasters to easily transition to future-ready public, data centre or hybrid infrastructures while directly addressing many of the issues that complicate common IP and cloud deployments, such as network connectivity, timing and ultra-low latency,” says Lopez. “In these challenging times,” he goes on, “sports broadcasters need to be more agile than they’ve ever been — and that’s exactly what GV AMPP allows. Built on a unique microservices architecture based on five core technologies — fabric, timing, connectivity, identity, and streaming — the flexibility and power of GV AMPP will bring about a significant paradigm shift in live content production, allowing events to be produced by teams in any location.” Lopez cites the example of Grass Valley’s work with Activision Blizzard Esports, who leveraged AMPP to keep its Overwatch League and Call of SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeurope

Sponsor Update

Duty League matches live on air during public on a number of different proofs of concept lockdown. Using the AMPP Master Control and testing these innovations — as well as application, the production crew was able to introducing a number of new Flypacks. create customisable workflows in the cloud without having physical infrastructure in place. “Cloud production opens up new ways to build and operate services,” Lopez concludes, “and we’re very excited to offer broadcasters and media organisations a fully cloud-based remote-production system that delivers the flexibility needed to stay ahead of the curve.” “Our new, state-of-the-art, productionGravity Media friendly IP Flypack is deployable anywhere, ED TISCHLER supported globally by our highly skilled and ACTING MANAGING DIRECTOR experienced engineers,” he says. “They feature Whether it was the BP Supercars scalable technology and flexible workflows All Stars Eseries in Australia or capable of delivering a range of projects from producing a weekly series of TOCs for host broadcast operations to large scale programmes for UEFA showcasing the best international events.” action from the UEFA Champions League and Gravity Media’s new Remote Operations UEFA Europa League vaults, Gravity Media’s Flypack is said to be especially well suited to focus has been on helping its clients to keep their productions bringing together venues, studio people safe and their productions on schedule. and roving presenter feeds, supported by And, according to acting managing director a compact crew — especially useful during Ed Tischler, his company has also been working COVID-19 social distancing.

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

“Quick to deploy and capable of easy integration with host broadcasters and Gravity Media’s own Production Centres,” Tischler notes, “this represents a very cost-effective and scalable solution.” For Tischler, the future will be about the virtualisation of production platforms, including remote and cloud-based production platforms. “We’ve all heard of remote production — but what does it really mean?” he asks. “Traditionally everything was done ‘on-site’. Commentators, presenters, directors, producers and even the on-screen graphics teams were all on location wherever in the world it happened to be — crowded, expensive and hardly socially distant!

129

svgeurope

But this has now started to change.” Better connectivity means that we can break out of this mould, he believes. “Although — for the moment — we still need our camera operators to capture the action, this signal can now be sent back to one of our global production centres in London, Sydney or Los Angeles where we can add the commentary, presentation, production and graphics,” he explains. “We can do this from almost any location in the world, keeping costs down whilst still maintaining the highest production standards. “There are many ways we can send that signal — be it by satellite, high speed fibre or even through the mobile network,” Tischler continues. “And not only will remote production reduce costs because there will be fewer people and less kit on-site — it’s good for the planet too!”

Harmonic ERIC GALLIER

VICE PRESIDENT, VIDEO CUSTOMER SOLUTIONS

There can, say many of those in the sports broadcast industry, be little doubt that cloud technology is reshaping workflows — and Harmonic is among them. “Enhanced cloud platforms that simplify workflows, embracing the flexible business models and convenience of COTS computing and the public cloud, will increasingly be deployed to bring high quality sports coverage in the fastest, most reliable, and scalable way to viewers all over the world,” believes Eric Gallier, vice president, video customer solutions, Harmonic. “As we look ahead towards the ‘new normal’, using cloud-based technology will be a must for live sports streaming and broadcasting to be delivered in a smarter, faster and simpler way.” Harmonic’s VOS360 Live Streaming Platform has, according to Gallier, been a game changer. “The solution is the world’s most advanced, fully managed live streaming platform developed for exceptional quality from source to screen,” he says. “It runs on a range of public cloud platforms, efficiently handling all stages of the media processing and delivery chain, optimising live video delivery with flexible and real-time scaling to handle peaks in viewership, which is critical for live sports. In addition, a dedicated 24/7/365 DevOps team ensures the highest level of availability and maximum 130

Sponsor Update

uptime.” The VOS360 platform is said to provide all the features required of a streaming solution for live sports. Running in the cloud, it can be operated and monitored from home. “The VOS360 SaaS platform takes a highly complex workflow and abstracts it to a simple layer with guaranteed reliability, enabling customers to receive content at the source and transfer to the cloud, then right to a viewer’s screen,” continues Gallier. “Reduced latency and exceptional encoding efficiency improve viewer experiences, while advanced compression engines and the latest developments in artificial intelligence help reduce average bandwidth by 50%.” Today, Gallier notes, Harmonic’s VOS360 Live Streaming Platform powers millions of simultaneous streams, thousands of live channels, countless VOD requests and streams hundreds of petabytes.

Hitomi RUSSELL JOHNSON

DIRECTOR AND CO-FOUNDER

Sometimes, you don’t just want to know if something’s amiss. There are occasions when it’s good to know that everything’s OK.

“Our products don’t only measure when it’s wrong,” smiles Russell Johnson, director and co-founder of Hitomi, who specialise in measuring lip-sync and timing delays associated with television production. “We also give the reassurance that it’s right. When you’re capturing something like the Super Bowl that’s worth millions of dollars in advertising revenue, you really need to get everything aligned spoton so that people can’t say that it wasn’t a good enough quality of service. “It’s really important to get precise audio to video alignment and that’s what we do,” he continues. “We can line up lots of audio in just a few seconds and you know precisely to the millisecond whether things are in phase or not.” Hitomi’s new, free iOS app, MatchBox Glass, was launched on the day the UK went into lockdown. Glass is described as a

sophisticated app that works in conjunction with the MatchBox Analyser to replace the need for human intervention to test audio and video links, ensuring that whatever is in front of the camera looks and sounds like it should on screen.

Imagen WILL PITT

COMMERCIAL DIRECTOR

The pandemic and ensuing shutdown of live games has led to greater demand than ever before for access to archive content. Subsequently, many sports organisations have delved deeper into their archives to replace the live action. For sports teams, leagues, federations and governing bodies, their DAM needs have moved rapidly from nice-to-have to need-to-have. “The flexibility of our platform has allowed us to pivot to the changing demands of the sporting world and accommodate their requirements,” says Will Pitt, commercial director at Imagen. “With the rapid and mass shift to remote working across the world, many organisations are being forced to rely on technology in a way they never have before and the world of sport is no exception. Secure and swift access to content has become vital to maintaining momentum as people work across time zones and locations.” Pitt goes on to note that, until recently, the process of generating descriptive, technical and structural metadata relied upon human effort in a manual process that can be expensive, complex and allows opportunity for human error. “Imagen’s new AI services generate a wide range of descriptive tags for fast and accurate searching across large digital media libraries using simple keywords,” Pitt explains. “Content owners are able to search for digital media assets more efficiently and onboard new images and video for market use more rapidly — and sports organisations can prepare valuable highlights for distribution.” Pitt believes that AI and machine learning continue to help the sports industry to operate in a more efficient and cost-effective way — benefits which have never been more pertinent or essential, he says. “As the volume of content that organisations produce grows exponentially, the number of humans available to manage it does not,” he continues. “With teams leaner than ever before, SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeurope

Sponsor Update

Tethered Drone

ARCAM / IO.BOT

Helicopter with GSS

www.xd-motion.com téléphone +33 130660534 - contact@xd-motion.com

ANY

IP NETWORK PROTOCOL CLOUD PROVIDER & EDGE DEVICE

With over a decade perfecting IP video delivery, Zixi is the preferred choice to live stream the world’s most valuable content.

700+

CUSTOMERS WORLDWIDE

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

200+

OEM & SERVICE PROVIDER PARTNERS

.9999%

RELIABILITY WITH HITLESS FAILOVER

131

svgeurope

Sponsor Update

and human resource more stretched, AI can help to fill that gap and accelerate growth in a turbulent time. By enriching media with extra descriptive, technical and structural metadata, content owners can improve search and discovery both internally and externally which would maximise operational efficiency, deliver higher revenues and increase engagement.” Pitt goes on to describe how Imagen’s platform is also being developed with near-live programming in mind. The latest integration into Adobe Premiere Pro will, says Pitt, rapidly transfer archive content and production files from Imagen directly into editing software and save countless hours in post-production. “This will provide a collaborative smart environment that keeps creators in their editing zone without the need to switch between applications,” he points out.

has been rounding out the SMPTE ST 2110 production workflow ecosystem. “An important part of that,” notes Mailhot, “and one of the big advantages of moving to ST 2110 is the ability to implement 4K and HDR Ultra HD, a key requirement of many sports broadcasters for premium events.” Recent Imagine product releases on its Selenio Network Processor have augmented the colour space processing and HDR conversion subsystems for both 1080P and UHD signals. The company has also added a UHD/HDRcapable multiviewer within its SNP platform. “Our processing and control platforms fully support AMWA NMOS, and we participated in the latest rounds of JT-NM testing,” Mailhot adds. “Seamless integration in mixed-vendor environments is required by sports broadcasters to enable best-of breed-solutions to complex production workflows.” Imagine Communications Imagine is adding JPEG-XS compression JOHN MAILHOT capabilities into the Selenio Network Processor CTO NETWORKING in order to provide production-quality, lowIt seems likely that much of what latency interconnection to enable the remote/ we have become used to over split production workflows of the future. the past months will find a place Interxion in our future.

BRYAN HILL

STRATEGY AND MARKETING DIRECTOR, DIGITAL MEDIA

“While global travel restrictions have hampered some in-person sales activities, we have been making great use of remote demonstrations using systems staged in our labs to communicate new features and capabilities to customers worldwide,” says John Mailhot, CTO Networking at Imagine Communications. “This practice is well-received by customers and staff and will continue into the ‘new normal’.” Imagine has also been using more remote log-ins for commissioning and acceptance testing in order to avoid travel and site work in consideration of local orders and practices. Of the 150 projects running around the world in the second quarter of 2020, Mailhot reveals that only around five have been substantially impacted because of COVID-19 — usually because the location is actually closed. The company’s key focus over the past year 132

The past 12 months have been interesting for Interxion from a mergers and acquisitions point of view. Having acquired a controlling interest in Icolo, a Kenyan data centre operator, Interxion then combined with Digital Realty in March. “The strategic combination of our highly complementary businesses accelerates our ability to better serve customers globally, with truly local expertise,” says Bryan Hill, strategy and marketing director, digital media. “Together, we can now offer customers unique expansion opportunities across a greater number of important and high-growth markets — in fact, across 267 data centres, 44 metro areas, 20 countries and over six continents.” In April, Interxion announced that it has begun the construction of a major expansion project in Paris. Named the Interxion Paris Digital Park, the new site — which will be only a stone’s throw from the IBC for Paris 2024 — will accommodate four data centres spanning a total of approximately 40,000 square metres of equipped space. “With the lack of live sports over the last few

months, and with the uncertainty of when spectators will return, we see a huge pent up demand for live OTT sports content,” Hill continues. “Now, with live sports beginning to return, we are ensuring that our customers can easily scale their infrastructure, connectivity and cloud connectivity in our data centres.” He notes that, now Interxion is part of Digital Realty, Interxion can also support customers not just in EMEA, but also in North America, Latin America and Asia Pacific. For Hill, the transition from traditional broadcast transmission to a live OTT sports world where customers can watch sports on any device, anywhere, anytime is now a reality. He also sees increasing use of the public cloud for content creation, media asset management and encoding. Interxion says it hosts the largest number of secure, performant, cost-effective private cloud access nodes in the markets in which it operates.

Lawo WOLFGANG HUBER PR MANAGER

During lockdown, Lawo says it has performed numerous remote configurations of customer installations and even factory acceptance tests — tasks that previously required significant on-site presence. The workflows and tools that were developed for this, says the company’s PR manager Wolfgang Huber, will obviously continue to be used in the ‘new normal’ after lockdown. “In retrospect, we will see that the coronavirus has driven some worthwhile optimisation in workflows for sports production,” says Huber. “The coronavirus experience will further push the workflows that enable distributed production — whether on-site or spread over various locations. And: these new workflows also provide other benefits, such as reduced travelling and better utilisation of technical resources.” Lawo has made a number of introductions over the past months across its video, audio control and monitoring products. “To pick a sports-related example,” continues Huber, “the network bridging functionality in the last release of Lawo’s VSM IP broadcast control system allows for easy set-up and management of IP networked trunk lines — for example, between several trucks at a large scale sports broadcast. SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeurope

Sponsor Update

Broadcast & Sports Media Technology RECRUITMENT | CONSULTING | COACHING

www.808talent.com

the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s leading specialist camera company

Aerial Camera Systems

4K Aerial Filming

SMARTgrip

UAV Filming

Wire Systems

Tracking Vehicles

KartCAM

Remote Heads

Tracking Systems

Primetime EMMY and BAFTA award winner t: +44 (0)1483 426767 e: enquiries@acsmedia.com w: acsmedia.com

Advert 2020.indd 1

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

11/06/2020 12:22:05

133

svgeurope

“Lawo’s Mix Kitchen is a long-term solution for any scenario where physical access to the broadcast centre is difficult or simply impossible due to changed travel arrangements, traffic conditions and so on,” he goes on. “It was inspired by our desire to assist audio engineers during the testing lockdown situation. The most important element of it is remote fader control using a Mackie HUI-compatible fader panel. “Lawo’s Mix Kitchen only requires slight configuration adaptations — using supplied templates — to enable the Nova73 console core on the broadcaster’s premises to be remote controlled. In addition, Lawo’s Mix Kitchen solution enables in-place access to any Mac- or Windows-based computer in the broadcaster’s data centre and can be complemented with an integrated vsmPanel, providing full remote control over hundreds of third party broadcast studio devices.”

Leader Europe KOICHI FUKAGAWA MANAGING DIRECTOR

4K/UltraHD may be a little way from being the universal standard — but Leader is already gearing to support 8K. A Leader LV5900 HD/4K/8K multi-standard waveform monitor was used by BT Sport at a UEFA Europa League match between Arsenal and Olympiakos on February — the UK’s first public demonstration of live 8K sport. The past few months have also seen a major new product announcement from Leader — the LT4611 SDI and IP video and audio sync generator. It’s a 1U full-rack-width generator producing analogue video sync, audio wordclock signals and SMPTE ST 2059-2 profile. “Based on the established LT4610, it has a lower entry price point,” notes Koichi Fukagawa, managing director, Leader Europe, “giving broadcasters the freedom to select the features they need as the industry progresses from SDI to an increasingly IP-dominated world.” In fact, it’s been a busy year for Leader on the new product introduction front with enhanced IP measurement for the LV5600 waveform monitor and its LV7600 equivalent rasterizer; and enhanced measurement of SDI for all five models in the Leader ZEN series of waveform monitors and rasterizers. Also added to the ZEN series is the ability to decode and display the SR Live metadata packet. “This is a key element of Sony’s ‘SR Live for 134

Sponsor Update

HDR’ workflow which allows 4K HDR and HD SDR simultaneous video production,” explains Fukagawa. “As a company, our goal is to deliver the tools broadcasters need to operate in the increasingly IP-centric studio and OB sectors,” he concludes. “We also recognise that broadcast products need to be cost-efficient and at the same time future-proof. Our strategy is to deliver in both respects with products that can be upgraded easily as standards evolve.”

Limelight Networks CHARLES KRAUS

SENIOR MANAGER, PRODUCT MARKETING

As Charles Kraus points out, a lot has changed in the world of sport since September 2019. We’ve seen the first major sports event that could be watched by video streaming only — the English Premier League (EPL) matches in December. During the height of the event, with six fixtures being played at once, Limelight delivered more than 4Tbps to support the EPL matches. Then, we had the COVID-19 pandemic shutting down all live sports events, now restarting without fans in stadiums. “The change in everyday behaviour caused by the virus outbreak is clearly changing people’s viewing habits and creating new patterns in daily usage worldwide,” says Kraus. “These events forced innovation in sports video coverage and delivery, and Limelight is in the thick of it. The reopening of live sports is driving a big surge in live streaming traffic onto global networks that have had to support the increase in online video that began in early March. We’ve built out significant additional capacity to support growing OTT demands — more than 70% increase in the last year alone.” Along with network capacity expansion, Limelight has broadened its range of video delivery solutions to enable delivery of the highest quality video. In April this year, the company introduced Live Push Ingest, which it believes solves a problem live sports streaming providers have. “When fans request live streams of a live sports event, the provider’s origin server can be overwhelmed, especially when there are spikes in demand,” explains Kraus. “In addition, the provider has to pay the costs of sending all of the streams to the CDN ingest. With Live Push Ingest, video chunks are pushed only once,

regardless of the number of viewers, and the CDN is then responsible for managing the content once received and serving all requests. This reduces egress costs, puts control of origin bandwidth in the hands of content providers, and protects their origin servers from heavy loads of viewer requests during large events.” A technology trend that Limelight feels is important in shaping sports production is reducing streaming delivery latency — and an area of focus for the company is offering a range of low latency live streaming solutions. “Our Realtime Streaming solution for subsecond streaming delivery is being enhanced with more features important to live sports streaming,” notes Kraus. “Limelight Realtime Streaming also allows broadcasters and content distributors to create interactive, live online experiences that are not possible with traditional broadcast.”

