Sport tech journal 2015 pr (final) by Studio Kuiper

ADVANCING THE CREATION, PRODUCTION, & DISTRIBUTION OF SPORTS CONTENT AUTUMN 2015

PUBLICATION

Live from Six Nations Rugby, World Snooker, Paris-Roubaix, UEFA Champions League, Wembley Stadium and Wimbledon Football Production: FIFA Womens’ World Cup • SportTech Europe: Road ahead for 4K and IP Champions Summit: Production for Bundesliga • Rio 2016: Preview with Yiannis Exarchos, OBS

PLUS: SVG Europe Sponsor Update for 2015

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AUTUMN 2015 IN THIS ISSUE

04 From the Chairman

Think globally but act locally says SVG Europe Chairman of the Advisory Board Peter Angell

06 Opening Comment

Welcome to an association of information and connection across Europe, says SVG Europe Executive Editor Fergal Ringrose

08 Facility Integration Summit

ESSMA’s Dimitri Huygen discusses the connected future for the stadium

10 Inside Super Bowl XLIX

Sky Sports tackles game with new Sure Shot unit

12 World Ski Championships

Eurovision delivers for world broadcasters, writes Ken Kerschbaumer; co-operation clears way for Nordic Sky Championship, reports Philip Stevens

34 SportTech Europe Summit

• The road ahead for 4K production, by David Fox • No ‘big bang’ for video-over-IP, by Will Strauss

42 Champions Summit & Champions League Final

Emerging IP technologies set to boost remote production, reports Birgit Heidsiek: finishing touches for UEFA Next Generation Services, reports Fergal Ringrose; 4K production and ZDF host operation, by Ken Kerschbaumer

54 Wimbledon Championships

NHK undertakes latest 8K trial, by David Davies

56 Rio 2016 Olympic Games How OBS is preparing for Rio 2016, by Philip Stevens

16 Six Nations Rugby

Observe and Sunset+Vine Host Broadcast operation at Stadio Olimpico

20 Football Production Summit

60 FA Community Shield

28 Paris Marathon & Paris Roubaix

62 SVG EUROPE SPONSOR UPDATE

81 Sponsor Index

Match-day production: a view from the top 8K production for FIFA Women’s World Cup FTV and Euromedia balance demands of marathon weekend, reports Fabrice Marinoni

30 World Snooker Championship

Cue the OB: How IMG produces snooker for the BBC

Live from Wembley: BT Sport launches 4K UHD era, reports Fergal Ringrose SVGE sponsors discuss their 2015 accomplishments as well as new technologies that will debut at the IBC2015 show this month. Compiled by SVG Europe contributor Ian McMurray

84 Closing Comment

Summer of change for European sport, writes Sports Video Group Editorial Director Ken Kerschbaumer ST J is produced & published by the Sports Video Group Europe ST J © 2015 Sports Video Group Printed at Partnion, Tel: +31 613 62 43 21 Amsterdam, The Netherlands

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SVGEUROPE SPONSORS PLATINUM

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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 — on all screens — via information, events and industry initiatives. Make sure your company and your industry are represented in this vital collaborative initiative.

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SVGEUROPEUPDATE

EUROPE

FROM THE CHAIRMAN

ADVISORY BOARD

CHAIRMAN Peter Angell IEC in Sport, COO

Think Globally, Act Locally

s 2015 enters the final furlong it is worth reflecting on a year that continued to see the sports production industry move forward with new technologies and productions that once again set new standards for the industry. For SVG Europe members and sponsors as well as sports fans those advances are all good news. Good news because they have given sports production professionals better ways to tell the story of an event in a way that viewers find more entertaining and informative. And better for sponsors as it means that investments in R&D can more easily offer up an ROI. SVG Europe, for its part, will celebrate the production and technical accomplishments in 2015 at IBC in Amsterdam on 12 September. This year’s honourees are being selected by the SVG Europe advisory board as this publication is going to press so to see who will be honoured please visit SVG Europe’s home page. The SVG Europe home page will also provide you with an opportunity to attend the event. The Sport Production and Achievement awards are one example of the many panEuropean events that SVG Europe has created in order to give our industry a chance to come together, learn, network, and return home better enabled to do our jobs. But as many of us know the vast majority of the sports production community makes a living not working on pan-European or even global events but rather local events. And that is why those pan European SVG events will, increasingly, be complemented by regional, language-specific events. Take, for example, Germany. Over the past three years SVG Europe has held a Germanlanguage event that gives sports production professionals in that region a chance to come together and have high-level discussions on the issues facing the German-speaking sport 4

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EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, EDITORIAL Ken Kerschbaumer

BY PETER ANGELL Chairman of the Advisory Board, Sport Video Group Europe

production community. And in October of this year we will hold a similar event in Italy. Our plan is to also hold a French-language event in Paris by the time January 2016 comes to an end. And probably the most important on-going initiative that will be shifting into a higher gear in 2016 is the work SVG does to encourage more women to join our industry and those within it to more easily advance and expand their careers. A look five years down the line lays bare that our industry (and many in the media industry) is poised for a crisis as there has not been the influx of new production and engineering talent required to fill the void created by those who will retire. The female workforce, which comprises more than 50% of the possible workforce, is a resource that we must reach and prioritise. For its part SVG Europe is going to do much more to make that happen. You can expect to see an increasing number of panel discussions at our events focused on Production Management, a key sector for women in our industry, as well as more women-only technology seminars, and much more. That outreach will require input from you. Our efforts are only helpful if we can get meaningful momentum behind them and also more input to make sure they best meet the industry’s needs. If you would like to spearhead a regional language event in your home nation or get involved with helping women player a mucg ,arger role in our business please reach out a member of the SVG Europe team today. 2016 will be a massively busy year for the industry. The Euros, another Summer Olympics, a full slate of football action, and much more will put sports media front and centre in the living rooms of sports fans all around the world. And you can be sure that SVG Europe, in a number of ways, will help you follow what is going on and what it means to you.

ADVISORY BOARD MEMBERS Simon Ackermann Habegger AG, Creative Director Robert Adams Constantin Sports Marketing, Managing Director Konrad Bartelski Consultant Riccardo Botta Sky Italia, Head of Production and Creative Hub Jonny Bramley BBC Exec Producer Glasgow 2014 & Rio 2016 Robin Broomfield Sky, Technical Manager Angelo Carosi Sky Italia, Director Jean-Louis Cleret SIS Live, European commercial director Charlie Cope BBC Sport, Technical Executive Tony Coxon European PGA Tour Productions, Head of Production Operations Nicolas Deal UEFA/Event Broadcast, V and A Project Leader Luc Geoffroy EuroMedia Group, CTO Meryvn Hall AELTC, Broadcast Manager Duncan Humphreys Stream TV Networks, Head of Broadcast – UK&Europe Steve Jenkins NEP Visions, Group MD Barry Johnstone CTV, Managing Director Jens Knudsen TV2 VP of Production Timo Koch Outside Broadcast, Managing Director Manuel Lesaicherre Orange, Director of Content Manfred Lielacher ORF, Head of TV Production Dean Locke Formula One Management, Executive Director, TV Production Brendan Mallon UTV GB Media, Head of Operations Dan Miodownik HBS, Production Department Director Roger Pearce ITV, Technical Director – Sport Simon Potter BT Sport, Consultant Bernard Ross UEFA, Head of TV Production Inga Ruehl Sky, Account Director, Sport & News Paul Ryan ESPN EMEA, Head of Event Operations David Shield IMG Sports Media, Director of Engineering & Technology GP Slee Broadcast Rental, Owner Pauli Subira TV3, Art & Directing Director Henk van Meerkerk Fox Sports NL, Head of Production Arjan van Westerloo Endemol Sport, Managing Director Pascal Wattiaux PW Sport, Consultant Phil White IBC, Director Of Technology & Events Tom Woods Woods Media Group, Co-Founder & CEO

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SVGEUROPEUPDATE

OPENING COMMENT

Association of information and connection across the European continent

s an association serving the European sports broadcast production community, at its simplest I really see Sports Video Group Europe as having twin missions: to inform and to connect. Our first role, every day and every week of the year, is to keep members informed with news and insight across our web site and newsletter. The latter may look like a straightforward list of headline stories every week — but in fact we have developed a BY FERGAL RINGROSE number of strands that speak of variety, depth, EXECUTIVE EDITOR reflection and comment in our coverage. SVG Europe You’ll be familiar with our Live From strand, where our reporting team is on-site at some of the biggest events in the European sporting calendar. On top of that we regularly run SVGE Analysis, SVGE Sit-Down, Guest Comment, SVGE Q&A, Show Preview’ and Show Wrap-Up stories across the weeks and months of the year. We don’t tend to make a lot of noise about the quality, speed and depth of our show coverage, it’s just another service we provide — but we probably should. I’ve been covering this business for over 20 years so I do know how good our NAB and IBC preview and analysis coverage really is! We have also increased the strength and depth of our reporting team in Europe over the last year, to the point where very little gets by us each week. The newsletter is a valuable resource, full of insider information: if you do not currently receive it just go to svgeurope.org and click on ‘Subscribe to Newsletter’ to receive your own copy. Our mission to connect is of course paramount and hopefully you are familiar with the results; in fact, hopefully you have actually connected by attending one of our many events over the past year? December 2014 saw our forward-looking, tech-heavy FutureSport take place at Lord’s Cricket Ground in London. In February it was on to Amsterdam for our Sport Facility Integration Summit at ISE, where a highlight was the keynote address by Dimitri Huygen, EURO 2020 Brussels Project Director and Managing Director European Stadium and Safety Management Association. The ISE event is a very valuable step for us into the stadium world (as opposed to the broadcast environment), one that we will be taking with greater fortitude for the February 2016 event. 6

