FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE How Telestream and Aspera are helping to deliver FOX Sports’ coverage of this month’s FIFA World Cup from over 6000 miles away
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n the US, FOX Sports is synonymous with top drawer sports television: it televises the National Hockey League, Major League Baseball, NASCAR, Major League Soccer, the FIFA Women’s World Cup, the USGA Championships and NHRA. This year FOX Sports has added to this prestigious roster the FIFA World Cup 2018, which begins in Russia this month. FOX Sports is America’s English language home of the World Cup this year and for the next three World Cup tournaments. Its coverage will include 64 matches in 12 stadiums across 11 cities. Production is based on a set positioned in Moscow’s Red Square, with a control room and technical operations centre located in the Moscow suburbs 12 miles away. The FIFA World Cup 2018 is the largest production in FOX Sports’ 20-year history in terms of personnel, hours, and scale. It includes 320 hours of original broadcast content and over 1,100 hours of total original content. Every match will be broadcast live on FOX or sister channel FS1. In total, 38 matches will be broadcast on the network – more than were broadcast in the four previous World Cups combined.
BRINGING ENTERTAINMENT OVER THOUSANDS OF MILES - A HERCULEAN CHALLENGE The FOX Sports Operations and Engineering team set out to create dramatic new efficiencies for this production. The team sought to leverage FOX Sports’ existing, state-of-the art production facilities in Los Angeles: by avoiding the creation of entirely new facilities in Russia and the movement of staff to Russia for the duration of the tournament, FOX Sports could instead invest more in the LA facility and production staff, creating more content for their customers. They sought to do this by leveraging new industry improvements in IP-based transfer technology. The requirements were clear: they must accomplish the new efficiencies while supporting sophisticated production infrastructure. They must ingest 20 HD-SDI feeds per match, and with 64 matches in the tournament, over 700 TB of match content will be generated over the 30 days of World Cup. They will be ingesting two UHD-HDR feeds per match. For all of these they must create a cloud-based HLS proxy, as well as high-res AVC Intra in Los Angeles, all of which
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