LiveU RONEN ARTMAN VP OF MARKETING

Sport has, the company says, been a massive growth sector for LiveU, from cycling — road and mountain bike racing; rallying with the FIA World Rally Championship; remotely produced rugby in Africa; to ITV Sport’s use at the 2019 Rugby World Cup, among others.

“We are working with all our customers to help them understand how remote production works with LiveU and how easy it is to deploy — but also how we can help more widely in the ‘new normal’,” says Ronen Artman, VP of marketing. “LiveU’s technology is inherently remote production-friendly: our Wireless At-Home solution was already widely in use across the world before the virus.” In addition to remote production, LiveU expects 5G to play a significant role in live production and contribution. According to Artman, his company’s successful live 5G broadcasts with leading US, APAC and European cellular providers, together with LiveU’s ongoing SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeurope

Sponsor Update

BRINGING ALL THE PIECES TOGETHER SO YOU MAY FOCUS ON THE CONTENT

Contribution from venues

Live Sports Distribution

OTT Platform - Streaming

Remote Production

Global Media Delivery

Major Event Services

info@aldea.tv

aldea.tv

+1.514.461.4136

It’s more than a picture Being surrounded by the right team is essential. Behind every great event lies an alliance of significant talents.

FINEST TEAM, OPTIMAL TOOLS OB VANS – STUDIOS SETS- TRANSMISSIONS – RF FACILITIES – DIGITAL SOLUTIONS – REMOTE PRODUCTION

www.ampvisualtv.tv

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

135

svgeurope

participation in EU 5G collaborative projects, have strengthened the company’s knowledge and expertise in this field, enabling it to enhance its algorithms and solutions accordingly. In June, LiveU launched the LU800 — the first production-level field unit. Combining multi-camera production with mission-critical transmission over native 5G, LiveU believes the LU800 changes the rules of the game for live news and dynamic sports productions, combining multi-camera production and superior video and audio capabilities with mission-critical transmission in a native 5G unit. The LU800 supports up to four fully frame-synced feeds in high resolution from a single unit, using IP bonding of up to 14 connections. “The LU800’s smart 5G bonding technology enhances the sustainability of video quality in sports stadiums and other venues,” believes Artman, “taking advantage of the increased bandwidth, lower latency and greater speeds offered by 5G networks.”

LTN Global MICHAEL ARMSTRONG VP OF SALES, EMEA

Limited travel and mobility have made centralised workflows essential to the media industry, believes Michael Armstrong at LTN Global. “LTN Global has powered alternative workflows to accommodate several large-scale productions, including NFL Draft 2020,” he says. “As the in-person format was impossible this season, the NFL needed a solution to activate fans from their homes. The League leveraged the LTN Live Video Cloud service to acquire, aggregate, and manage nearly 500 live international audience contributors. Fan feeds were routed and distributed via 15 outputs into the Ventuz Broadcasting System, which were then configured and run by Quince Imaging, enabling fast multiswitching of inputs to outputs. “The collaboration resulted in the highestrated Draft of all time and the most-watched sporting event since the pandemic shut down sports,” he adds. LTN Live Video Cloud is described as a powerful media control console that optimises and scales the aggregation, distribution, and monetisation of live video feeds. “It enables sports broadcasters to expand routing capacity, commanding limitless inputs 136

Sponsor Update

from any source and outputs to any destination, without capex,” Armstrong continues. “With Live Video Cloud, sports leagues, federations, and broadcasters can extend their reach to audiences worldwide and deliver broadcastquality content at scale.” He goes on to note how IP infrastructures are providing a reliable framework on which cloud and machine learning production solutions are built. These technologies, he says, establish IP-enabled production workflows that surpass what was possible with traditional satellite models. “When broadcasters combine a fully managed service offering with an intelligent multicast network that automatically outsmarts internet congestion, they can guarantee flawless transmission and win the future of video,” Armstrong concludes. “As more sports broadcasters move away from closed, inflexible legacy distribution systems toward IP transmissions, they’ll start to quantify the benefits of faster production and agile workflows.”

M2A Media MARINA KALKANIS CEO

The sports production industry was already turning to the cloud to modernise workflows, but the impact of COVID-19 has certainly accelerated this development. “We’re seeing sports rights owners asking how they can deliver more services and more content to their media rights holders, especially to younger OTT platforms that don’t have the same legacy infrastructure as the more traditional broadcasters,” says M2A Media CEO Marina Kalkanis. “Live video transportation via cloud IP will allow these sports streaming platforms to access content more easily and efficiently, especially when their workflows are already IP-based, without the need for expensive and rigid satellite deals. Subsequently, this offers better value to both parties and ultimately to the viewer as well, as it gives them access to additional premium content of the sports they love. “The flexibility of our cloud-based services has meant that we have been able to meet our customers’ requirements as their business operations adapted during lockdown,” she goes on. “As change is the only constant, it’s our company’s ability to adapt and be agile that has

become all important.” In May, M2 A Media launched M2 A CONNECT, which Kalkanis believes will be a game-changer for the distribution of live sports. Offered as a fully cloud-based live video over IP transport service, M2A CONNECT is designed to provide simple and flexible contribution workflows for live video. “M2A CONNECT makes sending and receiving video over Cloud-IP; secure, reliable, easy to set up, easy to hand off and easy to monitor,” continues Kalkanis. “M2A CONNECT integrates directly with scheduling systems and OTT workflows and manages all the cloud resources. M2A CONNECT can also transport live content to any number of secured end points, in different output formats — HD, 4K, SD and so on — while integrating audio and video muxing, content insertion, graphics overlays and cloud storage archiving.”

Matrox DANIEL MALONEY

TECHNICAL MARKETING MANAGER, MATROX VIDEO PRODUCTS GROUP

Matrox says it entered the remote production space with a vision of offering a no-compromise encoding/ decoding solution at an affordable price. “Our kit, combined with the ever-increasing availability of public internet bandwidth, would drive production costs down,” says Daniel Maloney, technical marketing manager, Matrox Video Products Group. “Additionally, new on-line delivery platforms are proliferating, and we have an environment where creativity and content diversification would blossom. These factors remain as true today as they were last year. “What has changed,” he goes on, “is that there has been an explosion of experimentation within the industry that includes adapted workflows — which would never have been previously considered. This change both poses a challenge as well as presents an opportunity to Matrox. We must sort through a plethora of data to understand what clients are doing, why they are doing what they are doing, and how we can help them achieve their goals in what is becoming the ‘new normal’.” Matrox is now shipping its Monarch EDGE decoder. Launched last year, the company says it is currently being successfully used for web contribution applications as well as live, cloudbased production workflows. SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeurope

Sponsor Update

Continuous Innovation ●

In-house Remote Production hub with 10Gbps diverse connectivity

●

Portapacks for multi-site decentralised production

●

Traditional and hybrid OB solutions

●

Proven track record on high profile live Sport, eSport and Events

www.arena-tv.com Tel: +44 1737 822011 Arena Television Limited, Hangars 4, 5 & 7, Redhill Aerodrome, Surrey, RH1 5JY.

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

137

svgeurope

“However,” notes Maloney, “it is our Monarch EDGE decoder that users can leverage for their studio-based infrastructures to produce live, multi-channel content in a familiar way.” Maloney believes that cloud-based technologies will continue to evolve rapidly, giving producers more tools to target more sports with more production value tiers. Web-based collaboration tools are now being integrated as a necessity, he says, but some may become permanent fixtures in production workflows in the near future. “And finally,” Maloney says, “native, allIP connectivity over copper/fibre/4G/5G will accelerate as enterprise-level IT hardware is leveraged by broadcast-focused software.”

Media Links AL NUÑEZ PRESIDENT

For many in sports broadcast, there is a sense of ‘we’ve been waiting for this’ as the pandemic changes how the industry works. “We started work with our base of network provider and broadcaster customers on many previous high profile sporting events with decentralised production workflow models a number of years ago,” says Al Nuñez, who is president of Media Links, “and now we’re seeing remote full-scale productions really catch on. “Our entire media over IP transport/switching solutions and professional services portfolio for the network edge and core, as well as our management software, lends itself to easy customisation to accommodate various evolving video formats — whether 4K, HDR, 1080P or other media needs, including increasingly more data carriage capabilities,” he adds. And the Olympics may not be happening as planned in 2020 — but work on the rescheduled event goes on. “We continue to work with multiple Olympic broadcasters who are always looking to fine tune their media transport designs based on changing requirements in order to optimise performance while holding down costs,” says Nuñez. He notes that Media Links’ new MD8000100G Edition allows broadcasters and sports/ entertainment producers to transport more synchronised media channels than ever before, addressing the ever-increasing need for more bandwidth at the network edge. 138

Sponsor Update

MediaKind DAMIEN MONTESSUIT

SVP AND REGIONAL HEAD, EMEA

To address the challenges posed by the ‘new normal’, MediaKind says it has concentrated on developing its cloud-as-a-service offerings. “In doing so,” says the company’s Damien Montessuit, who is SVP and regional head, EMEA, “we are making the delivery of popup channels for sporting events much more accessible. This directly addresses the need to deliver more live events more effectively, enabling broadcasters and service providers to quickly and efficiently spin up and down new services as and when required.” Self-curating live content and having access to highly unique viewpoints of live sports is an increasingly important feature for today’s fans, Montessuit believes. “We are developing our offering in the esports market to enable fans to find highly dynamic ways to create their own unique viewing experience,” he discloses. “This could include showing different teams competing against one another — including footage from the gamers’ individual screens — or even going as far as delivering 360 virtual reality in-game rendered footage from inside the game itself.” Enabling more flexibility at the edge of Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) for rights owners is a key development for MediaKind, Montessuit says. With MediaKind RX1 software and application-based video decoding technology and MediaKind Director 128 end-to-end management and security of contribution and primary distribution networks, content owners can now optimise and control the entire distribution chain, managing the receiver base efficiently and minimising transmission costs by converting and enhancing content at the output stage. “We have also evolved our entire portfolio to build strong, cloud-native media software-based solutions that can be deployed across multiple environments, ranging from on-premises to hybrid cloud,” Montessuit continues. “Most recently, we deployed our Aquila Streaming solution as-a-service on Google Cloud Platform. This development enables sports broadcasters to deliver high quality live content on all networks with broadcast-like experiences, while creating new revenue streams with digital ad-insertion.” MediaKind has also been developing its digital advertising technology. This, the company says,

will become increasingly important for a brand partner or sponsor to ensure they are maximising revenue opportunities, while also ensuring a highly personalised and immersive viewer experience. MediaKind’s Cygnus 360 Events solution also provides further monetisation opportunities through advertising, due to the expanded field of vision not normally seen through a traditional, fixed-lens live broadcast. “Digital advertising and virtual overlays are still marginal activities, and there are major investments needed in order to make them available as a reliable service,” says Montessuit. “Having said that, advertising is key in enabling more cost-effective direct-to-consumer services, as well as supporting indirect revenues from brand partners and sponsors to the sports federation. “So, watch this space!”

Mobile Viewpoint MICHEL BAIS

MANAGING DIRECTOR

When it comes to artificial intelligence — AI — the world is perhaps divided into two: those who are excited by the possibilities it offers, and those who are fearful of what it might bring. Mobile Viewpoint is among the former. “We feel AI has a major part in the production of sports and its potential is only just beginning to emerge, with AI at the beginning of its lifecycle,” says Michel Bais, managing director. “Mobile Viewpoint has a rich roadmap going forward to support many different types of sports, but also to make even better the general viewing experience — including creating multiple shots from multiple cameras without the need of an onsite camera team or director, and the integration of third party graphic systems. “But we feel that the technology is not just about streamlining sports production. It has also enabled the emergence of grass roots and niche sports that traditionally could not afford an on-site production team, allowing them to be viewed by all as a professional production on a number of different viewing platforms.” The company is also among the large number who have historically embraced remote production, and believe that its time has truly come. “The ‘new normal’ for sports production was already emerging in terms of REMI, or remote production,” Bais continues. “The COVID-19 SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeurope

Sponsor Update

A SCALABLE AND LIGHTWEIGHT UHD FLY-PACK

IDEAL FOR ANY TYPE OF PRODUCTION WORLDWIDE MORE INFO:

FLY-PACK.NL

Broadcast

Advert v7.indd 1

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

02/07/2019 15:28:13

139

svgeurope

pandemic has accelerated this process. Mobile Viewpoint had already anticipated this trend and has already implemented REMI-type features into our existing legacy live streaming encoders as well as our new AI sports production platforms which do not require on-site production people.” In support of the trend towards remote sports productions, Mobile Viewpoint has implemented additional remote controls such as Tally lights, RCP control and multi-camera support on single mobile encoders. In terms of evolving media workflows, this allows live streaming of 4K over emerging 5G technology, coupled with the adoption of cloud technology. “In addition,” says Bais, “Mobile Viewpoint has taken its years of sports production technology experience and is now also proudly delivering on new AI platforms for automated sports production. Without the need for an on-camera production team, it is possible to create live professional productions remotely including features such as highlight detection and playback, scoreboard overlay, remote commentary, a clipper for short live edits for social media highlights, and the scheduler which allows games to be planned for live streaming in advance without even having someone remotely present at the start of the game.”

Sponsor Update

waypoint tracking and geofencing,” he smiles. “We’ve always believed that working remotely is the future, and it is now our ‘new normal’,” Drewett continues. “We feel the AGITO is ideal for remote production, and essential for keeping the camera moving and getting close to players and presenters. It can be operated by only two people, while maintaining social distancing.” Recognising the constrained financial situation in which the sports broadcast industry finds itself, Motion Impossible recently introduced a program that allows customers to place an order with only 10% deposit, with the balance payable when the customer is ready to take delivery. “This means they have the opportunity to get a head start and absorb the current three-month lead-time on AGITO purchases with minimal financial outlay,” Drewett explains.

Movicom VICTOR PAKHOMOV CEO

For Movicom, the big challenge the industry faces is how to do more with less — and it’s a challenge that has accelerated in recent months.

Motion Impossible ROB DREWETT

CEO AND CO-FOUNDER

If there’s one car you’d associate with the state of the art in technology, it would likely be a Tesla — and it’s that level of capability that Motion Impossible is looking to emulate with its AGITO modular dolly system. Claimed by the “Our focus continues to be our service to company to be a world first, CEO and co-founder our clients via technological innovation, so we Rob Drewett describes it as a Swiss Army knife continue to respond to their needs by making for film makers. our equipment more flexible,” explains Victor Pakhomov, who is Movicom’s CEO. “That means we provide even more extensive support for setup and use to minimise on location technical personnel, and we expand the use cases to give our clients as many shot options for each event with as little cost and complication as possible. The gear just works, and does more than what you expect it to do.” The last 12 months has seen Movicom launch Robycam Studio, a smaller/lighter/faster system “We have been hard at work bringing the designed to incorporate the production value same technology you’d find in a Tesla to the and flexibility of a fully broadcast-capable AGITO, with features like collision avoidance, cable-suspended camera system into the 140

studio infrastructure for virtual and practical set applications. The company has also introduced RobyLine — a faster/sleeker point-to-point cable-suspended camera system designed for high speed operation in extreme sports and racing. Improvements have also been made to Movicom’s line of RefCams.