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March saw us flying to Barcelona for the St Patricks Day Football Production Summit, in association with our colleagues at Mediapro Spain. Firmly established in the calendar, this event brings together the most senior people at European football federations, leagues, clubs and broadcasters to discuss match-day production issues. We were lucky this year in gaining, from Host Broadcast Services Head of Production Dan Miodownik, a unique insight into broadcast and digital preparations for what turned out to be a thrillingly successful FIFA Women’s World Cup tournament in Canada 2015. In May we were at MediaCityUK in Manchester, where BBC Sport and dock10 graciously hosted tours of their respective facilities ahead of our SportTech Europe conference at Old Trafford. Again a packed programme and packed house, featuring a ‘Rugby Special’ preview of Rugby World Cup 2015 and a fantastic insight from Euromedia CTO Luc Geoffroy into the production complexity behind the greatest bike race in the world, the Tour de France. September sees us back in Amsterdam for Sport Production Summit 2015 at the NH Grand Hotel Krasnapolsky in Dam Square, as well our Sport Production & Technical Achievement Awards during IBC at the RAI, presented by Canon Europa. On top of this roll-call of ‘scheduled’ SVG Europe events I must also mention three special days that have taken place over the past year. In partnership with IMG Studios, led by Global Director of Engineering & Technology David Shield, we produced the Sport Facility Tour & Conference at Stockley Park, London last October, providing an overview of the top-class faciliites on-site as well as special insight into the phenomenal power of Premier League Productions. In early March, an important first for the association’s Women’s Initiative as Bubble & Squeak Managing Director Sadie Groom interviewed BBC Director of Sport Barbara Slater — a tremendous success for everyone involved. And in June, the inaugural Champions Summit was produced in Berlin by Sky Deutschland in association with SVG Europe. This partnership yielded a fantastic day of German-language sports production debate — ‘Broadcast Goes IT’, ‘Young People in Sports Production’,‘Champions Week 2015’,‘New Ways of Sports Storytelling’ and ‘What’s Next in Remote Production’ — involving a top tier of German sports professionals including Fraunhofer Institut, Plazamedia, Production Associates, ProSiebenSat.1, Sportcast, Topvision, TVN Group, TV Skyline and Vectorform. Sports Video Group has a powerful parent organisation in the United States and is rapidly increasing in quality, reach and insight — as well as sponsorship support — here in Europe. My message to you, in my role as Executive Editor? Stay informed, stay connected: get involved! EUROPE SPORTTECH JOURNAL / AUTUMN 2015

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SVGEUROPEUPDATE

ESSMA’s Dimitri Huygen discusses the connected future for the stadium BY KAREN HOGAN

he rise of the‘connected’ sports stadium and the new opportunities this means for revenue generation were among the themes of the keynote presentation given by Dimitri Huygen, who heads the European Stadium and Safety Management Association (ESSMA) and is a prime mover behind the EURO2020 stadium development project in Belgium. Setting out his vision for the emergence of a new, increasingly Dimitri Huygen, tech-savvy generation of stadium, Huygen confirmed that ESSMA: “The stadium of the a newly-designed facility is likely to be “much more than an future will be a old school stadium. The stadium of the future will be a smart smart stadium… a smart city, even” stadium… a smart city, even.” Integral to the success of these next-generation venues will be “the generation of additional revenue from the matchday experience”. Measures by which this can be achieved include building up the overall hospitality and VIP experience,

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Sport Facility Intergration Summit

and improving the food & beverage offering across the board. Huygen readily conceded that, at present, this is something that is still sorely lacking in many Belgian stadia. Nonetheless, the trend towards the selling of stadium naming rights and burgeoning revenue from broadcast distribution have “meant that construction costs are now lower” for many new projects, he added. But the focus of venue development initiatives shouldn’t be solely on the matchday experience:“There could be scope for increased revenue on non-matchdays, too. For example FC Porta organises kids club and children’s birthday parties.” Non-sporting entertainment, such as live performances by major name bands, is also set to remain an integral part of the overall mix. Outlining the multi-stadium project of renewal that he is currently undertaking in Belgium, Huygen also foresees increasingly sophisticated integration with visitors’ mobile and other handheld devices.“We are now getting into a kind of society thing where people come together at the stadium and get connected,” he said.“The result will be much more profitable venues where [operators] are able to achieve a more significant return on investment.”

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SVGEUROPEUPDATE

Inside Super Bowl XLIX

Sky Sports tackles game with new Sure Shot unit BY KEN KERSCHBAUMER

(L-to-R) George Jeffrey, Sky Sports, creative production manager; Keith Lane, director of operations; and Travis Schwartz, lighting director, inside the Sky Sports studio at Super Bowl XLIX

ky Sports UK is in the first year of a new five-year deal for the Super Bowl and is expanded on previous coverage with the use of a new combined satellite/production trailer from Sure Shot, a larger studio position, a pitch side position, and more programming in advance of the big game. “We have been running a lot of NFL Network programming so there is a lot of live network programming taking place all week based around the NFL and what the Super Bowl is all about as we give a boost to the coverage of the NFL,” said Keith Lane, Sky Sports, director of operations. Sky Sports game coverage kicked off Sunday at 10 pm GMT, an hour before the pre-game festivities. For game coverage Sky Sports relied primarily on the NBC dirty feed for the game coverage and the world feed for the halftime show. It also had access to individual camera

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SVGEUROPEUPDATE

Inside Super Bowl XLIX

feeds and three EVS servers so the production team could build up replays for analysis and also cut around NBC promotional material. Adobe editing software was also used for building packages. Outside of the game coverage Sky Sports this year had a pitch side host position. “We want to bring the game and atmosphere to the viewers at home and we thought it would be good to have a pitch side reporter who has an opportunity to grab some people and talk to them,” added Lane. Meanwhile upstairs on the studio level Sky Sports had a 19x12 foot studio outfitted with a 70-inch touchscreen panel with RT Software tOG-Sports Pro analysis software. The biggest technical change this year was the use of Sure Shot’s KMHD, the company’s newest production/ uplink truck. It measures 42 feet and has a C-band uplink plus Grass Valley LDX-80 cameras with Canon lenses; a Grass Valley Kayenne K-frame production switcher with four mix effects; two EVS six-channel servers (Sky had a total of three EVS servers); and a Chyron LEX 3.1 Duet graphics system. “We used Sure Shot on some of our golf coverage and this year we saw an opportunity to do something a little bit different,” said Lane. “Sure Shot built a new truck that gives us an opportunity to try using a production/uplink

truck for a large on-site production.” Lane says Sure Shot has done a good job outfitting the truck with really good equipment and the C-band link will provide domestic satellite transmission to New York City where a fibre connection from Pac TV was used for primary transmission back to the UK. Encompass provided a backup transmission to the UK and Sky Sports also downlinked the world feed in the UK as an extra layer of redundancy.

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SVGEUROPEUPDATE

World Ski Championships

Eurovision delivers for world broadcasters BY KEN KERSCHBAUMER

he FIS Alpine World Ski Championships were held in the US for the first time in 16 years, and much has changed in TV production since the last time the event was held in Beaver Creek and Vail, CO. And this year it was up to Eurovision Production Coordination, working alongside technology service providers like Game Creek Video and Bexel, to ensure that the production was all it needed to be. “We are trying to lift the production level for an Alpineskiing event here in North America and leave a legacy,” said Franck Choquard, managing director, Eurovision Production Coordination. Nearly every day featured a mix of training runs and 13 medal events. There were 26 rightsholders around the globe, and 20 of them had a presence onsite. The 1,500-sq.-metre International Broadcast Centre, located

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Franck Choquard, managing director, Eurovision Production Coordination

near the finish line at Red Tail Stadium, was home to about 400 production people every day, including staffers from Eurovision, NBC Sports, ORF (Austria), ARD/ZDF (Germany), France Télévisions, YLE (Finland), SVT (Sweden), and SSR/SRG (Switzerland). “The top three for this event are the Swiss, Austrians, and Germans,” said Coquard. “For the Swiss and the Austrians, this is their Super Bowl, and with the broadcasts

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SVGEUROPEUPDATE

World Ski Championships

in primetime, they will have a market share around 80%.” A production team of more than 200 was on hand to capture all the happenings (plus medal ceremonies, press conferences, and more) with more than 60 cameras, including more than 50 Sony HDC1500 cameras with Canon lenses, five Sony HDC3000 high-speed cameras, Antelope super-high-speed cameras, and a CamCat wired aerial system covering 700 meters on the men’s course and 400 meters of women’s course. “We had a maximum of 45 cameras for one race and a total of 18 EVS machines and operators,” said Choquard. The core event coverage was produced out of three Game Creek production units: Amazin’ and Dynasty A and B units. “Because we have men’s and women’s events on the same day, we need three production units,” said Choquard. “Amazin’ covers the women’s events, Dynasty A the men’s events, and the Dynasty B unit does the pre-cut production.” Bexel was hired to lay fibre for the course and to connect the medals plaza in Vail to the compound at Beaver Creek and laid 200 fibre patch points. “We sized it big,” said Choquard,“and it was almost fully loaded.” One hot innovation that wasn’t in use is drones, and it was not for lack of trying.“We studied a lot of alternatives

and faced a few issues like altitude and wind,” said Choquard.“But the biggest challenge we had was that 95% of the event is on federal land and you are not allowed to operate drones for commercial purpose on federal land.” The CamCat aerial system solved those issues and also had the speed required to keep up with skiers speeding down the course at 70 mph. And, like the high-speed cameras and the two wireless cameras at the bottom of the course, it proved to be a solid investment. “When you get the super-high-speed images at the right time and moment, they offer amazing pictures,” said Choquard. “And we’ve been asked why do we need two wireless cameras at the bottom of the course. But when [US skier] Bode Miller crashed, we could get a close shot of his wife and the emotion. And sport is more than action; it is the emotion carried to the people around it.” Eurovision also produced a “world feed plus,” a second feed that offered an additional two-plus hours of coverage of the morning inspection of the course, the ceremonies, and bib draws, as well as additional slow-motion coverage that might not have made the original world feed because of time constraints. “Additionally, when we have time, we interview the skiers and coaches,” added Choquard.