Mark Roberts Motion Control (MRMC) SARA GAMBLE

HEAD OF VOLUMETRIC SOLUTIONS

Polymotion Stage is a unique mobile studio for the creation of volumetric video, images, and avatars that can be deployed to wherever they’re needed. “Not only do we offer volumetric and virtual humans: we can also provide the virtual production environments for sports broadcasting to take place in,” says Sara Gamble at Mark Roberts Motion Control (MRMC). “Polymotion Stage is a solution that we can offer to capture talent without them having to access our crew. We operate with COVIDsafe guidelines, allowing the talent to enter the capture studio and leave without interacting closely with our teams. Providing a clean and safe environment, volumetric capture can take place, giving our customers content for both broadcast and marketing material. “The assets we capture can be used for AR graphics, broadcast graphics, sport analysis and more,” she continues. “This supports the production work flows as we can capture as much as possible on site during the day and process the assets when required, allowing for creative use when appropriate. These lightweight .mp4 assets can be used across multiple engines to create exciting and immersive experiences.” MRMC has now launched Polymotion Stage Truck, which it describes as a complete 3-in-1 mobile solution in a truck format. “This allows us to drive up and capture talent within a day,” explains Gamble, “dramatically reducing the time for set up and providing the ability to capture talent in multiple locations. Capturing at 4k 30fps, our truck can host a capture environment up to 10 feet to allow a wide range of sport and talent captures. The truck is roadworthy across the EU and North America and can turn up on location to shoot talent at media days, sports training grounds or even game days.” SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeurope

Sponsor Update

High-quality video capture and control over IP. With the increasing demand for controlling camera equipment remotely, Camera Corps can deliver a full range of IP based products and remote production solutions.

info@cameracorps.tv | www.cameracorps.co.uk/ip-control | +44 (0) 1932 336052

GLOBAL REACH LOCAL TOUCH Services: Audio Display Integrated Networks Video & Media Systems Virtual Events C Creative Services +44 (0) 1293 582000 | info@ctlondon.com | ctlondon.com

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

141

svgeurope

MST Systems JEFFREY CLARK

DEVELOPMENT DIRECTOR

Sponsor Update

NativeWaves EVA WIMMERS CEO

Sports broadcasting is S h e p rob ably sp e ak s fo r being transformed by AR — many in the sports broadcast augmented reality — and MST world when Eva Wimmers, has been working on developing its offering. chief executive officer at synchronised, multiscreen, personalised experiences company NativeWaves, says that the COVID-19 pandemic has presented major challenges to the live sports broadcast industry — but at the same time has offered opportunities for innovation. In the unusual months of spring 2020, NativeWaves focused on fine-tuning its current product offering, while developing new solutions that the company believes will cater to sports broadcasters needs in ‘the new normal’. “Our development work in golf on the “Last year, we had a single product which European Tour saw the release of our data- delivered a multiscreen experience of different driven real-time augmented reality system,” video, audio and data streams — all synced to notes MST’s development director Jeffrey Clark. the main broadcast,” Wimmers explains. “Now, “What’s really special about this is that we can we have made major improvements to this create dynamic graphics in real-time and overlay product with the addition of more automation tracked augment reality graphics without any allowing broadcasters/service providers to calibration or camera data.” manage the workflow remotely themselves. In the OTT and remote production space, We’ve expanded our portfolio by creating new MST has launched its native cloud graphics solutions that will enable synced multi-view system. The company had tested virtualising experiences; synced single screen; and an graphics engines, but this, says Clark, had too in-stadia audience experience all using a single many drawbacks and cost overhead. workflow, driving better integration to the needs “Instead, we created a native control and of both the event venue and broadcasters.” output framework that can run in any browser She believes that, over the next 6-12 months, or through existing systems such as vMix,” he these innovations will become ‘the new normal’ explains. “With optional SDI, NDI or IP output, — that broadcast infrastructure will evolve, we’ve created a graphics system that can serve with more automation and remote production traditional I/O needs but can also instantly scale becoming the solutions of choice. AI-driven in the cloud. Adding a new graphics channel technologies will come to the fore, Wimmers takes minutes with no additional hardware.” says, and broadcasters and service providers will Turning to the pandemic, Clark notes that his focus on delivering personalised experiences to company was quite fortunate in that it already their audiences. had a significant remote support and operational “And,” she continues, “data on how functionality within MST’s UK office. audiences consume their entertainment will “We’ve been working hard to expand on become even more important, especially to these facilities to be able to support a range of advertisers. Traditional broadcast and streaming different sports and networks,” says Clark. production workflows will have a lot more For Clark, remote production and OTT will synergy, and OTT services will no longer be continue to shape sports production. considered their poor cousin.” “To date, a lot of the focus within these Ncam has rightly been about reliably moving video PHIL VENTRE sources from venue to remote facilities,” he VP, SPORTS AND BROADCAST believes. “Now, we’re looking at how we move critical real-time data, such as a basketball game “What a year this has been so far clock, to remote facilities, without incurring for Ncam,” observes Phil Ventre. unacceptable latencies. it’s something for which “Premier League, Bundesliga, we’re already deploying a solution.” Champions League, Liga MX, CONMEBOL, 142

Fortnite World Championships, MLB, NFL and cars whizzing around at Formula E and F1 were just a few of our highlights. “All of a sudden,” he continues, “the world stops. In some ways workflows for sports events needed to change. We need a lower carbon footprint and remote production has been a hot topic for a number of years. The gradual return of sports has forced broadcasters to look at new ways of delivering viewing experiences to fans. We’ve seen a change on the horizon for a while now, and the current situation has forced this a bit quicker than expected.” Ventre says that Ncam has been working with a number of broadcasters around the globe participating in roundtables, sharing its roadmap and asking for their input to gauge the state of the industry. The latest stage of Ncam’s development is the release of its new Mk2 Camera Bar and server. Said to be lighter, more robust and flexible, with both natural and fiducial tracking capabilities, the new system was set to make its mark on a number of major sporting events over the summer. “We’ve talked previously about AR in sports being the cherry on top of a very expensive cake,” Ventre goes on. “Our new price point lowers the barrier to entry and the subscription — monthly and annual — and perpetual licence models ensure that it’s not just the Tier 1 events that can now afford to include AR. Tier 2 and 3 events can now offer the same production values as those delivered by major events, a solution we’ve referred to in-house as the ‘democratisation of AR’.”

NEP Group SIMON MOORHEAD

MANAGING DIRECTOR, NEP UK

Against the backdrop of the gloom of the past few months, NEP says it is seeing positive trends as countries reopen businesses and start to reintroduce events with new health and safety measures in place. “We expect different countries and businesses — and even regions and businesses within the same country — to come back in different ways and at a different pace,” says NEP UK managing director Simon Moorhead. Regardless of ‘when’ or ‘where’, the company has been focusing on the ‘how’ by implementing detailed safety guidelines and procedures, securing ample PPE for its teams and working with its clients and divisions worldwide to SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeurope

Sponsor Update

develop best practices. NEP has implemented several measures, including pre-event preventative actions such as conducting facilities risk assessments; limiting staff travel; conducting safety training; undertaking increased monitoring with appointed ‘safety captains’/coordinators and temperature testing; and implementing stringent cleaning procedures. “These measures have been, and will continue to be, vital to our adaptation to the ‘new normal’, but one of the most critical ways to create this ‘normal’ is to tap the expertise of our amazingly creative and innovative team members, who have either found ways or made ways to help our partners return their live events to audiences all over the world,” continues Moorhead. Late last year, NEP’s teams continued working on a number of media solutions that expanded upon the company’s earlier successes in moving more workflows to the cloud and offering more centralised production capabilities. “One of the examples of this was the successful test of NEP’s centralised production platform to the UK market earlier this year,”

notes Moorhead. “An EPL match was filmed at Aston Villa, processed through one of NEP’s data centres at Hilversum in the Netherlands, with control room production taking place in NEP’s iOB (intelligent outside broadcast) pod in Manchester.” Spurred by the pandemic, NEP says it has worked very hard to launch even more remote capabilities, and has seen significant interest and success in its centralised production, one-camera home studio options, virtualised editing, virtual studios complete with AR technology from the company’s Netherlands team that transforms a space into almost anything, and the use of custom LED applications to create a virtual audience to recreate the cheers, chants and excitement of a live audience. “We see flexibility as the key enabler in the world today and going forward,” concludes Moorhead. “We’re focused on not only making the traditional environments we have worked in safer but enabling the storytellers to have the flexibility they need to collaborate with each other.”

Net Insight PER LINDGREN CTO

The beginning of the year saw Net Insight divest its cloudba se d , low latenc y C DN platform, Sye, to Amazon Prime, and go on to use that hyper-scale distributed architecture and experience to build a next generation cloudbased contribution and distribution platform for the media industry called Nimbra Edge. March saw the company acquire Aperi to accelerate its move to fully virtualised IP media workflows.

“This allows us to reuse our new virtualised media and network functions, cross platform, whether in the cloud or in our Aperi or Nimbra

CTV are first and foremost a family. We care deeply about our community of staff, freelancers, suppliers and clients that between us make the magic happen on many global events! CTV are using proven remote technology to maintain our operations, making your production decisions simple and effective

Delivering Excellence

CTV Outside Broadcasts Ltd - 3 The Merlin Centre, Lancaster Road, High Wycombe, HP12 3QL Adam Berger: adam@ctvob.co.uk / Bill Morris: bill@ctvob.co.uk / hello@ctvob.co.uk / 020 8453 8989 / www.ctvob.co.uk Photo credits: 2019 Mitsubishi Motors Badminton Horse Trials: Jonathan Clarke/Alamy Stock Photo. BAFTA: Olivia Coleman: WENN Rights Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo. FIFA Women’s World Cup: Xinhua/Alamy Stock Photo London Marathon: Alex Cavendish/Alamy Stock Photo. The Mens Boat Race: Leo Mason DANCE Photos/Alamy Live News. NFL International Series Game: Newscom/Alamy Live News. X Factor Live Shows: George Reay ICC Cricket World Cup 2019: Cal Sport Media/Alamy Stock Photo. Golf Open Championship: Aflo Co. Ltd./Alamy Stock Photo

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

143

svgeurope

appliances,” explains CTO Per Lindgren. “It lays the foundation for the future of sports production over any open IP and cloud infrastructure and ultimately will enhance the fan experience with more and better produced content.” Net Insight has also added low latency compression with synchronised frame alignment for remote production, together with fully open internet architecture support with RIST, SRT and Zixi, both in the company’s cloud platform Nimbra Edge and in its appliances. “This allows for ingest directly into cloud or data centres for remote cloud production, but also opens up cost-efficient link backup or satellite replacement,” says Lindgren. “We have also worked with the new IP studio format ST 2110 to handle that in wide area networks and to open up for distributed IP productions.” According to Lindgren, Net Inisght has been working even more closely with key partners like Grass Valley and Calrec as well as large media service providers like Tata Communications, Eurovision and The Switch to adapt to new customer requests and requirements, and help in every possible way in the transformation journey the industry is undertaking. “The biggest trends we’re seeing right now are the big move to remote and distributed production workflows together with the shift to OTT distribution,” concludes Lindgren. “These shifts have accelerated the trends towards lowlatency compression, open IP and cloud-based workflows.”

Open Broadcast Systems KIERAN KUNHYA MANAGING DIRECTOR

Sponsor Update

“Sports production workflows have suddenly become much more cloud-based, due to the necessity of the situation,” says Kieran Kunhya, managing director, Open Broadcast Systems. “We have also seen a rise in the use of IP for contribution and distribution, driven by the need to create content from people’s homes, where there is of course no existing infrastructure.” These trends are, he believes, likely to continue. “As we begin to see the return to live sports, it will still be important to ensure that these can be delivered with a minimum of infrastructure and handled by as few people as possible,” he goes on. “Using IP means that video content can be created from literally everywhere.” Kunhya also sees the pandemic as serving a useful purpose in the longer term development of the industry. “One of the biggest barriers to IP to date has been around the mindset of broadcasters,” he adds. “This situation has led that to change so we are likely to see a big shift over the coming months.” Earlier in the year, Open Broadcast Systems successfully implemented the first project using native 2110 IP decoding. This is an industry first, Kunhya believes, decoding directly to 2110 uncompressed IP using software running on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware. “The specific project saw us using our highdensity decoder to enable more than 64 feeds decoded from MPEG-TS to 2110 uncompressed IP,” Kunhya explains. “The system, which was deployed in a 2U rack, replaces nearly two entire racks of decoders.”

Panasonic

ANDRE METERIAN It’s now widely agreed in the DIRECTOR, PROFESSIONAL VIDEO industry that many solutions are SYSTEMS BUSINESS UNIT FOR EMEA better implemented in software than hardware — but who would have thought Use of AR/VR technologies in that one of software’s advantages would be that sports production will grow it’s easier to deliver in the midst of a pandemic? and will be a real game changer, according to Panasonic. “They represent an accessible way to dramatically enhance video production with interactive content and stats in particular, as well as capturing the imagination of viewers at home,” believes Andre Meterian, who is director, professional video systems business unit for EMEA at Panasonic. According to Meterian, Panasonic’s AW-UE150 continues to attract much interest thanks to being the first PTZ to adopt the FreeD 144

protocol, meaning that it can provide Position Data Notification (PTZF), making it appropriate for usage within both VR and AR environments. “Furthermore, the use of PTZ cameras for live-streaming events due to their nonobtrusive design, fantastic image quality and full IP connectivity including PoE, provides maximum flexibility and simplifies installation for production teams,” he adds. Panasonic has also introduced KAIROS, its IT/ IP video processing platform, which offers super low 1-frame latency processing, along with the support of virtually any kind of signal into a single server. “That makes it an extremely powerful tool to create immersive live video experience for viewers,” Meterian continues. “It offers uncompressed processing, true uncompressed 4K inputs and full support of baseband and IP signals, including SMPTE 2110 and NDI at the same time. KAIROS is fully resolutionand format-independent and based on the latest technology in software and CPU/GPU processing, allowing users to allocate processing power with 100% efficiency and achieve performance levels currently impossible with traditional hardware-based products.” The company has also extended its live camera system line-up further with the addition of the entry-level AK-HC3900 HDRcapable system camera, which supports a future upgrade option to UHD — making it, says Meterian, a cost-effective option for live production environments. “We are aiming to provide a true glass-toglass solution and system architecture for sports production — from capture to delivery,” Meterian concludes.

Pixellot ALON WERBER CEO

The need to produce and distribute more sports content with fewer resources and lower budgets is causing many companies to investigate automated sports production. “In the past, fans came to the games,” says Alon Werber, CEO of Pixellot. “Now, with social distancing and crowd limitations, we have to bring games to the fans. Our AI-Automated technology enables production companies to lower their production costs, and it enables lower, amateur and niche sports leagues to film, produce and stream matches live and SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeurope

Sponsor Update

Efficient. Sustainable. Remote Production. A better way of workingâ&#x20AC;¦ Find out more at www.emguk.tv/roc

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

145

svgeurope

on-demand. This is especially critical for keeping fans involved and keeping the games and leagues alive.” According to Werber, one of the most important new developments for Pixellot has been its ‘You’ solution for amateur and youth leagues. This, he explains, enables the setup, capture, production and broadcast of a game using portable, inexpensive equipment. “The results are amazing,” he smiles, “and are very similar to the type of coverage that one is used to with professional sports.” In December, Pixellot acquired VidSwap, a sports video analysis and editing platform for multiple types of athletic events. “This made us the first end-to-end automated video and data solution in the sports industry,” says Werber. “VidSwap’s game analysis and video breakdown capabilities provide teams with additional layers of data and video analysis.”

Presteigne Broadcast Services ADRIAN YOUNG CEO

What’s preoccupying many people is whether the end of the pandemic will take us back to where we were — or whether some changes will be permanent.

“I don’t think the remote production genie will fit back into the bottle,” says Adrian Young, CEO of Presteigne Broadcast Services. “That means that — with the refinement that time and practice brings — there will be a fundamental and long lasting change in the way live sports productions are produced and we want to ensure we remain flexible to accommodate our customers’ changing needs. “Remote and/or distributed production will now accelerate,” he goes on. “Largely, they have been found to work. Whilst there are compromises, these will be addressed over a relatively short period of time through practice and new technology development. There is no prospect now of going back to OB trucks at a venue packed with 25-30 people in a confined 146

Sponsor Update

space. Home working is not entirely the answer, but it certainly can form part of a bigger answer. “With such a significant push in this direction, the technology vendors will accelerate their R&D and product development to make this easier, more robust and of a higher ‘broadcast’ quality,” Young adds. “Pre-COVID-19 workflows will largely be put to one side as the current COVID-19 affected workflows are refined and developed, and need to be iterated into something that maintains the pre Covid-19 production values but with revised long term workflows.” Although he acknowledges the importance of the substantial hardware upgrades in which Presteigne has invested over the past year, he places no less emphasis on recruitment. “We’ve made a number of significant experienced hires in our engineering and account management teams over the last 12 months,” he continues. “This leaves us very well positioned to pick up from where we left off once live sports production returns on a consistent basis.”

RaceTech KATE HILLS

PR AND COMMUNICATIONS MANAGER

As OB and technical facilities provider to all British racecourses as well as being horse racing’s OB provider to dedicated TV channels, RaceTech says it has played a vital role in the resumption of racing ‘behind closed doors’.

“We’ve been developing and trialling remote production workflows with one of our major customers,” notes RaceTech’s PR and communications manager Kate Hills. “From this, we were able to carry out a very successful live remote production trial which gave us the ability to control equipment in our OB trucks like the vision mixer, sound desk, graphics, talkback and RCPs from a central location.” Over the past 12 months, RaceTech has trialled a 360 camera that can live stream to social media as well as give several multi-camera live SDI

images that can be framed differently; it can potentially be used in one of the company’s live productions in the future.

RaceTech has also made further developments to its ultra-high frame rate ATL (across the line) camera in the form of a familiar feel ‘VT replay’ style controller. “This gives us the ability to offer our customers in the future an option to jog/shuttle/pause a live replay frame by frame,” Hills explains.

Reality Check Systems JEFF HEIMBOLD

HEAD OF COMMERCIAL

With staff located around the world, Reality Check Systems (RCS) found adapting its daily operations to the pandemic somewhat more straightforward than companies with more centralised operations. “What we’ve seen is an acceleration in the need for our clients to implement new workflows and solutions,” notes Jeff Heimbold, head of commercial. “Prior to COVID-19, we had many clients who wanted to look at cloud-based and remote production — but few had the time or the necessary incentive to really investigate and test. Then coronavirus came along — and there was no option. We think both will continue to be utilised to varying degrees now that they have been shown to be successful.” RCS says it has taken the opportunity not only to expand the company’s skillset and its offering both across cloud and digital technologies including Singular.live, but also on more traditional projects using Ross xPression and Unreal Engine. RCS has also launched Cobb, a desktop application that is built for graphics operators to be able to easily control different graphics devices. “It opens up a huge range of options for our clients,” believes Heimbold. “It provides multiuser, multi-output and multi-composition features that fit the demanding requirements of a modern, daily production workflow.” SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeurope

Sponsor Update

Red Bee Media DAVID TRAVIS

CHIEF PRODUCT AND TECHNOLOGY OFFICER

Red Bee Media says it has made improvement s and developments relevant to sports across its entire portfolio over the past year. These include its IP-based Global MCR platform, Remote Production offering and Managed OTT platform.

“For the latter specifically we have doubled down on our commitment to empower our sports customers to ‘self-serve’, says David Travis, who is chief product and technology officer.” Our goal is to make the operation of our

services as transparent, frictionless and simple as possible, which is exemplified throughout our entire OTT offering.” Red Bee Media is, for example, now offering the ability to sign up for and create a customer’s own branded service and manage content presentation on end-user apps. The delivery of live events through his company’s services is now operated via a click of the mouse, as is the ability to create ‘linear’ delivery and personalised channels from VOD and live assets. “The way we offer these services will have a radical impact on the sports market in two ways,” Travis continues. “First, by putting the power in the hands of our customers, we enable a far more agile and responsive service. Second, by removing traditional hands-on operations from our standard services, we reduce cost of delivery and offer a commercially attractive proposition for sports customers. The net result is that more sports events can be delivered at high quality more rapidly and more regularly. By lowering the bar to deliver content, we enable a richer experience for the fan at home or on the move.”

In general, Travis believes, the industry seems to have pulled together to invent new operational models and production practices to continue offer consumers a ‘new normal’ level of programming. “All in all,” he concludes, “we are seeing a lot of ingenuity across the industry as a response to the ongoing crisis.”

Riedel Communications SERKAN GÜNER SPOKESPERSON

In response to the pandemic, Riedel has ramped up its streaming and remote video production efforts. One example is the new Riedel Atmosphere Media Cloud + RemoteONE Appliance that enables professional OTT live streams. These services and devices are currently being used by the likes of Deutscher Galopp (German Horse Racing) and DTM (Touring Car Racing). “Innovation has always been part of our DNA,” says spokesperson Serkan Güner, “and it has been especially in demand during the

CMY

Delivering high performance technology to the broadcast industry

www.densitron.com

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

147

svgeurope

pandemic. Riedel has responded rapidly to special requirements that have arisen due to the crisis, which has resulted in unique products and services.”

The company’s responses have included what it describes as a unique ‘crowd audio’ solution that simulates a live fan experience and makes football more tangible during the Bundesliga’s ‘ghost games.’ Riedel systems capture live, realtime reactions of fans at home in their living rooms and bring the audio into the stadium. This creates the impression of a live fan atmosphere for both the players and the fans watching at home, even with an empty stadium. In May, Riedel announced a major expansion of its MediorNet product line in close collaboration with the Riedel Montreal team (formerly Embrionix). These include 13 new hardware devices and nine new software apps based on Riedel’s new MuoN SFP technology. The new MediorNet products include MuoN SFPs, pluggable gateway and processing devices delivered in a uniquely compact form factor; MediorNet MicroN UHD, the big brother to the MicroN media distribution and processing device; and the MediorNet VirtU IP high-density core infrastructure platform. “With the new MediorNet additions, customers will be better equipped than ever to meet the distributed routing, processing, and multiviewing requirements of today’s SDI, IP, and hybrid production environments,” says Güner. “The extended MediorNet family offers all of the tools needed for any sports production, whether it’s SDI-centric, IP-centric, or anything in between.”

Ross Video KEVIN COTTAM

VP GLOBAL SPORTS & LIVE EVENTS

If you’re one of those who fear that robots may take over the world, the last few months will likely not have made you feel better. In 148

Sponsor Update

May, RMP — Ross Video’s mobile production division — supported the first competitive tennis tournament since lockdown in Florida. As well as numerous other precautions, the tournament saw the widespread use of camera robotics to minimise the number of people who needed to be present. “I think the use of robotics is going to be increasingly prevalent as content creators try to keep crew sizes to a minimum,” says Kevin Cottam. “Production automation solutions are also likely to become more popular for the same reason. Many broadcasters are feeling pressure to minimise the number of people in a studio and so are looking to automate as much of their production as possible. “Allied to this,” he goes on, “we’ve seen a spike in interest in virtual solutions. Rather than having presenters or pundits in a studio or venue, we can use virtual green screen solutions to place them in a virtual set and have them interact with each other regardless of their actual location.” The pandemic hasn’t slowed down Ross Video’s rate of product development. “Every year Ross introduces a raft of new solutions and upgrades,” notes Cottam. “We have the broadest portfolio of solutions in live production, covering more than a dozen different categories from cameras to infrastructure products.” This past year has seen the release of a new version of DashBoard, as well updates to the company’s Carbonite Ultra production server, Acuity production switcher, Ultrix routing/ AV processing platform, Gator Toolbox signal conversion solution. Two new Ultritouch touchscreen panels for facility monitoring and control have been announced. Each of these solutions can feature within the Unified Venue Production System “From a sports perspective, everything we do is oriented around the concept of our Unified Venue Production Solution,” Cottam explains. “That’s a philosophy based around using the same tools for all aspects of a production in a venue or stadium, driving all video canvases — in-bowl, concourses, suites, external — with the same technology and techniques, and bringing broadcast quality production to every display. From the venue or stadium production control room through to the control of third-party devices, the Unified Venue Production System enables every element of the game-day or event production to be managed and controlled via

one customisable interface called DashBoard. It is, by its very nature, scalable and configurable.”

RT Software JASON KING

MARKETING COMMUNICATIONS MANAGER

Sports broadcasters will, of course, be anxious to keep production quality high despite recent workplace challenges, venue challenges and likely budget pressures. “The latest releases of our Tactic product family makes us feature complete when compared to other suppliers,” says Jason King, marketing communications manager at RT Software. “That, combined with the fact that we have always featured simple, low cost licencing models with all the ‘extras’ included means we will be well positioned to help sports broadcasters achieve these high production values at new, lower price points. “Fortunately,” he adds, “RT was involved in some virtualisation projects with major broadcasters in recent years and, as a consequence, we have products that are remote production ready. We already have a virtualised, web-enabled family of products for CG and templated graphics that are perfect for distributed or remote production. These can be set up at venue, on premise or in an AWS environment as required. We are building on this with a roadmap to get all of our products webenabled in the coming months.” RT Software has released new versions of the Tactic sports analysis and telestration product family. New features include camera morph/ camera fly, allowing seamless transitions between different broadcast cameras during analysis sequences. Also included is player tracking for auto-assisted keyframe, allowing complex graphical analysis sequences to be built extremely quickly. Tablet and touchscreen support are said to make Tactic Lite a perfect tool for presenter-led analysis. “We have also established an online learning experience, combined with software-based licencing,” King continues. “This makes it very easy for customers around the world to roll out projects involving our products. Initially available for Swift, our easy to use CG and template based graphics product, this is now available on the Tactic analysis products and shortly will include all our products, including virtual studios.” SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeurope

Sponsor Update

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

149

svgeurope

Sennheiser TOM VOLLMERS

HEAD OF PROFESSIONAL PORTFOLIO

Of all those involved in sports broadcasting who would be conscious of the very different atmosphere of behind-closed-doors events, you’d imagine those involved in the delivery of audio would be most acutely aware. “With ‘ghost games’ in place, one fully realises how important atmosphere and sound are in a fully packed stadium,” says Tom Vollmers, head of professional portfolio at Sennheiser. “Making people feel part of the action when they watch at home will be crucial for the future of sports broadcasting, and software-controlled audio pick-up will play a big role in this. In future, we will see object-based audio elements perfectly integrated in immersive audio formats such as Dolby Atmos and MPEG-H to deliver a spectacular experience to audiences at home.” From a purely technical standpoint, Vollmers believes there won’t be too many changes in relation to capturing field audio and sport sounds. “Bigger changes are required when it comes to interviews,” Vollmers continues. “To avoid contamination of windshields, broadcasters cover them in non-permeable plastic bags, which are carefully replaced after every interview. When several people are interviewed simultaneously or one right after the other, a separate microphone must be used for all of them for hygiene reasons. The broadcasters and their sound people are doing an excellent job here.” According to Vollmers, Sennheiser’s most important product development of the past year has been the Link Density Mode of its Digital 6000 radio microphone system. “It helps broadcasters to circumvent the most pressing spectrum issues they face in their daily work,” he explains. “They are now able to increase the number of channels within a given frequency window. Up to 40 links can be accommodated in an 8-MHz TV channel in Europe, and up to 30 links in the smaller 6-MHz TV channel in the USA.”

Sponsor Update

that’s a trend to which SES has responded. “We realised that our sports and events customers need more than just global connectivity, but also other services including editing suites, remote production, studios, and graphic insertion for live sports broadcasting,” says Susanna Mantello, who is the company’s VP and head of sales, sports and events. “Our goal is to provide sports broadcasters with a full-service offering from a partner that they trust, and soon we will officially announce how we are aiming to do that with our new media centre. “Given the incredible amount of success we had with our IP platform developed for AFP, based on our SES 360 platform,” she continues, “we are now ready to launch it for sports. The main benefits will be cost-effectiveness, extra unilateral feeds that can be distributed, remote production and more.” The realisation that sports would be produced differently once they went back live provided SES with an opportunity, she believes. “No longer would large crews of personnel travel all over the world, but rather smaller crews would be sent on-site, and most production would be done remotely,” Mantello says. “This requires strong logistics, but also the need for companies like us to provide large amounts of fibre, satellite and IP that allows our clients to receive multiple cameras at their studios and create feeds there.” Mantello notes the growth of esports. “It is the fastest growing market in the industry, and everyone has to be able to deliver on this,” she says. “The greatest news for companies such as ours,” Mantello concludes, “is that we are able to support all of these platforms and have invested in the ability to support the industry as it keeps expanding and maturing into new territories.”

Signiant

“We were happy to be able to support the industry in this way and proud that our products play an important role in keeping content flowing during this time,” says chief marketing officer Jon Finegold. “It’s been inspiring to see the industry’s creative thinking and innovative ways to bring sports back safely and to enhance the productions by using more pre-recorded footage, new graphics tools and AR in the absence of fans in the stands. We expect many of these new workflows to stick for a while.” Over the past year, Signiant has made a number of enhancements to its platform, including expanded support for growing files — something the company notes is widely used by its customers in remote productions for most major world sporting events. Signiant has also expanded its investment in storage independence, adding Google Cloud support and expanded its support for on-prem object storage as many sports broadcasts are now working across hybrid cloud, multi-cloud environments. Beyond this, its newest SaaS product — Signiant Jet — now has a unique ‘cloud handshake’ mechanism, making it far easier and more secure to set-up automated, inter-company content exchange. “The use of cloud storage with our platform has seen a big surge recently,” notes Finegold, “and we’ve seen more activity with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud in addition to AWS so we’re clearly moving fast to a multi-cloud world. That is all good tailwind for Signiant.”

Skyline Communications THOMAS GUNKEL

MARKET DIRECTOR, BROADCAST

The wider world of business has long been investing in tools to facilitate collaboration — and now, those tools have become an imperative in sports broadcasting.

JON FINEGOLD

CHIEF MARKETING OFFICER

Remote production has been a discernible trend in the industry for some time — and it has SES accelerated markedly as a result of the pandemic. SUSANNA MANTELLO In response, Signiant offered unlimited Media VP AND HEAD OF SALES, Shuttle users to its customers for a period of time SPORTS AND EVENTS as companies scrambled to set up remote work “Operational teams and experts do not An observable trend in the environments — and the company says Media sit together in a single room any more,” says industry is customers looking Shuttle usage has skyrocketed over the past few Thomas Gunkel, market director, broadcast at for a ‘one stop shop’ to fulfil their needs — and months. Skyline Communications. “They need the right 150

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeurope

Sponsor Update

Ultramotion Camera Rental Specialists At Fletcher we specialise in all of your Ultramotion Broadcast camera requirements • 4K, UHD and HD • HDR Options • Full body, Compact and mini sizes • RF Options • Fixed, Handheld and Robotic PTZ

FLETCHER

Fletcher Group +44 (0) 1923 233406 london@fletch.com www.fletcherlondon.com

Speciality Capture • Robotic and Tracking Camera systems • Full, Compact and mini robotic heads • Remote Production workflows • IP Connectivity • Customised solution development

MatchBox Glass Free iOS App

Is your enjoyment of live sports being ruined by hearing the action before you see it? It's really important to get precise audio to video alignment. We can measure synchronisation in just a few seconds by simply holding up an iPhone in shot.

www.hitomi-broadcast.tv SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

Line-up

Lip-synced

Live!

+Free 30 day trial licence* to help you get started

*MatchBox Analyser required

151

svgeurope

toolsets to work together and to communicate. DataMiner has an integration into collaboration tools like MS Teams or Slack, for example, to share critical alarms with a broader group of people, and also to share data about an ongoing sports event.” According to Gunkel, that isn’t DataMiner’s only benefit. “DataMiner enables our customers to make the move from SDI to all-IP, and from on-premise physical infrastructure to virtual infrastructure and services running in the cloud,” he adds. “It provides a ‘single-pane-of-glass’ interface with fine-grained authentication and rights management to orchestrate all a user’s physical and virtual infrastructure. That makes it easy to let operational staff work in a distributed fashion. All you need as an operator is a single connection into a DataMiner system — instead of providing lots of individual connections into multiple control and operational tools, which is often a huge barrier for IT.”