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SVGEUROPEUPDATE

Nordic World Ski Championships

Co-operation smoothes the way for ski coverage BY PHILIP STEVENS

etween February 18 and March 1 2015 the FIS (International Ski Federation) Nordic World Ski Championships took place in Falun, Sweden. During that twelve day period events 700 athletes from 55 nations competed in Cross Country Skiing, Ski Jumping and Nordic combined – where, as the name suggests, the winner was decided on the basis of one jump on the ski jumping hill and one crosscountry skiing pursuit race. For Swedish Broadcaster, SVT, this was one of the biggest events it has covered for many years. In all, some 200 technical and production personnel were involved. “We started our planning in 2011,” stated Adde Granberg, executive producer at Swedish Television. “Although we have covered these Championships previously this is the first time we have also acted as Host Broadcaster.” This Host Broadcasting (HB) function is being carried out on behalf of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU). SVT’s Johan Bernhagen directs the Cross-Country competitions while Björn-Gunnar Vellan is in charge of Ski Jumping. Alongside the HB commitments, SVT is also providing unilateral coverage for its own viewers. In an exercise that demonstrated Scandinavian co-operation, colleagues from Norway’s NRK are assisting SVT in certain operations.“Our sports department has not produced ski jump coverage for a number of years and when plans were being discussed that might include a new — and unique — jumping hill being included at Falun, we asked our Norwegian friends to help us out with all the knowledge they had gained —especially in the Oslo 2011 World Championships. That co-operation has worked exceptionally well.” Granberg explained that the personnel from NRK worked with SVT when construction of the hill course was taking place.“This helped us identify the optimal positions for our cameras. It would be unforgiveable to miss any part of the action during the events. What’s more, we are going to have our staff shadowing the production personnel from NRK so that we will be in a good position to produce Ski Jumping in Falun after the 2015 event.” Swedish Television has commissioned outside broadcast units from Mediatec and Norway’s OB-Team to provide the wide-ranging coverage of the events. Both companies have extensive experience of covering the events included in the Falun Championships. Mediatec has been involved in many of the World Cup cross-country meets,

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Adde Granberg: “We are utilising around 100 cameras across all the events”

including at the Falun venue. OB-Team assisted SVT with Host Broadcaster production of the World Cup biathlon last year.

Covering all the angles “We are utilising around 100 cameras across all the events,” reported Granberg.“These include a number of specialist units such as wirecam, rails, multicopter, and polecams.We are also using two hyper-motions for six times speed and five super slomo cameras for three times speed. The aim is to produce as much innovative coverage as possible with all the resources to analyse skiers and jumper techniques and performances.” The International Broadcasting Centre (IBC) is located at the Lugnet Arena within the sports complex in Falun The OB compound covers around 12,000 square metres. “We service the requirements of 26 international broadcasters from this facility,” said Granberg. “The arrangement is that each broadcaster provides its own equipment for use within the IBC.” The broadcaster is also providing second screen options for the Local Organising Committee at the Live Arena within the sporting complex. He concludes,“Our goal for these Championships is simple: To take sport production to the next level.” EUROPE SPORTTECH JOURNAL / AUTUMN 2015

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SVGEUROPEUPDATE

Cerith Williams, S+V: “I was lucky enough to get involved early on and it fell to me to move it forward”

Live from Six Nations Rugby: Observe and Sunset+Vine Host Broadcast operation at the Stadio Olimpico di Roma BY FERGAL RINGROSE

he Northern Hemisphere’s major rugby tournament, the RBS 6 Nations, kicked off with victories for England in Cardiff, France in Paris and Ireland in Rome. The Host Broadcaster operation for Italy v Ireland was a joint effort between Observe (part of the Dublin-based Screen Scene Group recently acquired by NEP) and Sunset+Vine. SVG Europe was at the Stadio Olimpico di Roma to learn the background to this RBS 6 Nations partnership and observe how they brought Italy v Ireland Match Day to broadcasters around the world. “Six Nations Rugby Ltd, in the last TV rights deal, decided they were going to produce some of the games themselves. This would give them an opportunity to work with new or different broadcasters in the future,” said Alan Burns, co-founder and director of the Screen Scene Group and Observe OB crew technical director in Rome. “Italian broadcaster DMAX didn’t have a huge history of sports coverage in Italy, but they really wanted to do it. Dmax is an Italian free-to-air channel, owned by Discovery, that targets mainly male audiences, and they’re starting to get into sports. Discovery was very keen to do the deal,” said Burns, “but didn’t have a lot of sports production experience. Six Nations Rugby Ltd decided to go ahead and they asked me to come and produce the game — as Observe. Last year was season one, and the deal is for four seasons, ten games here 16

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at Stadio Olimpico (two home games one year and three the next). “Six Nations Rugby Ltd wanted to increase the quality of the coverage coming out of Italy so that it was on a par with what the other broadcasters were producing out of the British Isles and France. Production is not my speciality, so I spoke with [Sunset+Vine chairman] Jeff Foulser and we brought in Cerith Williiams from their Welsh office — and that’s really where it kicked off. It’s a Six Nations Ltd production; Sunset+Vine is the production company and Observe provides the technical facilities.” “The initial approach was made to Observe, the facilities company,” confirmed Sunset+Vine match director Cerith Williams. “We had worked on other projects with Observe, and Alan approached S+V to do the production element of the operation. And I was lucky enough to get involved early on and it fell to me to move it forward — and I’m very pleased because rugby is a passion and mostly what I do back in Wales for Sunset+Vine Cymru. We do most of the coverage for Welsh language broadcaster S4C. “I think the Six Nations people have seen what other sporting bodies have done in other sports, cricket in particular,” said Williams.“The ICC Champions Trophy and Cricket World Cup are their property, their asset and they own it. It’s not an unwise thing to do. “We’re very pleased to be involved,” said Williams. “It adds to our rugby coverage. In Wales we got involved in rugby almost ten years ago. More recently, we got involved with ESPN to provide coverage of the English Rugby Premiership. And now, Sunset+Vine does all of BT Sport’s rugby including European Champions Cup and Challenge Cup. Rugby, now, is becoming a big part of Sunset+Vine’s core business,” he said.

Camera set-up at Stadio Olimpico “Here in Rome we’re creating a world feed with 20 cameras,” said Burns, “and for the first time this year on Six Nations games we’re using a mobile camera on the referee. That’s provided for us by BSI, who have also done it for us on BT Sport coverage of Champions Cup rugby. “We use Broadcast RF for the radio cameras; Ben Hawker is here on the Broadcast RF side. We have three wireless cams on the pitch and a beauty shot — weather permitting — on the gold statue up on the hill above the ground, EUROPE SPORTTECH JOURNAL / AUTUMN 2015

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Six Nations Rugby

with the stadium in the foreground and Rome in the background. It looks fantastic.” Broadcast RF on-site engineer Ben Hawker added, “We’ve four cameras here: three inside the ground and one up on the hill. A couple of them are custom-built: they’re dirt cheap for what they do, and they look really good!” “We’re not allowed to use Spidercam in this stadium,” said Burns.“A Spidercam got caught on a pole a few years ago (well before our time!) and they had to get a cherry picker out to untangle it. That was the end of that. Our camera set-up would be comparable, or maybe a little bit more, to any other Six Nations production. “We have two super slo mos and one high speed radio camera here,” he said.“The high speed 400 to 500 frames per second, on a radio link back to the OB. This is not a live camera, but we’re getting those extra handheld shots at high speed. That’s a Sony camera, with a radio link from Broadcast RF to the EVS. It’s just for analysis.” “One interesting thing about cameras,” added Cerith Williams. “I’d not worked this stadium until last year. Where I have my main camera gantry (Cameras 1, 2 and 3) is the furthest away from the touchline that I’ve ever seen in any stadium. It’s a good 100 metres. So we have to have very very powerful lenses on all of those cameras. “Hopefully, viewing at home, you wouldn’t know the cameras were that far away! Other than that it’s a great stadium to work with, plenty of atmosphere, full to the rafters with plenty of colour.” “This stadium is municipal and multi-purpose,” said Burns.“It’s not

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bespoke. There’s no cabling infrastructure — and anyway a cable rig for rugby is different than a cable rig for soccer. So we’re very much on the ground, with handheld cameras, touchline ground cameras, TMO cameras in the corners — you don’t have any of that with a football match.”

OB compound: broadcasters and trucks Because it’s a tight stadium for broadcasting major sporting events, the OB compound configuration at Stadio Olimpico is rather unusual. “There are three layers of an OB compound, going up the hill above the stadium,” said Burns.“The ground layer is the production vehicles; the next layer is the uplink compound; and the very top layer is where the generator and support vehicles go.” “We’re the Host with OB 1 and our support vehicle; DMAX is next to us; and the other people we have on site are BBC Sport with Telegenic. They do studio analysis and pitch-side pres with BBC staff. They’ve four or five cameras and they take our feeds. They have their own personality camera so that when there are lulls in play they can choose one of their own people rather than what’s coming off the world feed. “DMAX do something similar: they take our feed and do their own commentary, analysis and pieces they’ve shot and so on. And then there’s RTE [as Main Visiting Broadcaster] who have a small set up here with an interview camera and they’re doing news pieces with that for RTE Sport and RTE News.We do the commentary team set-up for them.