Skyline Television ROBERT KIS CEO

If you have an OB van with five working rooms, 22 workspaces, two production areas and capable of supporting more than eight cameras, you have a lot of space at your disposal. Or what about a truck with 65 square metres of floor and able to support more than 40 cameras? That’s a lot of space too — and having that space, as Skyline Television does with its OB11 and OB9 platforms, has been very important over the past few months, believes CEO Robert Kis. “Yes,” he says, “we’re fortunate that we have some OB vans with a lot of room, so we can undertake bigger productions with the minimum distance by using all the available space. Of course, we immediately built appropriate Plexiglass walls for all the workstations in all our vehicles. “What will happen in the coming year is difficult to predict — we have unfortunately not yet found a crystal ball that can tell us,” he laughs. Kis notes that Skyline Television has had substantial success over the past year, producing UHD/HDR games for the German soccer league. “The results were absolutely convincing,” he says, “and we believe that UHD/HDR also offers real added value in other productions.” 152

Sponsor Update

Slomo.tv

CEO Gerard J Hall. “Data was sent from the track to our DOC to interface to display race splits, CEO odds, payouts and historical information in realAccording to Michael Gilman, time, as well as SMT’s ticker, running order and CEO of Slomo.tv, near term track map graphics.” recovery for the sports broadcast industry will be impacted by the decrease in revenues over the past months. “Our company is ready for these new realities,” he says. “For more than two years, we have been constantly reducing prices of our instant replay slow motion servers, expanding their functionality and making them more powerful without loss of quality. This should help sports broadcasters to be profitable within SMT was selected by FIFA as the official this new real-world environment.” virtual offside line provider to assist VAR (Video A case in point is the Arrow-III, which Gilman Assistant Referee) for the 2019 FIFA U17 World describes as “a real workhorse, indispensable for Cup, which took place in November in Brazil. broadcasting of sporting events”. The system in The company has been providing virtual replay mode supports seven HD cameras or six advertisement insertions since 2003, allowing 3G cameras. its clients to sell ad space in uniquely flexible “For those who need a powerful, compact spaces such as fields of play, tennis courts, and mobile solution, we created the Simple backboards behind batters, hockey rink glass, R III,” Gilman continues. “This 1U server has on buildings, as virtual billboards and virtual capabilities which significantly exceed the sets and more. capabilities of all existing compact solutions. In “Clients such as ESPN, Fox Sports and HD mode, the server allows you to work with Turner Broadcasting take full advantage of the 12 cameras and has optional support for two technology with virtual ads that appear on independent workplaces.” virtual billboards, backboards, or in the batter’s Slomo.tv is also entering the HyperMotion eye position,” says Hall. “Our hockey clients market with its new MeteorMan solution, which have used our technology to display five ads at enables continuous recording at 200/240fps and once, in various locations around the rink. Ads short loop recording at 500fps. can be targeted on a per-market basis for local, national and international broadcasts and are SMT excellent options for companies to build global GERARD J HALL brand awareness.”

MICHAEL GILMAN

FOUNDER AND CEO

Having designed and developed the official timing and scoring systems for the NHL, Open Championship, NBA, Wimbledon, NASCAR, X Games, CrossFit Games and Dew Tour, SMT delivers end-to-end live events and broadcast technology to clients including broadcasters, organising bodies, teams, stadiums/arenas, sponsors and event operators. In common with the rest of the industry, the company is rapidly adapting to a new way of working. “As part of our support of the Triple Crown, we recently supported NBC’s coverage of the Belmont Stakes with one operator at NBC Sports’ Stamford studios and another operator in our Durham, N.C., headquarters’ Data Operations Center,” explains SMT founder and

Solo Satellite Communications KEITH MARSHALL

FOUNDER AND DIRECTOR

The pandemic has provided the opportunity for many businesses to think about their business model, and how it might look in an uncertain future. A case in point is Solo Satellite Communications. “I see a medium term future of constant disruption due to COVID-19 issues,” says the company’s founder and director Keith Marshall, who describes Solo as a services company rather than a products company. “Given we have been delivering from around the globe around 3,000 hours of live tennis per year with at times 25 outgoing circuits over SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeurope

Motion Impossible SVG Europe 0719 (Version 2.1).pdf 1 10/07/2019 16:59:18

Sponsor Update

CMY

HAVING THE RIGHT VISION Multidimensional cable-suspended camera system ROBYCAM 3D • 3-axis Gyro-stabilization • Motion Control System • Compass AR Tracking

• DGUV 17/18 Conformance Certificate by DEKRA • 200m x 200m outdoor / 80m x 80m indoor Permanent Installation

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

Learn more

movicom.tv

153

svgeurope

fibre and some on satellite means a substantial amount of logistics for a small company based in Yorkshire. This is not a future we can base ourselves on any longer, and our efforts are therefore going to be aimed at helping those that need UK presence.”

For Marshall, latency will be key in the future for any live workflow. “If you can keep latency down, then you are always going to be able to master a decent workflow remotely,” he believes. “With this in mind, the 5G networks offering low latency along with network slicing will eventually be fundamental to how traditional outside broadcasts are performed. You might think a satellite company would hate the idea of fibre and bonded cellular units — but it all has a place.”

Sony NORBERT PAQUET

HEAD OF LIVE PRODUCTION SOLUTIONS

It’s been a tough time financially for many of those involved in sports broadcasting — something that Sony not only recognises, but has done something about.

“We are carefully monitoring each situation to support organisations through restructured financing to ensure they can cope with the challenges they have faced,” says Norbert 154

Sponsor Update

Paquet, head of live production solutions. “Sony Corporation has also launched a $100 million global relief fund to support those impacted by the COVID-19 situation. In Europe and the US, this will be allocated to [among other industry groups] SVG to distribute via its SVG Sports Broadcasting Fund.” Sony has also recognised that its customers have needed to adapt quickly to new technologies and new ways of working. “In recent months, our consulting architects, solutions specialists and field engineers have been in very close communication with our customers to ensure smooth adaptation,” continues Paquet, “as well as future-forward thinking on the ways to address each specific challenge with the right solution.” Sony’s Virtual Production fully cloud based production service is aimed at facilitating sports productions that can’t afford the cost of an infrastructure and the personnel to operate it. With the use of connected cameras, from high-end models down to smartphones, it can be operated from anywhere and cover a wide variety of sports production, as a primary production tool or as secondary coverage. “We’ve also launched a portfolio of native IP connected solutions that form an open standards-based ecosystem,” Paquet goes on. “These can be implemented in remote and distributed production scenarios and can be customised to meet the individual needs of customers, whether they require full processing or simply operational adaptations. “Last but not least, we have been able to offer customised workflow services to multiple customers,” says Paquet, “allowing them to acquire, manage and distribute their sports contents, thanks to the flexibility and power of our continuously evolving Ci Media Cloud platform.” The future of 8K production is something Sony is also working on specifically with customers to demonstrate its potential, according to Paquet. A recent example was partnering with BT Sport in February this year to deliver the UK’s first public live 8K sports broadcast — the UEFA Europa League match between Arsenal and Olympiakos. “While mainstream 8K broadcast production and content consumption might still be a while off,” Paquet concludes, “this landmark event was able to give people a glimpse of what live 8K sports broadcasting — powered by Sony — will look like in the near future.”

SOS Global MICHAEL TENENBAUM MANAGING DIRECTOR

There are many aspects of the current pandemic that are frustrating — and not least of these is uncertainty.

“The ‘new normal’ is still a very relative term,” believes Michael Tenenbaum, managing director at freight forwarding company SOS Global. “We do not know when we will see the light at the end of the COVID-19 tunnel. The event landscape can only be adjusted once we know if the virus is something we will need to coexist with — or if, hopefully, it can be eradicated with the availability of a vaccine.” Under the circumstances, he believes he and his company need to remain flexible and quickly adjust to the upcoming challenges. SOS Global will, Tenenbaum says, monitor closely how the different nations and markets cope with the COVID-19 aftermath; how different companies manage to survive the crisis; and how the freight and transportation market emerges after some very difficult months. All this and much more are, he judges, variables that will establish the ‘new normal’. “Talking specifically about our area of expertise — freight forwarding — the air freight market is the one facing the biggest slump,” Tenenbaum continues. “Having the largest part of their fleets grounded, airlines now have limited capacity in terms of cargo space. Therefore, demand exceeds availability and rates have skyrocketed. Getting the travel industry back to where it should be is vital for bringing ‘normality’ into the air cargo sector as well. It all comes down to having open borders again, and people travelling.” He notes that broadcast equipment often relies on air freight, since equipment needs to be moved fast due to the tight timescales between events. The much slower sea freight service is, for the most part, not an alternative. “So,” Tenenbaum continues, “if the air freight industry doesn’t go back to normal, transportation costs will have a significant SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeurope

Sponsor Update

impact on broadcasting production budgets. “But,” he concludes, “we at SOS Global like to remain positive. We believe that this unique situation will create a new awareness in the global community and generate a stronger sense of togetherness — one that will provide the base to successfully tackle this challenge, and to tackle any new ones in the future.”

Square Box Systems DAVE CLACK CEO

Since the onset of COVID19, Square Box Systems has launched remote proxy editing using Premiere Pro from home. “CatDV’s panel downloads proxies from the core CatDV system for remote, proxy edits,” explains CEO Dave Clack. “CatDV’s panel collects new content — such as titles, FX and images — that is added to the local project and holds it on storage connected to the core CatDV system so that other creative staff can reuse it later. Then, CatDV can orchestrate remote renders using Adobe Media Encoder.

“We are extending these remote workflows to bring masters to local machines for those folks with faster connections that want the flexibility to render locally too,” he adds. CatDV now has a brand new Web3 interface which Clack says makes browse, search and collaboration even more intuitive, and adds more support for tablets and phones. Square Box has also extended how CatDV can be deployed to make it simpler to run larger, or cloud-based, or distributed systems, using Docker as well as Mac, Windows and Linux. Clack believes that the future will see even more use of historic content and the back catalogue. “Now’s a good time to run that digitisation project,” he laughs, “especially with AI getting better for speech and celebrity detection.”

virtual advertising technology at all LaLiga home games, along with an extension of the company’s La Liga coverage to include home matches of RCD Espanyol and the renewal of a long term licensing deal with giant sports production company MediaPro, it has been far from an unproductive few months for Supponor.

“It is clear that sports rights owners and producers are already acknowledging that Supponor physical fans in stadiums demand ever more DAVID PATTON engaging entertainment experiences and that VP BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT the traditional broadcast model is no longer the With the signing of a long- only game in town,” believes David Patton, VP term agre ement with FC business development at Supponor. “There is Barcelona to supply the club’s much to be said for the potential of IP video for

OUTSIDE BROADCAST Tel: 020 8947 3333 www.racetech.co.uk

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

155

svgeurope

both broadcast distribution as well as directto-consumer OTT models. Live sports on OTT creates powerful opportunities for leagues, clubs and also new and more established broadcasters to monetise individual fans via subscriptions or even free to view content, helping to massively grow their fan base and audiences that can subsequently be monetised through targeted promotion in game.” Patton goes on to note that, in terms of moving towards the coming year, Supponor is currently having some interesting discussions about how the overlay and placement graphics in which his company specialises in can reduce the impact of empty stadium or arena seating and on viewer experiences whilst offering opportunities to display socially important messaging and additional value to key commercial partners. “In the lab,” Patton continues, “intelligent processing of huge volumes of our unique virtual advertising event data is allowing us to complete previously unimaginable tasks and our next generation NSA3 solution immediately benefits from this work and sees ‘beyond colour’. NSA3 advances what traditional chroma products offer to deliver increased automation and performance in all conditions.”

Synamedia JAMES CLARK

DIRECTOR, GLOBAL SECURITY BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT

Many of the things we once took for granted have not been possible during the pandemic. One activity, however, that has apparently not been affected is content piracy. That’s according to James Clark, who is director, global security business development at Synamedia. “A drop in sports content has not meant a drop in piracy,” he says. “Pirates have been discounting their services to attract viewers — and they have been working with hackers to make their services more resilient to takedown, and to fight other pirates for a slice of the consumer pie. Pirates have also been offering consultancy services to would-be pirates on how to set up an illegal network, what tools to use, and even providing turnkey systems. “Luckily,” he explains, “our intelligence can track this activity and help guide our product development to continue to build tools to fight the pirates.” 156

Sponsor Update

Over the past year, Synamedia has developed wider and deeper intelligence on how pirates are operating, their infrastructure, the tools they use, their modus operandi and the services they target. The company has also made further improvements to its Streaming Piracy Disruption service, specifically in its piracy identification and disruption capabilities. Synamedia’s watermarking technology, says Clark, continues to get even more robust, with even faster detection times. The company has also been working on technologies that help to deliver broadcastequivalent latency for live sports streaming. “Synamedia has been investing R&D spend in new compression techniques and advanced encoding technologies to deliver stunning low latency live experiences while optimising bandwidth,” Clark adds. “We also see customers embracing a cloud-first model. Capabilities like our Video Network Cloud give service providers greater flexibility, choice and agility in their deployments, and can automate the launch, scale up and scale down of high availability sports channels.”

Tedial JEROME WAUTHOZ VP OF PRODUCTS

W ith re mote pro duc tion becoming a practical reality for many in the sports broadcast industry, there has never been a better time for companies like Tedial to take the opportunity to further enhance their offerings. “This has been a true opportunity to think out-of-the-box and accelerate the industry’s predictable transformation to the earlier adoption of automated production tools and hybrid cloud,” believes VP of products Jerome Wauthoz. “SMARTLIVE, our award-winning automated live sports production solution, has recently incorporated several features and functionalities that will give broadcasters the edge they need to come back to live programming stronger — ready for remote operations and able to target and win fans with better storytelling.” Earlier this year, Tedial enabled increased fan engagement for broadcasters who it says can now deliver improved and more vivid graphics resulting from the new integration between SMARTLIVE and Singular.live’s cloud-based technology for live graphic overlays. Graphics can be inserted into the SMARTLIVE auto-

generated EDL, reviewed in the player and then burned in when the EDL is flattened. “This major development gives broadcasters the capability to enhance storytelling by layering graphics on top of highlights,” says Wauthoz. “In addition, SMARTLIVE can now create transitions between EDL segments, such as fade in/fade out, adding a dynamic element to highlights.” SMARTLIVE is also now connected to a video AI engine to detect replays into the video live stream or file to provide even more advanced storytelling and making highlights more dynamic. “Remote operations — talked about for years, but not globally implemented — have been catapulted to the forefront of technology as a result of social distancing with both talent and tech working from home,” concludes Wauthoz. “The difficult times of today will result in smaller budgets tomorrow and make the automation of SMARTLIVE a no-brainer.”

Telegenic EAMONN CURTIN DEPUTY CEO

Having already successfully delivered many remote productions last year from Toronto for In Touch Productions, Telegenic had already started its remote roadmap by organising 10 Gig connectivity — which is key to remote production — into the EMG UK ROC in High Wycombe, UK with BT Media & Broadcast. “This has given us the ability to offer our clients a secure, safe environment for their productions to work from,” explains Telegenic deputy CEO Eamonn Curtin. “It has two large gallery and VT areas with a third coming on stream at the end of July. These enable social distancing for a whole production team — which isn’t available in a truck on site. They have been successfully used for the return to EPL football for BT Sport. It can service three concurrent games in a day, enabling us to facilitate back-to back games if needed. “It’s now time to help re-shape sports production workflows in an entirely new way,” Curtin continues, “so productions are more sustainable whilst not compromising on the quality of the output.” Telegenic has, says Curtin, continued its UHD/ HDR journey, having successfully delivered more than 30 live productions to date. SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

Sponsor Update

svgeurope

Keep your vital PTP Network Service under control One tiny inconsistency in the PTP configuration of your all-IP operation can have far-reaching consequences. But how can you ensure this does not happen, when relevant data is spread across many different products from different vendors throughout your operation? Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s where DataMiner comes in, with a powerful out-of-the-box PTP app, capable of collecting data from any PTP device, including third-party network analyzers, and providing a true 360-degree real-time view on your entire PTP ecosystem.

skyline.be/PTP

ANYitGRANDMASTER Discover yourself. Request our free webinar on skyline.be/webinars ANY BOUNDARY CLOCK ANY PTP SLAVE

Skyline-SVG_Europe_Journal-PTPAdd.indd 1 SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

open monitoring & orchestration software for any media & broadband platform

22/06/2020 11:08

157

svgeurope

Telestream SCOTT MURRAY

SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, CORPORATE MARKETING

When is a technology trend not a technology trend but a business trend? When you’re talking about remote production, according to Scott Murray at Telestream. “Implementing technology should be thought of only in terms of ‘making money’ or ‘saving money’,” he believes. “Technology for remote production saves money by allowing broadcasters to minimise staff sent to the remote location and it also makes money by allowing broadcasters to create more content with the same amount of staff — generating more content to be monetised.” The cloud has unquestionably made remote production much simpler — and Telestream’s Vantage workflow, which was previously only available on-premise, is now available as Vantage Cloud Port Hosted Workflows. Telestream has also found some benefit in the current pandemic. “Like the rest of the world, most of our company is working from home,” Murray says. “We have had to find ways to keep developing software, supporting our customers and shipping products. Given that we have to create products that our customers use, we are using the same techniques in development that our customers will be deploying in the remote productions. Our experience in our own company has directly translated into solutions our customers can use.”

Tellyo RICHARD COLLINS CEO

Many sports broadcast players have suffered in the past few months — but Tellyo is, it seems, not one of them. “One effect of being a cloud-based remote live production and editing video platform is that our business hasn’t slowed down as a result of the pandemic,” smiles CEO Richard Collins. “Indeed, it has more than doubled since the crisis started. “I think once we all understand and accept that the old normal is never coming back, that the old ways of working need to be adapted and modified, we are all going to be in a better place,” he goes on. “Technology is going to be 158

Sponsor Update

the source of many solutions to the challenges that COVID has presented. We all need to adopt this mindset, partnering together, sometimes with multiple companies to create these new workflows and processes.” The past year has seen Tellyo “massively increasing” the power of its platform to support content creation, and live production highlights with short-form clips at up to 1080p/20mbps/60fps. The company has built an integration with Adobe to support crossplatform workflow; integrated with Zoom and other conferencing technologies; continued the improvement and integration of Stream Studio; partnered with The Switch; and created the Mimic platform. Collins is intrigued by how consumer behaviours may have been changed by the pandemic. “People’s expectations and demands are likely to be different going forward,” he believes, “including the role of social and digital types of content. The types of production that have proven possible on far smaller budgets should make many pause and consider how the future consumer is best served.” He is no less interested by whether the following that esports has attracted in recent months will stay loyal. “I think that loyalty might be higher than you’d think,” he says, “driven by marketing dollars seeking out that younger demographic — and broadcasters having seen a way to serve it and make it profitable.”

Telos Alliance LARRY SCHINDEL

SENIOR PRODUCT MANAGER, LINEAR ACOUSTIC

When you’re being asked to do more with less — which has become a common refrain over the past few months — automation provides a potential way forward. That’s the view of Larry Schindel, who is senior product manager for Telos Alliance’s Linear Acoustic. “Automating as many file-based audio processes as possible makes good business sense,” he believes. “Broadcasters will need to support Dolby Atmos and MPEG -H content — as well as their existing deliverables requirements — but tools that can do it all are scarce. AudioTools Server meets broadcasters’ existing needs to automate workflows for file-based loudness management, upmixing,

encoding/decoding, QC, and more, as well as easily adding Next Generation Audio support to those workflows.” Schindel goes on to note that, on the hardware side, his company’s newer Linear Acoustic units are fully ready for remote production work. They make use of HTML5 web-based remote control, and support AES67/SMPTE ST-2110-30, -31 workflows. “Our hardware typically sits in an OB truck or in the broadcaster’s air chain, so there really isn’t much of a change required for our units to work in this ‘new normal’ of having production personnel working remotely instead of from a common facility or control room,” he explains.

Telstra Broadcast Services ANDREAS ERIKSSON

HEAD OF BROADCAST SERVICES

Telstra has been on the forefront of media network advancements for years, according to Andreas Eriksson, head of Telstra Broadcast Services.

“In 2017, we developed a permanent remote production network across Australia, which provided us the confidence and capability to deliver international remote production deployment the same year,” he says. “The future of production is remote. As companies look to adopt this model, they are engaging companies like Telstra who own an advanced global infrastructure capable of delivering large bandwidth.” There are multiple content delivery methods that have unique benefits, he believes. “Telstra’s hybrid media networks take the best of fibre, satellite, data and IP to create solutions that meet business and technology needs,” he explains. “All play important roles in broadcasting, but should not limit a company’s delivery aspirations.” Telstra has increased its media delivery reach by providing a secure gateway from on-network media rights holders to off-network media SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeurope

Sponsor Update

buyers. Known as the Telstra GMN Express, high-quality linear video is transported using cloud infrastructure in a secure manner via content networks with varied levels of content management and quality assurance. “Depending on service level agreements, not every broadcaster requires the premium managed service Telstra provides across all offerings,” Eriksson notes. “Telstra GMN Express provides a scalable managed service model to meet SLA requirements.” As cost reduction business models and delivery mechanisms continue to be paramount, Eriksson thinks, companies are diversifying their options to meet financial and environmental goals. “As remote production adoption increases, the cost to produce an event is reduced,” he goes on. “Companies can now centralise their equipment and top talent to deliver multiple events in one day. Beyond this, companies are doing their part to promote environmental sustainability. The reduction in people and equipment movement reduces the carbon footprint associated with production.”

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

The Collectv

continues. “We’re squeezing our equipment into smaller and smaller boxes. This makes it MANAGING DIRECTOR more flexible, cheaper and easier for production The ability to adapt to change to carry and move themselves. It keeps has long been a key human headcount down, puts fewer people at risk — characteristic and fundamental and, frankly, makes some jobs viable.” to our success — and it’s one that Chris Sarson, The Switch managing director of The Collectv, found himself ROBERT SZABO-ROWE using to the maximum. SVP, PRODUCT MANAGEMENT “When COVID restrictions hit, we had to move quickly to a more flexible model,” he In the ‘new normal’ of live says. “Using EVS equipment remotely was sports broadcasting, leagues, something we were able to get up and running broadcasters and other rights quite quickly; moving broadcast files across holders will aim to have as few people onsite as the internet took a bit longer. We have ended possible, reducing the number of crew, support up utilising many different protocols in many staff — and even the talent, in some cases. different situations, as bandwidth varies along with clients’ own internet security. We still have learnings and efficiencies to make. Things are only going to get better in this area.” The Collectv now has a small but diverse selection of remote tools which have got the company working in any remote situation it has faced so far. “Then, there’s our remote kits,” Sarson

HRIS SARSON

159

svgeurope

“Our remote production services (REMI) make more sense now than ever in this environment,” says Robert Szabo-Rowe, SVP, product management at The Switch. “REMI provides a practical, deliverable and proven option for producing live events that lightens the load when it comes to travel, equipment and onsite staffing — without compromising the quality of the broadcast.” Szabo-Rowe notes that his company is also working with rights holders to find ways to enhance the viewing experience for fans at home. “Although it’s a very small consolation, without fans present, we are able to have more access to cameras so that optimal angles could be permitted without the age-old problem of ‘we can’t block the fans view of the game’,” he smiles. “We are looking into increasing the creative use of audio and video to make the fans at home feel like they are ‘on the pitch with the players’, making it a more intimate presentation.” The Switch has launched a new cloud-based Production-as-a-Service offering, MIMiC, which is designed to make it significantly easier for more broadcasters and other producers of live sports to access remote production capabilities — especially for shoulder programming and coverage of smaller and niche events. “This on-demand service gives rights owners more options than ever,” claims Szabo-Rowe. “It meets the growing need to fill a larger number of hours of live sports content across multiple platforms — including streaming and social media, which are increasingly driving viewer engagement. Content producers can now leverage The Switch’s unique combination of agile cloud production capability and global network reach to cost-effectively meet increasing demand for efficient and flexible broadcast quality production for live events of all sizes.” MIMiC, according to Szabo-Rowe, delivers the convenience of a complete end-to-end service and is available as a flexible on-demand ser vice that includes remote IP video contribution, production and clipping tools, and distribution. All aspects of the production workflow, from editing and graphics creation, to comms and talk-back, are handled in the cloud. “Support for sports data feeds, contribution connectivity, contribution encoding equipment, programme distribution and production staffing are all key features that live sports producers can now tap into,” he explains. “This latest addition 160

Sponsor Update

to our service portfolio opens up broadcast quality live production across a broader range of live sports events, removing the cost and complexity that can burden traditional production models.”

fast-paced, high-stress environments of sporting events.” On the control side, TSL says it is focusing on the development of its TallyMan and Flex Control systems. “With many TSL customers working from TSL Products home, rather than in-studio, we recently added MARK DAVIES a feature called Web Keys to the Flex Control DIRECTOR OF PRODUCTS Network to our Universal Switch Panels (USP3 AND TECHNOLOGY range). This allows users to control devices With the need to do more located onsite within their hub and spoke with less, major broadcasters installations across the United States from are seeking solutions that are quick and easy home.” to implement; simplify and expedite remote TVN Mobile Production command and control over production MARKUS OSTHAUS capabilities; and create seamless workflows that CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER minimise training time, reduce human error and offer significant cost savings. S in c e l a s t ye a r ’s I B C — remember IBC? — TVN Mobile Production’s new TVN-OB6 vehicle concept has made its debut at the Northern Ireland vs. Germany UEFA Euro 2020 qualifier in Belfast. It is, the company says, the perfect OB truck for premium productions with equipment supporting UHD/HDR and Dolby That’s how Mark Davies, who is director of Atmos — the latter being in increasing demand, products and technology at TSL Products, sees the company notes. things — and his company has spent the last few months ensuring it is able to respond to those requirements. “We’ve altered our R&D roadmap for the short term, in response to specific customer requirements and to meet the current needs of the industry,” he explains. “During these unprecedented times, TSL will continue to work in an agile way alongside its customers to “For premium productions, I think that for at evaluate its offerings and will work on presenting least the next 7-10 years, you will still need big OB updates to better fit the current needs of its vans because the customer wants to be on-site,” customers, while also keeping up with the believes Markus Osthaus, chief executive officer. demands of ever-changing sports broadcast “I still believe that when we are doing sports, it is requirements.” about emotion — and it’s always great to have Specifically, TSL has updated its audio the director on-site so he or she can feel what it’s monitoring offerings, including its SAM-Q all about.” platform, PAM-IP and MPA1 lines. The most Having adapted its OB vans in line with recent updates to the SAM-Q platform include recommended practice, TVN collaborated the new audio phase metering mode and closely with the DFL when football in Germany loudness monitoring modes. returned. “In direct response to customer feedback “We believe this was a role model for sports in sports OB truck applications, we have a leagues and broadcasters worldwide,” Osthaus new addition to the MPA1-MIX range, the says. MPA1-MIX-V, which features a redesigned In addition to the new truck, TVN has also user interface,” says Davies. “We redesigned developed special remote control solutions and the front panel to offer sports broadcasters developments for large cameras in order to a solution they could operate from muscle remain capable of working in the defined access memory, which is especially beneficial in the zones of venues. SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeurope

Sponsor Update

Ku-band trucks. Ku-band flyaways C-band flyaways (3.7m) Fibre connectivity Live-U LU600 bonded cellular AVIWest bonded cellular 10-bit 422 HD stat mux system (ASI and IP out). 10-bit 422 HD encoders ENG cameras. Leading SNG & connectivity provider for over 20 years & with thousands of hours of perfect transmissions per year.

www.solosat.net

CatDV: the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s leading Sports Media Management Platform. Capture and enrich media, inject stats, search and collaborate for creative efficiency, team heritage and fan engagement. More than 80 sports teams win with CatDV, across NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB, Premiere League, EFL, Motor Racing, College Sports, E-Sports, Tennis, Golf and more. www.squarebox.com SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

sales@squarebox.com 161

svgeurope

TVU Networks YONI TAYAR

MARKETING DIRECTOR

Televisió de Catalunya’s (TV3) ‘Minut a Minut’ sports television programme turned to TVU’s mobile transmitter app TVU Anywhere to simultaneously host more than 25 football fans globally in a virtual talk show during a two hour live broadcast on its Esport3 channel. The programme’s panellists were able to engage in live video exchanges with fans in full HD picture quality and with minimal delay. “The TVU Anywhere transmissions ran flawlessly throughout the broadcast, which was especially important when switching between the numerous live fans,” says Yoni Tayar, marketing director at TVU Networks. “TV3 had full control to activate, deactivate and set the time period of validity for the multiple accounts, which was very reassuring. The ease of the technical setup, as well as the functionality of the TVU Anywhere app for participants, allowed people from a variety of different backgrounds to connect with each other via their passion for football.” This connection was made possible with TVU Anywhere’s token-based user management; fans were simply provided with a QR code to pair their mobile device to a remote TVU server. TVU Anywhere is a smartphone app that aggregates cellular data, with H.265 encoding and patented IS+ transmission algorithm. It allows anyone to transmit high-quality live video footage to broadcasters and TV studios, securing high and reliable bandwidth by aggregating both cellular and home internet connection. “We were honoured to have TV3 place their trust in using the TVU Anywhere app to bring the fan experience to a whole new level with this global football event,” continues Tayar. “During this critical time, it is rewarding to see TVU’s innovations playing an important role in helping our global media partners continue to create and deliver programmes to their audiences.”

Tyrell DAN MUCHMORE

SALES AND MARKETING DIRECTOR

A s a reseller and s ystem integrator, Tyrell says its approach has always been to find manufacturers who are innovating and challenging the status quo rather than boringly walking the well-trodden path of brands and products. 162

Sponsor Update

“We see our value in being able to find these solutions and challenge our customers in their thinking,” says sales and marketing director Dan Muchmore. “So for us, our ‘normal’ hasn’t changed because of COVID; if anything, we are going to be louder in our messaging.” Muchmore says that user engagement and graphic presentation have been the most exciting development for his company. “The first solution that comes to mind when I refer to not walking down the same well-trodden paths is from Twizted Design,” he notes. “Twizted have brought to market a way of creating the graphic layer as an HTML layer on a device, meaning that depending on region, demographic, interest, device type and so on, a different graphic experience can be presented. Twizted is really aiming squarely at the next generation of viewer who might be on an Android or IoS device as well as watching via traditional TV.” Tyrell is the European representative for Twizted Design, and Muchmore says he is having “some very exciting conversations with broadcasters and sports rights owners that want to think differently about how they present sport in a post-Covid economy and viewership.” For Muchmore, the challenge is about engaging the viewers of the future. “Is today’s sports broadcasting doing enough to capture the consumption habits of the teenager today?” he asks. “How are we developing our workflows to engage with those users? We have solutions today that will allow that next generation viewer to engage with the statistics, manipulate their content experience and even go as far as feeding back live to the broadcast based on an event in the game.”

UI Centric MOE HAMDHAIDARI MANAGING DIRECTOR

Founded in 2008, UI Centric is a creative engineering company that focuses on designing and developing user-centric digital products and whose clients include the BBC, CBS, NBC, UEFA and FIFA. The company recently completed work with UEFA on the launch of UEFA.tv, giving the organisation the ability to build a direct relationship with fans. “We obsess ourselves with the user and consumer trends, and we make sure we develop strategies that are aligned to this,” says managing director Moe Hamdhaidari.

Hamdhaidari notes that, as a company with offices around the world, UI Centric has long been used to working remotely. “We utilise video conferencing and Slack to make sure our project teams remain in sync,” he explains. “And, similarly, by over communicating, we ensure things don’t get lost. It was important to set this as an expectation at the start so that we could continue delivering the fantastic work we do for our clients. In terms of communication with our clients, again, using video conferencing has been crucial. “It’s not just been all work either,” he laughs. “We’ve also enjoyed ‘remote’ social events with our clients too.”

uniqFEED KATY WALSH

COMMUNICATIONS AND MARKETING MANAGER

Developing bespoke products that respond to the unique needs of a particular market sector is an almost guaranteed route to success — which is why uniqFEED has developed an enhanced version of its proprietary virtual advertising software specifically for baseball. “It supports both high home view and centre field cameras, augmentation of both dynamic and static boards, recognition and adaptation to changing weather and lighting conditions and highly robust tracking and segmentation capabilities,” explains communications and marketing manager Katy Walsh. Given that the company’s solution is about advertising, it’s little surprise that coronavirus has impacted it. The reduction in live sporting events has, however, presented uniqFEED with an opportunity. “It’s enabled us to focus on product development, to test additional capabilities of our technology, such as experimenting with the insertion of alternative augmented content on empty stadium space, such as virtual crowds,” Walsh discloses. She goes on to note that the return of live sporting events behind closed doors saw rights holders and sponsors looking for ways to increase revenue and make up for missed opportunities. “Virtual advertising allows for increased revenue streams and unlocks new opportunities for rights holders and sponsors,” Walsh concludes, “so we foresee an upsurge in the interest in virtual advertising software in the near future.” SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

Telegenic_Sports Tech Journal_AutumnOL_2019 copy.pdf

Sponsor Update

19/07/2019

11:02

svgeurope

CMY

GREAT PEOPLE, SYSTEMS AND SERVICES FOR THE BROADCAST INDUSTRY

+44 (0)20 3375 8532 www.thecollectv.com OUTSIDE BROADCASTS // MANAGED SERVICES // FIXED-RIG // CONSULTANCY SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

163

svgeurope

Verizon Media ARIFF SIDI

GENERAL MANAGER AND CHIEF PRODUCT OFFICER, MEDIA PLATFORM

Sponsor Update

Videosys Broadcast COLIN TOMLIN

MANAGING DIRECTOR

There is probably no supplier to That there is huge pent up the sports broadcast industry demand for watching live sport that has not been impacted is unquestionable — and that’s borne out by the by the acceleration of the remote production fact that the Manchester City vs. Arsenal game phenomenon. Take radio camera company match on the day the Premier League returned Videosys Broadcast, for example. attracted a record audience of over 2.6 million. “Radio cameras are our core business,” notes managing director Colin Tomlin, “but two areas we have been developing are fibre and remote production. Remote production has obviously come to the fore, and our recent addition of UDP web control and cascading allows us to control cameras from one side of the planet to \ the other.” The fibre product is, he explains, a stagebox product allowing video, audio and data to “Sports broadcasters can expect these record- a remote area — a commentary position or breaking audience figures to continue for the remote studio, for example — self-powered over foreseeable future,” believes Ariff Sidi at Verizon a single SMPTE camera fibre cable. Media, “particularly when matches are being Videosys Broadcast has been working on played behind closed doors.” three main products in the past year — the To better serve viewers, Sidi thinks that sports Epsilon radio camera CCU system, the Infinity broadcasters need to have the right amount of Stagebox, and UDP support for remote bandwidth and capacity to meet the surge in production with the company’s camera control traffic. products. “One of the best ways to manage huge “The Epsilon is now a production unit with amounts of online traffic is by rerouting traffic sales to China and Croatia, and demos in Spain, to a different content delivery network to Italy, Serbia and the UK,” says Tomlin. “The minimise delays and buffering if one becomes Stagebox has been under review for a little overloaded,” he explains. “When we streamed while, but is now finished. It greatly reduces Super Bowl LIV in UHD HDR — the first time rigging costs, with one SMPTE cable replacing that was ever done — all that UHD traffic up to eight video and 16 audio circuits, Gigabit eventually made its way to our CDN to ensure a Ethernet and four RS232/422 data paths.” seamless experience for consumers.” VIDI Sidi’s company recently enhanced its Verizon ROBERT OSZVALD Media Platform’s ingest, encoding and CDN DIRECTOR, EVENT SERVICE capabilities to support over 10 million concurrent viewers, with full ad personalisation. Founded in 1983 and “This gives publishers the capability to reach headquartered in Darmstadt, broadcast-sized audiences with faster than Germany, with over 30 years of television latency and prepare them for the experience in consulting, planning, installation influx of viewers we are likely to see with the and operation of temporary and permanent return of live sports,” he says. projects for broadcasting and media, VIDI is Additionally, to enable broadcasters, content privately owned with a turnover in excess of €20 publishers and service providers to maximise million. audience reach, Verizon Media has released The company has three divisions. VIDI Events what it describes as next-generation content provides broadcast services for live events, while control features on the Media Platform. This VIDI NVS operates in sales and expansion of a includes its new Channel Scheduler which allows network management software solution for content publishers to create virtual live linear operation/control/monitoring of broadcast experiences using assets from a VOD library, a and media networks. The third division, VIDI live feed, or a live event. Systems, plans and executes complete turn164

key projects for broadcast and media system solutions. This includes worldwide marketing and the sale/rental of television studio systems and equipment (stationary and mobile), consulting for television studio systems and their equipment, planning, construction and handover.