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SVGEUROPEUPDATE

Six Nations Rugby

Alan Burns, Observe: “Six Nations Rugby Ltd decided to go ahead and they asked me to come and produce the game”ibc daily.pdf 1 04.08.15 10:58

Outside Broadcasting

“Our truck has eight EVS XT3s on board,” said Burns. “This truck has a massive Evertz EQX multi-embedder, Evertz routers, RTS Telex talkback matrix, Sony vision mixer and Sony cameras. We’ve always been Evertz; Simon Reed has been a good supplier to us for 12 years. All our trucks are Evertz. “In audio we have a Studer console. We’ve just put Calrec Artemis into our other trucks. We’re actually moving to the Artemis, from the Studer,” said Burns. “We had Calrec before, then we went to Studer — and now we’re going back to Calrec. When we bought this desk, Studer was a little bit ahead. But with the Artemis now, Calrec has gone ahead. The Artemis is excellent, excellent.”

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New RBS 6 Nations graphics with Alston Elliot “This year, as a separate project, the Six Nations has now got a new graphics look,” said Burns.“We did a test run here and in Ireland last year. Now there’s one RBS 6 Nations graphics feel across all 15 games this year. “Six Nations Rugby contracted Alston Elliott to produce the graphics, as part of this look. The look was created by Screen Scene and then Alston Elliott took the design and prepared it to work on air. “There are Alston Elliott machines in the Observe truck and in the BBC truck. They can generate different version of the graphics: English, French, Italian and Welsh. They’re now very much part of the RBS 6 Nations look and feel. On the ground, it’s a combination of their staff and my staff. “So whether you’re watching on BBC, RTE, France TV or DMAX, it all looks the same,” said Burns. “Then for the world feed, Pitch International distributes it to all the other territories — South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, Argentina. “It’s been a two-year project — a look across the whole competition, whether the broadcaster are commercial or non-commercial,” he said. “It’s all centrally pooled with Alston Elliott; everybody has the same data and we’re all running off the same graphics engine.”

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SVGEUROPEUPDATE

SVG Europe’s Football Production Summit

Match-day production: A view from the top BY FERGAL RINGROSE

A panel of speakers from Italy, Netherlands and the UK joined SVG Editorial Director Ken Kerschbaumer on stage in Barcelona to give us an insight into key innovations taking place in those countries to bring us closer to match-day action

Manuela Baraschi: “The difference in coverage is one of personalisation”

“What would we like? More exclusive matches; more availability from the coaches and players; tactical analysis in the pre-match; and all-week access to the key players” MANUELA BARASCHI 20

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ow do we tell better stories, more cleverly, to engage the viewer? How do we recreate that spine-tingling atmosphere of a raucous crowd in a packed stadium for a top of the table club clash? Manuela Baraschi is head of Sport Production and Operations at Sky Italia. She said,“we’re in a situation where our competitors have the same matches, so the difference in coverage is one of personalisation. For Sky Italy this is the last season of the current bid. “In these three years we have introduced exclusive images from the locker room and tunnel, and additional cameras i.e. I-movix with antiflicker and player/coach cameras. We’ve also gone from 10 to 16 cameras coverage for each top match.We use Piero and Viz Libero for tactical analysis, and a studio on-site for top matches with analysts like Vialli, Boban and Marchegiani. For the big matches we also have Twitter from the pitch and so on. “On match-days,” said Baraschi,“we start and finish with Sky Sport News (SkySport24), covering the pre-match from three hours before kick off and 90 minutes for the post-match. SS24 also covers the training pitch all week long in the build-up to big games.

“We have also connected eight of the stadiums (11 football teams) by fibre to improve the quality of the feed and we’ve reduced the satellite band from 36 to 24 Mhz, using MPEG-4 DVBS2 uplinks without losing quality but reducing connectivity costs. “We’re looking at other technologies such as videostitching for the second screen, but we understand that it is necessary to find a marketing strategy to cover the production costs. “What would we like? More exclusive matches; more availability from the coaches and players; tactical analysis in the pre-match; and all-week access to the key players,” said Baraschi. Premier League Head of Production Nick Morgan told us of the three key areas of responsibility in his position. “I’m the person responsible at the Premier League for Premier League Productions, our international production and distribution arm. Secondly I look after our UK broadcasters, almost like an account manager, making sure they get what they need.And the third part is working with our 20 member clubs to make sure they deliver what’s needed to both domestic and international broadcasters. “In terms of broadcasting we work in a three-year cycle and we’re now in the second year of this one,” said Morgan. “While we’re always looking to enhance our coverage year on year there haven’t been any seismic changes in this cycle. Some of the key differences we’ve brought to our offering over the past couple of years? One, from a domestic point of view, is standardising our offer across all of our clubs. Previously, there were quite a wide variety of approaches among clubs, whether that be camera positions or commentary positions, the level of player and manager engagement and so on. We did a big overhaul of that a couple of years ago, to bring it up to the level we felt was a prerequisite for being part of the Premier League. “From an overseas point of view,” said Morgan, “we’ve brought a number of new tools into our offering. Perhaps most notable is MARS — multi-angle replay system — which has capitalised on the investment we’ve made to allow us capture any moment of a match from a variety of angles, irrespective of whether the director had cut them to line. “Remotely at IMG’s Premier League Productions facility in Stockley Park a producer can watch the match and decide for themselves editorially which are the most interesting moments and angles and then compile the together in a clips channel which we distribute around the world,” he explained. EUROPE SPORTTECH JOURNAL / AUTUMN 2015

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SVG Europe’s Football Production Summit

“We’re an enabler, providing content for broadcasters, rather than being a broadcaster ourselves — we’re giving remote broadcasters more and more opportunity to behave like a host broadcaster, so their analysis at half time can involve more control of the pictures. Historically, as you all know, sitting on a world feed can be quite frustrating when you don’t know what’s happening when and where. “In addition to that we now provide a dedicated wide shot at our matches; it’s there, so you don’t have to hope that the host broadcaster goes back to that shot at the right time. You have total control and can act as if you are the host broadcaster. We’re trying to enable international broadcasters to feel like they’re more a part of the action and part of the domestic experience,” said Morgan.

Hearing the heart of the action “I was delighted to have the opportunity to sit here and talk to all the other broadcasters, because I think we’re all looking for the same goal — which is getting closer to the game,” said Henk van Meerkerk, Head of Production at Fox Sports Netherlands.“And the funny thing is that we’re always talking about cameras; more cameras every time, more 4K, nice graphics and a lot of technology. “But I think the easiest way to get into the game is audio. We’re not allowed to use full audio [for the Eredivisie]. We can use the microphones of the cameras around the pitch, but we’re not allowed to use the conversations of the referees and we’re not allowed to wire players.

• • • •

Henk van Meerkerk: “We’re all looking for the same goal — which is getting closer to the game”

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“When I started in 1995 we placed a camera between the benches, and we put a microphone on the camera,” said van Meerkerk. “That microphone is still there, and I would like to show you a clip from the Netherlands: we’re a small market, and probably most of you have never seen football from the Netherlands before!” he told the Barcelona audience. “The clip has two components. The first is emotion. You’ll see a lot of coaches screaming and yelling to referees, and talking to their players. And nobody in the Netherlands cares about this camera. Nobody cares about the audio; it’s just there, and they [the coaches] know it’s there, and they behave the way they normally do. “Another dimension you’ll see is a high-profile coach and ex-international striker Marco van Basten actually using the camera to explain to the audience why he didn’t like the decision of the referee. He speaks to the camera and also explains to the referee’s boss why they should change certain rules!” Van Meerkerk then showed the audience a clip of recent action from the Eridivisie, with no censorship whatsoever on the utterances of the managers in the technical zone pitch-side. The startled reaction of the crowd, most coming from the larger markets around Europe, suggested that indeed they had never heard

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anything like it in their own country nor would their leagues even consider allowing such colourful language on air in primetime! “Looking at your reaction to the clip proves to me that this should really be the step to get into the game,” van Meerkerk remarked.Will the big European leagues follow this Dutch example?

Inside Sky Sports’ shopping list Mike Ruddell, Head of Technology at Sky Sports UK, took us on a fascinating ride through “a few of the buzzwords and hot topics that are keeping us busy and keeping me awake at night! “Cloud: Everyone’s got a cloud these days; and we’ve seen some really clever advances such as cloud-connected IP cameras and that kind of thing, and a lot of companies are doing good work around transcoding and delivering through the cloud. But in the broadcast space, I haven’t seen a truly killer application,” said Ruddell. “If you’re just taking your application and putting it in your data centre connected to my studios with a big fat pipe, that’s not what cloud means. The benefits of cloud come with virtualisation and all of those kind of things. So if it can reside in my data centre just as well as yours, then it’s not cloud. “IP: the benefits of IP for distribution — data

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connection, files, media, pictures — I think the benefits of that are pretty well understood. The reliability, scalability, integration with IT infrastructure, a lot of that kit already exists. But the questions that are keeping us busy in terms of IP are, where do you draw the line in the production chain from glass to glass? Can we see a world in the future where a Cat-5 cable comes out of a camera and also goes into your set-top box at home? Probably not for a while, but where do you draw the line between that SDI world and the IP world — and in the transitional period do we have to maintain the two things? “Social, second screen and apps: We know the second screen is here to stay, but the challenge is that there are now so many clever apps and things you can do with your iPad and the second screen that it’s really hard to see the wood from the trees sometimes. There must be a dozen cool new things that come past the desk every day to do with apps and social … but at the same time everyone is really keen on engaging a younger audience so apps and social is the way to go. “Remote production: it means many things,” he said.“It could just mean bringing a few camera feeds from the OB back to base and cutting the feeds remotely. The opposite end of the scale — will we get there, maybe we shouldn’t — is remote cameras and nobody on-site, with a great

big resilient network between the site and base. At Sky we’ve dabbled a bit with remote production; the first event of any scale we did was Sky Sports News operation at the 2012 Olympics where we built a studio on top of Westfield. The IP connectivity worked better than we hoped, but we weren’t fully confident so we double-crewed it and worked remotely and on-site. “We’ve seen recently some really cool stuff that Pac-12 Networks have been doing out in California with college basketball: it has proven that the technology is there and it works as long as you’ve got the network between A and B. But depending on what your market is and what country you’re in, and depending on the telco environment, it’s quite hard to make the numbers stack up.You can be sure that if the numbers did stack up already, we’d be doing it a lot more than we currently do. “Ultra HD: Sky’s position on this is fairly clear. We’re testing, we’re learning a great deal. But there has been no commitment to launching a UK service — we’re just

Mike Ruddell, Head of Technology, Sky Sports

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SVG Europe’s Football Production Summit

getting our hands on as much kit as we possibly can and putting it through its paces, so that if the trigger is ever pulled, we know in which direction to head. But for us, fundamentally, the reason that trigger has not been pulled is because the wow factor is not there.We’ve ticked the box that says more pixels; we haven’t yet ticked the box that says high dynamic range, faster pixels, higher frame rate and SMPTE 2020 colour space. “Connectivity: One project we’re running at Sky is improving our connection to the telco providers, and installing a secure platform between Sky Studios and the outside world. We’ve called it the OB Data Gateway. This is Sky-managed IP, so we can effectively buy any IP-delivered service from BT or any other telco around the world, as a managed service with extremely high SLAs which is where we put our premier circuits: we don’t put that on a dodgy bit of internet with a five hundred quid video-toIP encoder. If we can just rent the bandwidth we can just manage all these services ourselves. “We have already saved money here,” said Ruddell. “Some of the secondary video circuits for Formula 1 — the on-boards and so on — moving to VOIP comms instead of ISDN is saving cash. Also on F1, remote editing to save us taking huge amounts of storage out on the road. Lower quality reverse feeds to our regional offices. Cellular and

• • • • • • • • • • •

If it’s live,

ENG contributions come through this system. Giving staff mobile remote data access saves them buying expensive SIM cards when they’re out of the country. And on the Premier League itself we’re delivering pan-cams back to the studio, a locked off camera not pointing at the pitch, showing the reaction of fans which is used for our Soccer Saturday production. “In the old world,” said Ruddell, “if we wanted all our ancillary services at base available to us on a production we had to take them out on the road, meaning bigger OBs and more kit on the trucks. Instead of one centralised system we had to have 20 trucks. So, where we’re heading now, if we think about it as a very clever firewall, it will enable us to effectively not just connect any computer at Sky Studios to any computer on the road but it will let you connect any service run by any user on any computer in the world to any service on a computer back in Sky Studios. “It’s much more grand than an IP address on a box-tobox level, it’s about services. What it means is that all of that stuff can be running either on the trucks or in Sky Studios — in theory, there’s no difference.We haven’t even scratched the surface of what we could do with this. All of the cool buzzword stuff we talked about before, I see as being enabled by this data gateway platform of the future,” Ruddell told the Barcelona audience.

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Ten-match 8K production for FIFA Womens’ World Cup BY FERGAL RINGROSE

uring the wrap-up session at SVG Europe’s Barcelona football conference StefanEric Wildemann, Manager Sales and Distribution FIFA TV, announced that “on the back of the very successful collaboration with NHK for the 2014 FIFA World Cup, NHK will produce ten matches in 8K for the Women’s World Cup 2015 in Canada. It’s going to be a six-camera production in three venues, and obviously the final is part of that, plus the Japan matches. “NKH will then transfer the signal to two public viewings in the USA, in cooperation with the local media rights licensees, and there will be local streaming at the IBCC or elsewhere in Vancouver, along with some screening in Japan. The distribution of the signal will be done by NHK,” Wildemann confirmed. In terms of the overall broadcast production plan for the FIFA Women’s World Cup 2015 in Canada, HBS Head of Production Dan Miodownik said “it’s easily the second biggest production now, after the FIFA World Cup — it’s bigger than the Confederations Cup both in terms of scope of services but also in terms of interest from broadcasters, which is significantly larger than we expected coming out of 2011. The match production plan is, I would say, on a par with big matches at the domestic level, which indicates the interest in this competition. “Canada is obviously a big country,” said Miodownkik, “and we’re struggling with both the geography and time zones. So the plan is to have six fixed OB vans; we’re getting those through Dome Productions who are the biggest producer in Canada. They rank fairly high even in North America, and when they put in a big truck it’s a big truck! “In terms of specialty companies,” he continued, 26

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“Broadcast RF will do our RF solution; remote cameras will come from TV Skyline and Plazamedia — both of those worked with those in Brazil, as did Fletcher in relation to ultra motion. PMT will provide the Spidercam, and ACS Helicopters [will be involved] as and when we need them — the final decision on those games will be taken in the next month or so. “But what this shows you is that we are starting to be able to use this event as a stepping stone, not just coming off the 2014 World Cup but we can also start thinking ahead to what we would want to be doing for the Confederations Cup and World Cup. That has an impact as well on things like digital services and where we’re going with UHD — whether it’s 4K, 8K or somewhere else,” he commented. “It is important that you are offering more than just a match feed, and again that’s replicated here. A slight variation on what we’ve done in having a clips compilation, for Canada we have what’s called an Additional Content Channel (ACC). The idea of that is to output as much content as we possibly can — pre-match, post match and during the game — so that the broadcasters on-site can really take advantage as quickly as possible. That’s replicated by the high-end technical platform we need, both on the trucks at the venues and at the IBCC. “On ENG content: again, another good step in the right direction from FIFA, putting in resources to gather content around the games,” said Miodownik. “Remember this is now a 24 team competition, with double-headers, so you’ve got a lot going on on Match Day Minus One.You’ve got even more going on on Match Day, with teams arriving while another match is taking place. “Those ENG crews will be working like dogs, gathering content not just in and around the training camps at the hotels, but also on Match Day Minus One and then on Match Days mopping up as much content as possible. This content is cut down and sent back to the IBCC where it is then ingested on the Media Server. “The ENG will be full HD. Everything will be logged.We will have a big post operation: in this case we’re going to go more for the cut-downs and not finished ‘craft’ product, though we will produce a little of that. Two types of service in terms of the Media Server access: at the IBCC you can access everything (as has been developed since 2006); and then there will be off-site access, which is news-type not match action,” said Miodownik. EUROPE SPORTTECH JOURNAL / AUTUMN 2015

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SVGEUROPEUPDATE

Paris Marathon & Paris-Roubaix

FTV and Euromedia balance demands of marathon weekend in France BY FABRICE MARINONI

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rance Télévisions produces and broadcasts the Paris Marathon as well as the ParisRoubaix cycling race. This year the two events, organised by the ASO Group, took place over the same time period in April. Euro Media, the service provider in charge of the coverage and broadcasting of both, had to juggle the contrasting requirements of these two demanding events. Bruno Gallais, in charge of wireless production and international business development at Euro Media France, explained: “A total of 80 people were assigned to the two races (a staff of 40 for each). The first marathon runners were expected to arrive around 11.30am, whereas the Paris-Roubaix race began at 12.50pm. In both cases we were able to go live on France Télévisions.” During the Marathon, two pressurised airplanes 04/08/2015flew 14:11:22 over the skies of Paris; one of these subsequently

continued on to the Paris-Roubaix race, thereby covering both events on the same day. “A portable camera equipped with HD Runner from Livetools Technology and a studio camera were placed at the starting line, with the [entirety] managed by the SNG XS2 van(F188) belonging to our subsidiary S-TV,” continued Gallais. In the France 3 Alsace OB unit situated in Strasbourg, director Christophe Baudoin was able to use the footage recorded by the four motorcycles and a helicopter fitted with a Cineflex camera system, and delivered by the HFi4 unit stationed in Avenue Foch, Paris. Meanwhile, for the Paris-Roubaix race the team required two relay aircraft, including a pressurised one and two helicopters equipped with Cineflex systems. With the Paris Marathon and Paris-Roubaix cycling event, the second week of April 2015 was a very busy one

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Paris Marathon & Paris-Roubaix

for Euro Media Group On the ground at the Roubaix Velodrome, the director Jean Maurice Ooghe (production director of the Tour de France) counted on four trail bikes to record the images and two for the sound recordings. Given the extremely difficult nature of the cobbled areas, these were the only motorbikes that could be used to film the peloton. In addition, for the first time on this event one of the organisation’s assist motorbikes (the one that supplies wheels to riders in case of a puncture) was fitted with a Toshiba mini-camera in order to provide a fully immersive live broadcasting experience. “The images were very interesting because the bike’s engine was turned off so there was no shaking and the sound recording was of a high quality. It was therefore a totally immersive experience [involving] one of the aspects of the event that is rarely covered, i.e. wheel changes when there is a puncture,” said Gallais. Euro Media’s HFR41 OB unit received all the RF signals and in turn retransmitted them to the France 3 Nord Pas de Calais OB unit located in Lille. OB units HFi5 and HFi6 situated high up in Mons en Pévèle and Meudon (close to Paris) made it possible to cover the entire race without any picture.

On bike-cameras were integral to coverage of the 2015 Paris-Roubaix cycling event

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SVGEUROPEUPDATE

World Snooker Championship

Cue the OB: How IMG produces snooker coverage for the BBC BY PHILIP STEVENS

“For archiving we have now switched to LTO disks because they require less space for storage” KEVIN ORWIN, NEP VISIONS

heffield’s iconic Crucible Theatre was once again the venue for, arguably, snooker’s most prestigious tournament — the World Championship. Starting on 18 April, this tournament, which has been running since 1927, was played over 17 days in what has been described as the unique and intense atmosphere of the Crucible. Alongside coverage shown on BBC, this event is also aired by British Eurosport. In fact, the worldwide audience has been estimated to be around 400 million. Production of the tournament has been provided by IMG for the past 18 years, with OB facilities coming from NEP Visions since 2012. “We normally start planning for the tournament in early February,” said executive producer Alison Witkover.