Vislink ROBERT KING

EMEA SALES DIRECTOR

How to overcome the different atmosphere at sporting events at which no spectators are present? From Vislink’s point of view, one answer is the deployment of wireless cameras.

“The freedom of movement provided by wireless camera systems delivers immersive camera shots that create an enhanced sense of involvement in the televised event,” believes Robert King, who is the company’s EMEA sales director. “The ability for wireless camera technology to deliver mobile point-of-view images allows viewers to better engage with the unfolding action and experience the excitement like never before.” He likewise believes that the advent of HDR — which Vislink’s cameras now routinely support — with its enhanced level of visual reality also creates a more compelling experience. Responding to its customers’ needs for flexibility and getting more from less, Vislink has released new capabilities across its key product ranges. The latest release for the company’s HCAM wireless camera transmitter, for example, now provides better performance in HD resolution modes. “Us e r s c an tr ade th e HE VC vide o compression improvements for a realisable increase in transmission range — meaning better go-anywhere flexibility or simplified rigging leading to faster and cheaper installs,” SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeurope

Sponsor Update

Bring Next Generation Audio to Life

The visual benefits of Next Generation TV are easy to see, but the promise of a better experience for your audience can only be fully realized by engaging their eyes AND their ears. Linear Acoustic LA-5291 is designed especially for the production of Live Dolby Atmos® content using the Dolby Digital Plus JOC codec, and facilitates the transport and distribution of Atmos content to viewers via cable, satellite, OTT, and streaming platforms.

Only Telos Alliance has the tools you need to bring immersive and Next Generation Audio to life.

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

Linear Acoustic LA-5291 Professional Audio Encoder

TelosAlliance.com/NextGen-TV

165

svgeurope

King explains. “The result is a product that can be used for the coverage of all events — whether they be premium 4k, or everyday HD productions.” Vislink now also has additional video quality modes in its HCAM product that are designed to enable production teams to be more responsive to the artistic needs of the director to tell the story of the event. “By balancing video quality and end-to-end latency, our latest updates allow more creative use of wireless camera systems in all applications including high frame rate systems for slowmotion action replays,” says King. “The result is that a wireless camera can now be more widely deployed at an event and justify its deployment even more keenly.”

Vizrt THOMAS NELSON HEAD OF SPORTS EMEA

It seems possible that the sports broadcast industry may look back on 2020 as a year in which circumstances meant that it innovated like it never had before. A case in point is Vizrt. “We are most proud of our work with Spain’s La Liga who utilised Vizrt software technology to create virtual fans using highly specialised software for football games that resumed in June of 2020,” says Thomas Nelson, head of sports EMEA for Vizrt. “Viewers — by a wide margin — appeared to prefer the virtual fan experience. It required some very special technology that, among other things, allows the flight of the football to be keyed properly when it rises above the pitch line backed by the virtual fan graphics behind. It must do this regardless of stadium, camera angle, time of day, position of the sun, shadows and so on. This is very difficult to do.” Nelson goes on to describe what he describes as another breakthrough technology that Vizrt developed with TNT in the United States to realise the virtual shot clock in NBA games, allowing viewers to keep an eye on game play and still see the shot clock as it plays out. The continuing advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) in live sports environments is something that has caught Nelson’s eye, and how that applies to the use of virtual (VR) and augmented reality (AR) in realtime. “A great example is what we have developed with our new AI keyer for live sports and how it automatically adapts the keying of our graphics 166

Sponsor Update

to changing weather and lighting conditions, ensuring that the virtual graphics keep the illusion of reality,” he explains. “It has been a great achievement from our development team and is giving us new ideas in the future application of this technology.”

V-Nova

becoming the new normal,” he concludes. “Season tickets are being swapped for UHD sets and subscriptions, and consumers are expecting better video quality in their lounge.”

Wildmoka MATT LOREILLE

CHIEF MARKETING OFFICER

MATT HUGHES SVP, GLOBAL SALES

One of the most significant product developments in which V-Nova says it has been involved has been the development of MPEG-5 Part 2 Low Complexity Enhancement Video Coding (LCEVC) and the company’s own software implementation for the MPEG-5 LCEVC standard. “LCEVC has been developed to bring additional compression efficiency and lower computational requirements to video workflows, including those for linear and streaming sports services,” explains Matt Hughes, the company’s SVP for global sales. “LCEVC is an enhancement to any streaming codec that can be deployed by means of software updates to existing encoders and players, thus helping services to deliver better quality to more viewers with the same workflows and infrastructure.” V-Nova has also been developing a SMPTE VC-6 SDK for file-based acquisition and editing. SMPTE VC-6 can, says Hughes, dramatically improve compression efficiency to deliver high quality HD and UHD content over restricted networks — enabling more content at higher quality between sites. This, he believes, is critical as teams are increasingly working remotely and will continue to do so as the sporting calendar ultimately starts to resume. “Viewers are demanding that sports broadcasters deliver video at a massive scale and with high quality,” Hughes continues. “But delivering a full HD and UHD broadcastlike live experience at scale is still an industry wide challenge and there is no room for using technologies that are anything other than bestin-class. That’s why we continue to optimise our core VC-6 and LCEVC technologies which can play a key role in this from remote production and contribution through to more efficient streaming delivery to millions. “Innovation in remote production is critical right now as we strive to ensure high production values with behind-closed-doors events

It seems likely that at least some of the sports programming we’ve recently become used to will persist. “Sports broadcasters have come up with a range of new content to stay on air — remote interviews and shows, archive content refurbishing, sport coaches’ live sessions and so on,” notes Matt Loreille, chief marketing officer at Wildmoka. “In the ‘new normal’, some of this shoulder content will remain because, even if the footage quality was sometimes inferior to the usual broadcast quality, the emotion and level of proximity created with this new type of content found its audience. These programmes often required significant lower levels of investment. This means sports broadcasters will embrace some lower cost solutions/supply chain to capture and mix such new type of programmes.” Since September last year, Wildmoka has extended the level of flexibility offered to sports editors using its StoryBot — an AI/ML-based engine that automatically creates short-form video content such as game summaries, best of player, season’s recap and so on. “We are now providing editors with full access to our story designer,” explains Loreille, “allowing them to design/architect the exact story that the bot will be using when creating the videos for them. “Most of the tools available on the market that generate automatic highlights have limited editorial flexibility,” he adds. “They are pretty much used to ‘industrialise the short form video content production’. Everybody gets pretty much the same type of content because the ‘algorithm’ decides what should be in there. This is not the direction Wildmoka took, because we’ve noticed that there is no one-style-fits-all when it comes to content and editorial styles.” For Loreille, AI/ML-based solutions such as the Wildmoka StoryBot are at the forefront of shaping sports production workflows because they allow sports editors to produce more content while focusing on the storytelling rather than the technicalities. SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeurope

Sponsor Update

Creative Engineering Redefined uicentric.com

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

167

svgeurope

WSC Sports DANIEL SHICHMAN CEO AND CO-FOUNDER

Within days of realising that almost sporting events would be on hold, WSC Sports had spoken to almost all of its 100+ partners to find out how the company could help them. “It also gave us deeper insights into the everyday workings of leagues and broadcasters,” says Daniel Shichman, the company’s CEO and co-founder. “In this time, we developed new technologies and product offerings that we rolled out to help keep the sports content flowing during a time when publishers were crying out for ways to fill the content void created by the lack of live sports action. “Using the AMP Stories framework, we developed a tool to let clients create and publish live stories from our platform,” Schichman explains. “Users can publish stories to a variety of destinations — websites, apps, Google search (OneBox) and so on — which saves them time as they don’t need to use an external tool. And it provides monetisation opportunities.” Meanwhile Clipro, one of WSC’s core platform offerings, received a complete revamp to comply with advanced editing requirements so that users can have all their content creation needs met, within one dashboard. New features and capabilities include many more customisation options and new video templates for social posts. WSC has also developed its technology to support three new sports, including mixed martial arts and car racing — meaning its product now works with 17 different sports. Noting the experiments being conducted with artificial fan noise and imagery, Shichman is convinced that the industr y has an unprecedented opportunity. “This period is really paving the way for technologies to be developed and trialled on the biggest stage when they normally wouldn’t stand a chance of getting permission,” he says. “This period of time could be the turning point for technologies such as AR and VR: if they prove successful, then they may become mainstream.”

XD motion BENOIT DENTAN CEO

The advent of drones — so much more affordable than planes or helicopters — has transformed all genres of broadcasting. XD motion specialises 168

Sponsor Update

in aerial filming and multi-dimensional tracking solutions based on innovative gyro-stabilised systems, and has deployed a tethered drone (using a 100-metre fibre cable) for its Formula 1 coverage. With an on-ground generator for full autonomy, 4K camera with control painting and lens control, its capabilities are almost limitless. “We provide aerial shots from helicopters, planes, multi-dimensional cablecams and travelling tracks, robotic arm vehicles and drones,” explains XD motion CEO Benoit Dentan. “We use the latest gyro-stabilised head technology — from three to six axis — auto horizon axis and open architecture solutions to accommodate all sizes, models of cameras and lens systems

“In response to the changes we have seen, we have also developed a remote production capability — allowing remote control for all our products, including the ARCAM IO.BOT 6-axis robotic arm, and our X fly range of cablecams,” he adds. Another success for Dentan’s company has been an installation at the Bercy Accor Hotel Arena in Paris which has seen XD motion deliver a permanent X fly 3D installatio, UHD camera with HDR and HFR 6X ultra motion (coupled with augmented reality) including statistics, effects and sound synchronisation. The Enduropale du Touquet is a motorcycle race which takes place every year on the beaches of Pas-de-Calais, and is the longest sand race in the world. XD motion deployed the GSS Cinema Pro+ helicopter for its coverage. “The Cinema Pro+ is optimised for larger cinema payloads and integrates more camera and lens payload configurations than any gimbal in its class,” explains Dentan. “With six axes

of movement, it can handle full-sized cinema cameras with impressive lenses. Using it for the Enduropale allowed viewers to every part of the race as if they were actually there.”

Zixi JOHN WASTCOAT

SVP, ALLIANCES AND MARKETING

Many believe that the broadcast market has been slow to embrace IP — but the last few months have seen adoption accelerate. “Zixi has developed a tested and trusted software-defined video platform to help clients deliver broadcast-quality live streams over IP networks for the past 12 years,” notes John Wastcoat, SVP, alliances and marketing at Zixi. “Prior to the pandemic, we were already seeing lots of customers adopting IP and hybrid IP workflows. Since the onset of the pandemic, we’ve seen more clients forced to quickly virtualise their workflows, and they were eager to leverage our platform to enable remote monitoring and operations for broadcast continuity.” For Zixi, virtualisation and the software that enables it are discernible industry trends. “Virtualisation of workflow infrastructures is becoming more and more essential as the need for broadcast-quality live video production conducted from disparate and remote locations increases,” says Wastcoat. “We’ve seen a trend towards relying on software solutions that allow for efficient, cloud-based deployment. This type of capability is only possible with the freedom that untethered software-based solutions provide.” According to Wastcoat, over the past year, Zixi has committed to being the most interoperable software-defined video platform in the industry, and can now accept 17 industry protocols and containers including the Zixi protocol, RIST, SRT, WebRTC, Multipath TCP and NDI. Zixi can accept NDI as an input, transcode it for transport and conduct NDI output. “That’s a big benefit to sports content creators who want to use NDI production workflows on premise from remote locations, send streams over the public internet and know that broadcast-quality content will be delivered with low latency,” believes Wastcoat. “We can also take these NDI workflows and push that content into our network of cloud-based production software vendors. We also now offer native support for WebVTT captioning.” SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeurope

Sponsor Update

Visit us at uniqfeed.com

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

169

svgeurope

SVG EUROPE SPONSOR

Sponsor Update

PAGE

LEVEL

808 Talent 133 OB/SI/Other ACS (Aerial Camera Systems) 133 OB/SI/Other AE Live 33 Gold AJA Video Systems 34 Gold Aldea Solutions 135 OB/SI/Other Amazon Web Services Gold AMP Visual TV 135 OB/SI/Other Applicaster 35 Gold Arena Television 137 OB/SI/Other Arkona Technologies 39 Gold Ateme 39 Gold BATCAM 137 OB/SI/Other Blackbird 41 Gold Blackmagic Design 41 Gold Brightcove 43 Gold Broadcast Rental 139 OB/SI/Other Broadcast RF 139 OB/SI/Other Broadcast Solutions 43 Gold BT Media & Broadcast 45 Gold Calrec 45 Gold Camera Corps 141 OB/SI/Other Canon 176 Gold CenturyLink 47 Gold Cerberus Tech 49 Gold ChyronHego 49 Gold Cingularity Clear-Com 51 Gold Cloudbass OB/SI/Other Cobalt 53 Gold Creative Technology 141 OB/SI/Other CTV 143 OB/SI/Other CyanView 145 OB/SI/Other Deltacast 53 Gold Deltatre 59 Gold Densitron 147 OB/SI/Other Dolby 1 Platinum DreamCHIP 149 OB/SI/Other EditShare 59 Gold ES Broadcast 61 Gold Euro Media Group 5 Platinum Eurovision Services 61 Gold Evertz 63 Gold EVS 63 Gold Fanview 149 OB/SI/Other Fletcher 151 OB/SI/Other Focusrite Pro 65 Gold For-A 65 Gold Genelec 67 Gold Globecast 67 Gold Grabyo 69 Gold Grass Valley 7 Platinum Gravity Media 9 Platinum Harmonic 71 Gold Hitomi 151 OB/SI/Other Imagen 13 Platinum Imagine Communications 71 Gold Interxion 73 Lawo 75 Gold Leader 75 Limelight Networks 15 Platinum LiveU 77 Gold LTN Global 77 Gold M2A Media Gold 170