“Having said that, as this is now a regular event for us, we have a pretty good idea of what is required. However, what is really good is that the organisers do not just send us the schedule and say ‘that’s that’. We maintain a close — and excellent — relationship with the organisers and that means they work with us to ensure match schedules marry with transmission times as much as possible.” Witkover, who has been producing snooker coverage for 15 years, says that her daily schedule during the tournament begins with the creation of a running order the previous evening. This is then emailed to the presenter, Hazel Irvine or Jason Mohammad. “I also discuss with the seven feature producers assigned to the championship what material we can create that relates to the players in action the following day. We have two ENG crews, four editors and three FCP edit suites on site that will produce this insert material for us. The feature producers are very pro-active in coming up with ideas for the programmes. I normally allow them freedom to make those features as long as they need to be — within reason. If the story is worth two minutes, then we’ll go with that — if four minutes then that is the duration we will try to accommodate.” Alongside the material created at the event, a number of short inserts – averaging one minute or one minute and a

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Equipment Hire OB Trucks EUROPE SPORTTECH JOURNAL / AUTUMN 2015

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World Snooker Championship

SVGEUROPEUPDATE

half â&#x20AC;&#x201D; are produced in advance, enabling them to be played out between frames, if required. Each morning at 0900 Witkover has a meeting with the presenter to talk through the schedule for that day. On a daily basis, too, she will liaise with tournament organisers regarding walk-on time for the players, interval durations, gaining player access and so on. Then Witkover, or one of the other programme editors, takes charge of the presentation of each live programme as it is transmitted. As far as the relationship with British Eurosport is concerned, Witkover says that alongside providing the world feed, there is liaison regarding start time of matches and commentary positions. During the early stages of the tournament, Doc Directing: Senior Match director Steve Docherty has more than 20 years experience when two snooker tables are in use, space is of tournament coverage limited within The Crucible for a presentation studio. During that Challenges of the production period, presenters Irvine or Mohammad and their pundit guests NEP Visions provides four trucks for the tournament for production broadcast from the nearby Sheffield Winter Gardens. During the last and editing. For the main table coverage, its HD4 double expanding five days of the event, and with only one table in use, there is room for a trailer is used, while the slightly smaller Voyager 2 is employed for glass studio within the auditorium of The Crucible to be constructed. In matches on table two. In both vehicles directors carry out their own both cases, however, the production is handled from a scanner within vision mixing on Grass Valley units that have been adapted to allow a broadcast compound located at the main venue. wipe transitions to be carried out easily from aux buttons and for

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World Snooker Championship

states Steve ‘Doc’ Docherty, the senior table director with more than 20 years’ experience of the match coverage.“I like reading the game and anticipating where the next shot is going to be played.As far as a challenge is concerned, because the sessions can be long, maintaining concentration is vital. Then making sure we get the best shot, replaying where it helps to tell the story and putting in appropriate graphics to enhance the viewer’s experience.” During the early rounds when twin tables are in use, there are two additional match directors working alongside Docherty. He goes on to say while delivering the pictures of the game has remained similar over the years, the technology surrounding replays and graphics and, of course, better Pres truck monitors: Presentation from Sheffield is handled from the Visions ‘Horizon’ truck quality images with High Definition, has onscreen Vizrt graphics to be inserted each time the main camera 1 improved. “We try to use far more replays from different angles and is selected. Similarly, the Telestrator can be readily overlaid through a show essentials such as the spin on the ball. The director decides on the angle of the replay and the EVS operator plays them in as directed.” one-button press. When two tables are in use, nine cameras are used for each, with a Presentation comes from Visions’ Horizon vehicle with the director here assisted by a vision mixer. Editing and archive material is handled beauty shot offered to both tables. A hot head is used for an overhead shot of table one. For the finals, a Jimmy Jib will be brought in to by Voyager 1 truck. So, what makes a good snooker director? “I really enjoy the game,” supplement the coverage.

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World Snooker Championship

“We will have twelve cameras for the final, including one I-Movix Sprintcam hi-motion camera,” says Docherty. He goes on,“Covering snooker is quite different to other sports. You are working in an area that is very small and this presents a major challenge for camera operators. There are few sports where they get to stand right next to the athletes.” That close proximity, says Doc, can affect a player’s performance, their career, and their chances of winning a world championship.“The way we prepare is to get the right cameramen out there in the arena who are experienced and who are known and trusted by the players. Camera operators know not to move as the shot is about to be executed. So we tend to use the same people.”

Providing the facilities That stability is also a theme for OB provider, NEP Visions.“We cover three snooker tournaments a year for IMG and because the set-ups are very similar, we try to keep continuity of trucks, equipment and people,” explains Visions’ engineering manager, Kevin Orwin. “There are still challenges and one of the biggest is the sheer scale of this tournament. Coverage starts at 1000 and goes on until the last match has finished. There are four trucks to service, feeds to Eurosport throughout the whole day and there are interactive feeds, as well. And, of course, during the early rounds there is the additional remote venue at the Winter Gardens for which we have to provide connectivity.” Orwin goes on to report that one major innovation for this year’s

Sheffield event has been in the change of supplier for the review and analysis of predictive shots through the use of virtual technology. While producer Witkover was in Beijing on another assignment, she was approached by Chinese company, Rigour, about providing replay technology and following an intense evaluation process it was decided to use the system for the 2015 tournament. The system has two main functions — site reset and augmented reality. The site reset function enables a static picture of the table to be captured and displayed on a large screen in the playing arena. This allows the match referee to place the balls back in their original location should re-spotting be needed following a foul stroke. Augmented reality allows 3D technology to simulate the scene, and within two seconds the table can be viewed from multiple angles allowing viewers to see the various options that might be open to players. “We trialled during the earlier Masters snooker tournament and was found to be precise,” says Orwin.“It is extremely accurate and helps commentators to decide in advance whether a shot is achievable.” He says that another advantage is that the system has the ability to feed an image into a large TV monitor in the venue to enable a referee to precisely re-spot a ball in the event that a foul shot needs to be retaken. Orwin reports that although some archive material is on tape and can be played into programmes in that format, most of the workflow is tapeless.“For archiving we have now switched to LTO disks because they require less space for storage.”

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SVGEUROPEUPDATE

SportTech Europe 2015

The road ahead for 4K production BY DAVID FOX

SportTech 2015 featured a session titled The Great Debate: Post-NAB 2015, Can We Define a 4K Roadmap For The Future? The consensus was that we can, but it won’t be simple…

rian Clark, Commercial and Technical Projects Director at NEP Visions, said: “There are technical hurdles, but they are moving hurdles,” and it’s not just a matter of resolution, but also colour, frame rate and dynamic range. “Forget pixels. Pixels are easy. It’s the other bits that are going to be more difficult,” he said. CTV is also pursuing those moving hurdles. It built a 4K-capable truck in the middle of last year, and “things have moved on a tremendous amount since then,” said Barry Johnstone, CTV Managing Director. “We put everything we could in there to try to protect ourselves from the future. Having gone to NAB, I’m not sure if we should take all that stuff out and start again.” The OB company is part of the Euro Media Group, which is looking to invest in new UHD-capable (or even 8K-capable) cameras and hopes to start a three-to-five year renewal process of more than 400 cameras later this year.“We would like to standardise,” said Johnstone, which is why CTV didn’t buy any cameras for its new truck, as it

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is only this year that there is a choice of cameras for the sports market — although he liked some of what he saw from each of the manufacturers at NAB. NEP is also looking to buy new UHD cameras “pretty soon”, as it has a chassis being built at the moment, and is also looking at IP networking and how the market is changing. “There is a dynamic that has changed very quickly over the last six months,” said Clark. He believes that the market has gone from wondering if UHD is valid, and how few UHD cameras you could get away with, to how to do the same as we do with HD, but in UHD.

Commercial considerations Unfortunately, the cost of UHD is an issue. As BBC Sport’s director, Barbara Slater, told another SportTech Europe session, broadcasters are under huge pressure to cut budgets (in her case by 20%), so “who is going to pay for this investment in 4K?,” asked Steve Knee, Managing Director, Cloudbass. EUROPE SPORTTECH JOURNAL / AUTUMN 2015

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SportTech Europe 2015

Peter Schut, Axon Digital Design’s CTO, added that some broadcasters still have problems justifying the added expense of HD. In the Netherlands, The Voice is shot in SD because the commercial director of RTL won’t pay 15% extra that the production company is asking to do it in HD, because he doesn’t believe that many more people will watch it. Instead, it is upconverted for transmission. Clark believes that UHD will be driven by commercial considerations, “and I don’t mean in terms of being able to monetise 4K”, but whether to keep up with rivals or to seek competitive advantage. However, it will still require an audience. “If viewers switch over between HD and 4K and don’t see the difference, they are going to cancel their subscriptions,” added Knee. Unless viewers see the same rationale to move to UHD as they did from SD and HD, “we’ll have spent all this money for nothing,” he believes. “When we’ve been talking to broadcasters about 4K, we need to deliver the technical solution in a way that the production teams can implement it in exactly the same way that they normally tell their story, and talking to EVS, to Evertz and Sony, the technology is just not there yet. If we want to do 4K through an EVS network, the restrictions are going to be huge, moving this amount of data around.” Indeed, one of the biggest question marks is over replay devices, and what will be practical when dealing with four times the data, said Clark.“If you are to mimic the number of replay channels you put into an English Premier League football match and try to replicate that in 4K, it’s a phenomenal amount of EVSs. They just don’t physically fit in

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the truck. So, what are we going to do? We’re going to have to look at doing it in a different way.”

Question of dynamic range Clark remains unconvinced that UHD by itself will be enough to attract viewers, however, he believes that wider dynamic range can make a big difference. At NAB, he watched a demonstration showing identical HD screens, one showing Rec.709, the other HDR 2020 colour space, and believes that this is the difference “that will drive consumers.” Having gone to CES in Las Vegas in January, Clark believes that TV sets are only months away from delivering HDR, and he’d buy one. A couple of years ago Canon’s Larry Thorpe said viewers would need at least a 50-inch TV to gain anything from UHD; at NAB he said it will actually require at least a 65-inch screen, and Johnstone wondered how many viewers in Europe would have room for it. As Schut pointed out, also having visited CES, the consumer electronics industry “doesn’t care about the broadcast industry,” and is charging ahead with UHD screens where the only difference is the higher resolution (sometimes at lower frame rates - 25/30p). He agreed with Clark that HDR is the key,“but I think 4K is the vehicle to get HDR […], to be honest, 1080p HDR would have been fine.” Distributing UHD to viewers is also a challenge. Dock10 handles video and broadband distribution around the MediaCityUK site, including to apartments, with a single fibre delivering triple-play

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SVGEUROPEUPDATE

SportTech Europe 2015

packages, with bursts of up to 100Mbps, which means that people use a lot of OTT services. It has the capability to deliver UHD, with HFR and HDR, once such services launch,“but that is very much on a cluster basis. How that

rolls out down the street into Victorian and Georgian homes is another challenge,” said Paul Clennell, dock10’s CTO. When it built its seven HD studios, it used a very modular design, so it can simply replace boxes to move a studio to UHD. Indeed, it has been talking to manufacturers about doing that for one studio as a showcase and may do some live productions as an experiment in the next year. This would mean it wouldn’t need to be expensive. “A lot of that equipment could be hired, we’d just purchase the core infrastructure,” explained Clennell. “The key thing is customer demand for making that transition,” which he thinks will happen gradually over the next two to four years, coinciding with technology refresh rates. It has a Cisco 10Gbps network alongside baseband and will transition from baseband to IP as necessary. However, it is already dealing with 4K every day, as rushes come in for post production. “The vast majority of what we ingest for drama comes in 4K and stays in 4K,” he added.

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SportTech Europe 2015

Representatives from Imagine Communicaitons, Quantel-Snell, Ross Video, Grass Valley, EVS and Sony during the session, ‘Live Production over IP: Charting the Transition from Baseband’

No ‘Big Bang’ for live video-over-IP transition BY WILL STRAUSS

ive sport producers, facilities and broadcasters will be given the chance to take a phased or hybrid approach to the transition from baseband to IP, according to representatives of six of the broadcast industry’s most influential equipment manufacturers. Speaking during the ‘Live Production over IP: Charting the Transition from Baseband’ session at SVG Europe’s Old Trafford SportTech conference, senior sales and marketing executives from Sony, Grass Valley, Quantel-Snell, EVS, Imagine Communications and Ross Video were united in their plans to develop IP-based products for every part of the television workflow, especially for 4k. But while all six were optimistic that IP would eventually be the foundation upon which all live TV is made, each admitted there were still hurdles to overcome before SDI and baseband video is completely replaced by standard Ethernet connectivity. As such they all agreed that IP should be introduced in a phased or hybrid way that will allow users to benefit from off-the-shelf connectivity but without the need to instantly discard expensive legacy video equipment.

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Steve Dupaix, Senior Director, Strategic Partner Marketing at Imagine Communications, summed up the manufacturing fraternity’s approach.“Imagine is focused on the transition to IP for the whole broadcast workflow,” he said.“We are committed to the production space and to producing infrastructure products that will support it and help [end-users] to transition to it.” Other speakers followed suit, with the speed of the transition getting particular attention. “As IP evolves it is important that it stays at the right pace,” said Andy Newham, Ross Video EMEA Business Development Manager for Switchers and openTruck, while Trevor Francis, Director of Broadcast at Quantel-Snell, asserted: “It doesn’t need to be a big bang. Our strategy is to allow people to migrate to IP at a pace that they choose, putting IP alongside existing infrastructure.” The ‘hybrid’ model was a constant theme throughout the conversation. Laurent Petit, EVS, Market Solution Manager, OB and Live Production, was keen to point out that his company’s IP products are designed to aid a phased transition.“The reason that we have invested time in developing our IP gateway [XTAccess] is because we know that there is a huge install base of video servers in the market that will not be changed in a day just because the world is going to IP,” he said.“The idea was to introduce a product that could leverage the existing infrastructure and go step-by-step into the IP domain, allowing users to gain experience with the different IP challenges — in terms of interoperability and synchronisation — and then be ready EUROPE SPORTTECH JOURNAL / AUTUMN 2015

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SportTech Europe 2015

for the next generation where everything can be integrated together.” Grass Valley also produces intermediary technology but, as Sam Peterson, Senior Segment Marketing Manager — Live, pointed out, there are opportunities for naked IP connectivity. He explained: “We have gateway modules too but because we have servers and cameras and switchers, we have taken the next step and that is to do tests with direct connectivity between devices. The one application for us that we do think has some immediate merit is in Ultra Motion cameras.” Peterson suggested that with a Grass Valley LDX86 high-speed camera it is possible to take an IP signal out of the base station on one wire instead of on two or three and then inject that Ultra Motion live into a slo-mo replay server. “That is one place where we can aggregate those multiple links together,” he said.“We’ll see how that pans out. We’re ready to test this in professional applications. That is the only way that we will find out how this works out. We have a couple of truck user partners that are looking to develop it.”

Coming into its own While IP offers a myriad of opportunities, it was agreed that it only really comes into its own when you start to look at the move to high frame rates (HFR), high dynamic range (HDR) and higher resolution content such as 4k.“To be honest, if you are using HD, you cannot see a benefit with IP because SDI is a mature technology and is a very

SVGEUROPEUPDATE

reasonable price,” said Hiroshi Yamauchi, Sony Professional Solutions Europe, Senior Manager 4K IP Production. “It is more appropriate for a hybrid HD and 4K use, that might include HDR or HFR where you want real-time and low latency. Our message at Sony is that IP is for when you are thinking about future investment.” The panel also agreed, generally, on the suggestion that industry standards need to be finalised before IP can become commonplace in live sport. Newham pinpointed TICO, a patent-pending visually lossless lightweight compression specifically designed for live TV. “Mostly Ethernet works at 3Gb or 10Gb and there are quite a lot of limitations there,” he said. “So we need to look at some form of compression within the IP and we don’t have a standard for that yet. We are doing some work with TICO to try to identify some sort of low level compression at about 4:1 that can work realistically so you can transport 4k over 3Gb. On a 10Gb [connection] you can do it over three streams.” Dupaix added:“Using these lightweight compression techniques, the compression lives in the active video area so if you look at the signal on a monitor you will just see noise but all the timing is preserved for a 1080p signal. That means that you can do clean, quiet switching through a traditional SDI infrastructure with TICO compression and still do audio dunking or I/O channel swapping. That is significant because it makes it possible to do 4k production through both an IP-based fabric or an SDI based fabric with very low latency.”

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“The number one handicap to doing a live production remotely is the timeliness of the video you are watching” STEVE DUPAIX, IMAGINE COMMUNICATIONS

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Peterson from Grass Valley said TICO was on his company’s agenda too with Ultra Motion.“When it comes to 4k for this,” he said, “We’re looking at TICO. That is a reasonable first step and it is the best solution we have today.” Prompted by a question from the audience about the possibility of building a remote/centralised facility “back at base” and deploying cameras on location, bringing the pictures back as IP, the panel offered a mixed response. “One element that needs to be answered is what type of connectivity do you have?” asked EVS’ Petit. “It will largely depend on that. You need to have a 10Gb pipe in order to transport a few signals. If you want to do a 20 or more camera production and still have small bandwidth to carry the signals, we are talking about a different types of compression that would not fit into this IP domain.” The issue of latency was then addressed.With Imagine’s Dupaix wondering how much of a delay a broadcaster could tolerate.“The number one handicap to doing a live production remotely is the timeliness of the video you are watching,” he said. “If you are expecting to have only a two frame, 40 millisecond, delay that is not going to happen. For secondary channels and other things — such as graphics production — that can tolerate a delay, then it is possible. But with live production, trying to capture the

SportTech Europe 2015

action in real-time and respond to it, that is the real bug. It needs to stay local to the truck.” Newham from Ross was more black and white with his answer.“We can kind of do [remote production] now with a given latency if we’re talking about HD. For 4k, it gets a bit more complicated.” Future proofing was another strong argument for IP with Peterson highlighting that the drive to better picture quality is not going to stop at 4k 50 frames per second, which means that the advent of 12G-SDI is unlikely to be sufficient. He said: “IP gives us a little bit more flexibility for the next thing whether it is 4k 100 fps or 4k 100 fps UHD. Plus what are we going to do in colour space and High Dynamic Range? 12G-SDI is just another stop on the continued chain of developing higher resolution video systems.” “12G-SDI, we are supporting it,” added Francis. “But it is going to be a temporary distraction. Not a destination. The fact that IP technology isn’t aware that it is carrying video, therefore does not know or care about frame rates and codecs, you cannot bring it quick enough.” When it comes to HFR and HDR, Dupaix concluded: “The quicker we get to the IP domain, the quicker those types of technologies will come to the fore and we can start to revolutionise our industry.”