CONTACT

PHONE

Ben Swanton +44 7917 772731 Antonia Wood +44 1483 426767 Stuart Coles + 44 1442 234531 Gina Georgallis +44 7984 143056 Larry Tonon +14384903249 Simon Frost +44 (0)118 9165200 Elise Riffuad +33 771372591 Aaron Gelbman + 972 508577889 Rob Hopkinson +44 1737 822011 Rainer Sturm +49 1728640605 Dorota Bouskela +33 684633212 Jonathan Hurndall +44 7799884829 Adrian Lambert +44 (0) 7905 863352 Mel Atherton +39 6824770 Nick Greasley +44 (0)7491 426232 Geert Paul Slee +31 6 53 934877 Chris Brandrick +44 1322 520202 Andreas Hoeflich +49 6721 40080 Felicity Webster +44 1977 598694 Kevin Emmott +44 1422 842159 Barry Parker + 44 1932 336052 Leah Green +44 7966261516 Claire Taylor + 44 (0)330 608039 Andy Howard + 44 (0)7711 640276 Elijah Frazier +1.631.845.2000 Dan Pope + 44 (0)7788977904 Rachel Archibald +1 4156696833 James Wilson +44 7790900967 Bob McAlpine +1 631 9888033 Ben Tompsett +44 7988 844201 Barry Johnstone +44 208 453 8989 Erik Kampmann +32 471866529 Geraldine Demarteau +32 42397884 Claire Bell +39 011 384 18344 Martyn Gates +44 0 207 648 4211 Miriam Wright +44 (0)207 4063219 Stephane Ducobu +32471514611 Tracy Geist +14152998120 Terry Murphy +44 1923 650 074 Timo Koch +32 474475474 Agnieszka Czerska +41 22717 2111 Mo Goyal +1 905 335 3700 Sebastien Verlaine +32 4 97434244 Jim Irving +7764 615709 Richard Hingley +44 1753 576 861 Ted White +14243211775 Peter Hattan + 44 7860 958955 Lars Olof Janflod +46 708166643 Bazeli Mbo +33 (1) 5595 2604 Aaron Duckmanton + 44 203 745 6566 Katharine Guy + 44 1635 569777 Siobhan Murtagh +44 845 820 0000 Crystele Trevisan +33 (2)99285205 Russell Johnson + 44 797 0716261 Jack Cammish +44 7860834758 Jennifer Overbaugh Paul Leonard +44(0)7900763804 Andreas Hilmer +49 72221002 Kevin Salvidge +44 7286 178 752 Andrew Gray +44 7931 841534 Ronen Artman +972 9 763 2414 Nadia Khan +1 508 331 1870 Elizabeth Lawrence +44 07949 904 168

EMAIL ben@808talent.com awood@acsmedia.com Stuart.Coles@ae.live gina@phosphor.pro larry.tonon@aldea.tv frossimo@amazon.com elise.riffuad@ampvisualtv.tv a.gelbman@applicaster.com rh@arena-plc.com r.sturm@arkona-technologies.de d.bouskela@ateme.com jon@batcam.tv a.lambert@blackbird.video melissa@blackmagicdesign.com ngreasley@brightcove.com gpslee@broadcastrental.com chris.brandrick@broadcastrf.com a.hoeflich@broadcast-solutions.de felicity.webster@bt.com kevin.emmott@calrec.com barryparker@cameracorps.co.uk leah.green@canon-europe.com claire.taylor@centurylink.com. andy.howard@cerberus.tech elijah.frazier@chyronhego.com dp@cingularity.tv rachel.archibald@clearcom.com james.wilson@cloudbass.com bob.mcalpine@cobaltdigital.com btompsett@ctlondon.com barry.johnstone@ctvob.co.uk erik.kampmann@cyanview.com g.demarteau@deltacast.com Claire.bell@deltatre.com martyn.gates@densitron.com Miriam.Wright@dolby.com stephane.ducobu@dreamchip.de tracy.geist@editshare.com terry@esbroadcast.com Timo.koch@euromediagroup.com czerska@eurovision.net Mo@evertz.com s.verlaine@evs.com jim.irving@fanview.co richard@flech.com ted.white@focusrite.com peter.hattan@for-a.co.uk lars-olof.janflod@genelec.com bazeli.mbo@globecast.com aaron@grabyo.com Katharine.guy@grassvalley.com Siobhan.Murtagh@gravitymedia.com crystele.trevisan@harmonicinc.com russell@hitomi-broadcast.tv. jack.cammish@imagen.io jennifer.Overbaugh@imaginecommunications.com paull@interxion.com andreas.hilmer@lawo.de salvidge@leadereurope.com agray@llnw.com ronen@liveu.tv nkhan@ltnglobal.com lizzie.lawrence@m2amedia.tv SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

svgeurope

Sponsor Update

SponsorIndex SVG EUROPE SPONSOR

PAGE

LEVEL

Matrox 79 Gold MediaKind 17 Media Links 79 Gold Mobile Viewpoint 19 Platinum Motion Impossible 153 OB/SI/Other MOVICOM 153 OB/SI/Other MRMC (Mark Roberts Motion Control) 81 MST Systems 81 Gold NativeWaves 83 Gold NCAM 85 Gold NEP 21 Platinum NEP Connect Gold Net Insight 86 Gold Open Broadcast Systems 87 Gold Panasonic Broadcast 89 Gold Pixellot 37 OB/SI/Other Presteigne 89 Gold RaceTech 155 OB/SI/ Other Reality Check Systems (RCS) 157 OB/SI/Other Red Bee Media 91 Gold Riedel 91 Gold Ross Video 23 Platinum RT Software 93 Gold Sennheiser 95 Gold SES Astra 97 Gold Signiant 99 Gold Skyline Communications 157 OB/SI/Other slomo.tv 159 OB/SI/ Other SMT 101 Gold Solo Satellite Communications 161 OB/SI/Other Sony 25 Platinum SOS Global 27 Gold Square Box Systems 161 OB/SI/Other Stats Perform Gold Supponor 101 Gold Synamedia 103 Gold TEAM OB/SI/Other Technology Advantage OB/SI/Other Tedial 103 Gold Telegenic 163 OB/SI/Other Telestream 105 Gold Tellyo 105 Gold Telos Alliance 165 OB/SI/Other Telstra 109 Gold The Collectv 163 OB/SI/Other The Switch 29 Platinum Timeline Television TSL Products 111 Gold TV Skyline 165 OB/SI/Other TVN Mobile Production 167 OB/SI/Other TVU Networks 113 Gold Tyrell 115 UI Centric 167 OB/SI/Other uniqFEED 169 OB/SI/Other V-Nova 119 Gold Verizon Digital Media Services 117 Gold VideoSys Broadcast 169 OB/SI/Other Vidi 121 Gold Vislink 123 Gold Vizrt 125 Gold Wildmoka 127 Gold WSC Sports 129 Gold XD Motion 131 Zixi 131 Gold SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

CONTACT

PHONE

Donald Sievewright 07721 862556 Murray Barker +33 784548898 Al Nunez +1 6787703584 Charlotte van Hertum +31 7270 00502 Rob Drewett +44 1454 501010 Natalia Bogatova +7 (495) 988-40-78 Assaff Rawner +44 1342 838000 Andrew Hicks +44 07727 053322 Venkat Venkateshwar +43 6607740782 Phil Ventre +44 (0)7581 482750 Brian Clark +44 7824 563146 Donna Palumbo +44 01908 865554 Mari Fogelberg +46 735148503 Kieran Kunhya +44 20 3051 1695 Sivashanka Kuppusamy +49 1736282693 Yossi Tarablus +972 (0)52 289 0297 Chris Eyles +44 (0)1293 651300 Kate Hills + 44 781 3947201 Mike Ward +44 7799 660792 Silvia Botella + 34 689917616 Christian Bockskopf +49 (202) 292 9516 Stuart Russell +44 7827019494 Mike Fredriksen +44 207 1688820 Simon Beesley +44 (0)1494 462246 Merav Cunningham +19723 9280843 Jon Finegold +1 781 3126786 Thomas Gunkel +3251313569 Kate Krivitskaya +1 3102858190 Patricia Hopkins +1919 6024392 Keith Marshall 44 07836 333763 David McIntosh +44 (0)7887 592730 Steve Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Connell +1 800 628-6363 Neil Bundle +7876416770 MaryKate House +1 7087381639 David Patton + 44 20 8992 1550 Christelle Gental +44 788 1914289 Hannah Aitchinson + 41 413681818 Patrick Roache Claudine Cecille +33 607865552 Eamonn Curtin +44 1494 557406 Melanie Tassone Richard Collins + 44 (0)7799 117269 Martin Dyster 07900 584066 Ana Lockwood +612 2986 63643 Chris Sarson +44 20 3375 8532 Jessica Mintz +1 310 339 4017 Charlotte Wearden +44 8450 944 445 Chris Exelby +44 1628 564610 Robert Kis +491703733777 Markus Osthaus +49 (511) 12123705 Yoni Tayar +34 936317566 Dan Muchmore 07852 545868 Moe Hamdhaidari 0207 488 2830 Katy Walsh +41 792197492 Sam Orton-Jay + 44 (0)7980 557617 Elizabeth Fichtner +1 01908 865551 Colin Tomlin + 44 1293 541200 Robert Oszvald +44 6151 9385 25 Emily Fox +44 7802 392669 Mark Gedderman +1 401 787 0120 Lucille Mari +33 (0)4 28 27 02 20 Galit Shiri +972 508610010 Benoit Dentan 33 130660534 Keara McCarthy +1 877 4949426

EMAIL donald.sievewright@matrox.com murray.barker@mediakind.com anunez@medialinks.com c.vanhertum@mobileviewpoint.com rob@motion-impossible.com nbogatova@movicom.tv Assaff@mrmoco.com Andrew.hicks@mstworld.com vv@nativewaves.com phil.ventre@ncam-tech.com bclark@nepgroup.com dpalumbo@nepgroup.com mari.fogelberg@netinsight.net kieran@obe.tv sivashankar.kuppusamy@panasonic.com. yossit@pixellot.tv chrise@presteigne.tv khills@racetech.co.uk mike@rcs.live silvia.botella@redbeemedia.com christian.bockskopf@riedel.net srussell@rossvideo.com mike.fredriksen@rtsw.co.uk simon.beesley@sennheiser.com merav.cunningham@ses.com jfinegold@signiat.com thomas.gunkel@skyline.be kate@slomo.tv p.hopkins@smt.com keith@solosat.com David.mcintosh@sony.com SOConnell@sosglobal.com neil@squarebox.com marykate.house@statsperform.com david.patton@supponor.com cgental@synamedia.com haa@team.ch paddy.roache@techad.co.uk ccecille@tedail.com eamonn.curtin@telegenic.co.uk melaniet@telestream.net Richard@tellyo.com martin.dyster@telosalliance.com ana.lockwood@team.telstra.com chris.sarson@thecollectv.com jessica.mintz@theswitch.tv charlotte.wearden@timeline.tv chris.exelby@tslproducts.com r.kis@tv-skyline.de markus.osthaus@tvn.de ytayar@tvunetworks.com dan.muchmore@tyrellcct.com moe.hamdhaidari@uicentric.com katy.walsh@uniqfeed.com sam.orton-jay@v-nova.com Elizabeth.Fichtner@verizonmedia.com ctomlin@videosys.tv. roszvald@vidi.eu emily.fox@vislink.com mgederman@vizrt.com lucille@wildmoka.com galit@wsc-sports.com bdentan@xd-motion.com keara.mccarthy@zixi.com 171

THANKS ITS SPONSORS GOLD

â&#x201E;¢

OB/SI/OTHER

808

TALENT

PLATINUM

GOLD

OB/SI/OTHER

svgeuropeupdate CLOSING COMMENT

A PUBLICATION OF

Making the right moves BY KEN KERSCHBAUMER Executive Director, Editorial Services, Sports Video Group

imbledon. The Open Championship. The French Open. The Euros. The Ryder Cup. The Olympic Games. In the sports world all of those events fell victim to the COVID-19 pandemic. Some of them were cancelled outright, some have been moved to 2021. And even those that have moved to 2021 may ultimately be cancelled. The COVID-19 pandemic has managed to show two aspects of sport that are diametrically opposed. First, the pandemic has showed that sport is pretty insignificant when our families, our friends, and our co-workers are at risk of not only falling ill but dying. And, second, the absence of sport shows just how much those insignificant events actually mean to our individual and collective spirit and emotional wellbeing. Of course, for those in the sports production industry the loss of sport has had an impact on income, mental health, and more. Industry professionals, working closely with government officials, planned an attack to get production teams back in action efficiently and safely. Who would have guessed a year ago that the topic of how to open the door to an OB truck or how to serve coffee would be not only an important conversation but, potentially, a debate? The hard work that has been going on since March to get sporting events back up and running and the related production efforts have been an inspiration. Not only has the vast majority of the production planning been done remotely via Zoom and conference calls but the resulting production plans have been ingenious, innovative, and, potentially, game changing. Most importantly, they seem to have been done properly as infections and the spread of COVID-19 seems to have been contained very well. 174

You hear it over and over again: the COVID19 pandemic has accelerated the transition to workflows that might have occurred in 2023 to occurring now. The question now: which of the new workflows are here to stay? There is also a bigger question facing thousands of sports production professionals across Europe and around the globe: the future of their careers. It is a difficult topic that will require an honest dialogue so that those who find themselves redundant have a chance to learn new skills, learn a new way of working, and create new opportunities. And there will be opportunities for those willing to embrace change. First, the remote workflows that now have people working from home mean that issues like relocating to a new town, city or country in order to work on a new production are no longer a barrier. Working from anywhere means being able to take an assignment from anywhere. Working with software-based production tools is also a great opportunity as the ability to add, say, graphics, replay, directing or editing functionality to oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s skillset is only a download away. The future, potentially, is one where production professionals can create a multi-faceted production centre at home that can allow them to quickly transition from mixing audio to running replay, and more. This transition will require more than just the willingness of the production professional. Manufacturers will need to make it easier and cheaper for those looking to learn how to operate new tools and software to learn how to use them at a professional level. SVG Europe will continue to bring the sports production community together for these critical discussions. The past five months have seen unspeakable loss of life, income, and hope and the months ahead appear to be difficult as well. But we can get through this together with discipline, planning and a desire to help each other.

PUBLISHED BY SPORTS VIDEO GROUP

260 Fifth Ave., Ste. 600 New York, NY 10001 USA Tel: +1 212.481.8140 | Fax: +1 212.696.1783 www.sportsvideo.org

Ken Kerschbaumer, Executive Director, Editorial kenkersch@sportsvideo.org | Tel: +1 212.481.8140 Heather McLean, SVG Europe Editor heather@sportsvideo.org | Tel: +44 7986 473520 Will Strauss, SVG Europe Editor will@sportsvideo.org | Tel: +44 7789 711611 Fergal Ringrose, SVG Europe Contributing Editor fergal@sportsvideo.org | Tel: +353 872 348 311 Veronica Newson, Event Content Manager veronica@sportsvideo.org | Tel: +44 7801 231312 Clare Sturzaker, European Sponsorship Sales Manager clare@sporstvideo.org | Tel: +44 7710 991595 Nicky Lane, European Sponsorship Consultant nicky@sportsvideo.org | Tel: +44 7956 107882 Rob Payne, Managing Director, Worldwide Sponsor Development rob@sportsvideo.org | Tel: +1 212.481.8131 Andrew Gabel, Manager, Sponsor Development agabel@sportsvideo.org | Tel: +1 646.998.4554 Dawn Boultwood, Content Production dawn@sportsvideo.org | Tel: +44 7967 197803 Livvy Maule Ffinch, Audience Development livvy@sportsvideo.org | Tel: +44 7867 800191 Susan Schoepe, Sales Support/Credit Control sue@sportsvideo.org | Tel: +44 7711 168858 Joe Hosken, General Manager, Europe joe@sportsvideo.org | Tel: +44 7429 090134 Martin Porter, Executive Director marty@sportsvideo.org | Tel: +1 516.767.6720 Paul Gallo, Executive Director paul@sportsvideo.org | Tel: +1 212.696.1799 Magazine Production Dean Cook, The Magazine Production Company www.magazineproduction.com | Tel: +44 1273 467579 ABOUT SVG EUROPE Sports Video Group Europe supports the professional community in Europe that uses video, audio, and broadband technologies to produce and distribute sports content. Through SVG Europe, leagues, owners, teams, broadcasters, webcasters, OB companies, and technology providers learn from each other, turn vision into reality, and implement innovations. Sharing these experiences leads to advances both in the sports-production/distribution process and in the overall consumer sports experience. MISSION To advance the creation, production, and distribution of sports content. To provide a knowledge resource for the growing community of sports video professionals working for broadcast/broadband organizations, professional teams and leagues, collegiate and secondary schools, and facilities. To facilitate a dialogue with manufacturers, suppliers, and technology developers that will improve the quality and profitability of sports programming.

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020

Join SVGE today www.svgeurope.org

176

SportTechJOURNAL AUTUMN 2020