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Champions Summit 2015

Gert Zimmermann, moderator; Alissia ILjaitsch, Vectorform; Kathleen Schrúter, Fraunhofer Institut; Alexander Rúsner, ProSiebenSat.1

Emerging IP technologies set to boost remote production BY BIRGIT HEIDSIEK

he 2015 Champions’ Summit in Berlin — which was produced by Sky in association with SVG Europe and featured Blackmagic Design as event sponsor — was characterised by much discussion of the new UHD format as well as Sky’s camera tracking system that combines virtual and actual images in real-time by sending data to the 3D server. The impact of advanced technologies such as IP-based production and remote production on the broadcast industry constitutes a key issue for content creators, technical providers and TV stations. The opportunities that come with the change when broadcast goes IP are promising, but there is some feeling that the industry is not yet ready to move completely into the IP world. “What is the advantage for the customer when broadcast goes IP?” asked Markus Osthaus, CEO of the service provider TVN Group. “The production will 42

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become cheaper and benefit from a broader range of technical opportunities, but the advantages are not reproduced yet.” After the last IBC and NAB he planned to build a first IP-based OB van in 2016, but this ambitious project was ultimately put on hold. “There is no common standard,” underlined Osthaus. “As long as there is no continuous production workflow, it remains unclear in which direction the standard is going to develop.” “The whole industry will change tremendously in the next four to six years,” said Daniel Url, CEO at German system house Wellen&Nöthen, who is convinced that an IP infrastructure will fundamentally affect the production costs. “Standard technology is cheaper; there will be less cable connections and lower weight in the OB and we can do multicasting.” Video processing will be replaced by a software-based infrastructure and the production units will become more EUROPE SPORTTECH JOURNAL / AUTUMN 2015

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Champions Summit 2015

flexible. “IP is an issue for us but we also focus on the virtualisation of servers. A hundred servers are replaced by one single rack and a play centre,” said Url. A lot of content will be moved into the cloud and IP is forcing this development. Broadcasters might even create their own cloud.“The industry is about to change but the investment cycles won’t because an IP-based back-end doesn’t require [the rebuilding of] the whole TV station.” According to Thomas Riedel, CEO of Riedel Communications, it takes seven years to pay back the costs of an OB van. “In this business there are only tiny margins,” he said. The migration from HD to an UHD infrastructure is easier if it is IP-based, while true ‘connectivity’ means the ability to have access from anywhere in the network. In terms of remote production, there is a common consensus in the broadcast industry that this is more or less already happening. “Remote production can save you a fortune,” said Colin Cradock, COO, Production Associates.“For instance, on our biggest OB van there are five to six engineers but when we do a remote production, we need only three.” Robert Kis, managing director TV Skyline, considers flight-boxes as a good alternative to a mobile OB van.“For our production in Asia we had the requirement to provide

the same equipment as in Cologne,” explained Kis,“but we brought everything in boxes. We had an OB van without any chassis. But for a single event it is more efficient to use an OB van.” Summing up, Ludwig Schäffer, CEO MTI Teleport, added: “Canada already proved at the Olympics in London three years ago that this is technically not a problem. We are on the move of a huge change. There will be a lot of technical opportunities when the IP [approach is] available for the remote production.”

New ways of telling stories While IP-based production requires IT experts that can face the new challenges in the broadcast world, it is not necessarily an easy task to locate new talent with this specialised know-how. And if anything, the shortfall is becoming greater since huge data centres are able to pay much higher salaries than broadcasters. This was one of the messages that emerged from the Champions’ Summit in Berlin on June 4, which was hosted by Sky in association with SVG Europe and featured Blackmagic Design as event sponsor. “The employee is the DNA of a company,” said Joachim Wildt, CEO, Plazamedia. “This is the key [to the] success of a company.“

“The employee is the DNA of a company. This is key [to the] success of a company“ JOACHIM WILDT, CEO, PLAZAMEDIA

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Plazamedia GmbH TV- und Film-Produktion, a subsidiary of Constantin Medien, receives about 150 applications for each employment opportunity. “There is no lack in terms of quantity, but [there is] in terms of quality.” Meanwhile, the core business of Sportcast is to provide technical services as well as to coordinate media services. The apprenticeship for a media management assistant has received a decreasing number of candidates since 1997. Alexander Günther, who is in charge of the management at Sportcast, observed that young people are fascinated by the new exciting media world but aren’t always clear on how they wish to specialise: “Generation Y has a different understanding [about] what work will be like.” It is a different situation, however, when it comes to creative roles. Sportcast coordinates about 700 productions every year. “We [have a demand for] qualified candidates for production, camera, slo-mo and highlight editing,” said Günther. Besides training for audio-visual media designers, the DFB daughter company also hires lateral entrants. “This leads us back to the issue of quality.” The parameters that are expected at Sportcast include technical, content-based methodical competences. To pick a recent example, the requirement to deliver the Bundesliga games encouraged

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Champions Summit 2015

the Sportcast team to recognise that they have to book the slo-mo operators themselves because they will be editing the highlights. For Alissia Iljaitsch, executive director EMEA Vectoform, it is clear that when it comes to emerging production techniques, it is “the details that count.” In order to get closer to the customer, she suggested the use of wearables that deliver these richer details. “Television needs to change. The event has to play the major role,” added Kathleen Schröter from Berlinbased Frauhofer Institute.“We have to develop new ways of storytelling.” Alesander Rösner, SVP Sport ProSiebenSat.1, wondered if a new visual language will attract a bigger audience. “In the US, boxing is a mix of sports and entertainment.” In Germany, there are also ongoing experiments with new techniques. Schröter refers to a recent boxing match in which a compact HD camera was attached to the tie of the referee: “This generated a great amount of word of mouth. It is very fast and can be used live.” But a new visual language can only be introduced if there is a general consensus about its potential, remarked Alessandro Reitano, director sports production at Sky Germany.

EUROPE SPORTTECH JOURNAL / AUTUMN 2015

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Champions League Final

Olivier Gaches, UEFA Digital Media Solutions Manager

Finishing touch for UEFA NGS with partners deltatre and EBU BY FERGAL RINGROSE

The Champions League Final in Berlin saw the final test showcase for UEFA’s Next Generation Services (NGS) concept, with its partners deltatre and the EBU, ahead of full deployment for the next three year Champions League cycle starting with the 2015-2016 season

“What used to be in the Future Zone is now here, and it’s real” OLIVIER GACHES, UEFA

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EFA Next Generation Services involves a new digital component with content in the cloud and all content available as turnkey services; and a broadcast piece with content delivered to a new NGS EBU UEFA Box. Broadcasters will have access to a wider selection of clips and content from a selected number of feeds for exploitation across second screen digital platforms. UEFA will also be providing broadcasters with an enhanced graphics, data and statistics service, and deploying a new audio watermarking mechanism embedded into the multilateral world feed. The biggest challenges facing the partners have involved how to deliver NGS across 146 games ‘from Arsenal to Zenit’, and how to do so eight times in parallel for each Match Day with no central IBC to handle connectivity, control and distribution.

At the UEFA Digital TV & Digital Media Showcase area in the TV Compound on Final Match Day Minus One, an ebullient UEFA Digital Media Solutions Manager Olivier Gaches told SVG Europe, “what used to be in the Future Zone is now here, and it’s real. For the next UCL cycle we are investing in a new piece of technology for our TV graphics van, powered by deltatre, in order to do more advanced content. For that we receive data from spotters and a tracking solution from the venue for match data in order to power the on-air graphics and also our Content Factory. “What’s new, on top of that, is that we’re going to ingest 12 camera feeds. From these feeds we’re going to have a remote production, where we can see the multi and pick up key match events. When we see a goal we go into the van, where there are 12 camera feeds, and we keep 12 different camera angles for the event. Then we generate a proxy version that goes to the editorial guys to pick up the event. So, the first thing we are doing is multi-angle clips,” said Gaches. “The second thing we are doing, on top of the 12 feeds now we will now grab the audio feed from the HD truck. We embed EUROPE SPORTTECH JOURNAL / AUTUMN 2015

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Champions League Final

this with audio tags and we re-ingest the audio signal into the truck to mix it in channel 7 and 8, and then uplink that as multilateral feeds available to all broadcasters. So for all Champions League matches we will produce multilateral coverage with audio watermarks. “And in addition,” said Gaches, “we need isolated camera streams as well. Out of the 12 camera feeds we are going to stream three in order to have that content available for tablets, phones or PC. “How do we bring this content back to UEFA central Content Factory? We went to the EBU and asked them, out of your satellite transmission could you please provide us with 50 Mbps bandwidth dedicated for file transfer. They developed the technology in the mux in order to have the live coverage and this 50 Mbps bandwidth where we push multi-angle clips and live streaming. That’s on top of the satellite, and then they developed a box, feeding into a receiver, in order to store all these assets. That’s super cool,” said Gaches, “because we are now able to do coverage from Baku to Wembley; no matter where the stadium is we are going to have consistent coverage. “In order to finance all this, we said to the EBU, why not have a receive

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box that can be provided to the broadcasters in order for them to have all this content directly into their premises in a near-live manner? We have boxes to power the UEFA Content Factory and Livex [UEFA clips archive], and then there is an option for the broadcasters to buy the box in order to receive content. “So, live broadcast-quality multi-angle clips from the venue; and because we have our flagship Livex as a browser-based clips distribution platform, if you have a box you can access that legacy broadcast quality content. Livex is an on-demand solution; or, you can subscribe and we’ll push some of this content out to you. You

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Champions League Final

need to have a strong editorial willingness in order to use this content; you need to have your creative team with you to get the best out of it,” he suggested. “The Super Cup in Tbilisi in August will be the first match, then the qualifiers, and then onto Match Day One of Champions League 20152016 season. We are empowering the TV graphics van into a multiservice van. We now have no issue, whether we’re in Baku, Berlin or Wembley; we have the van, we have the SNG, we have our transmission ready — with our partners deltratre and EBU,” said Gaches.

deltatre: the technical challenges Gilles Mas, deltatre, World Football Unit & Digital Host Broadcast Director, told SVG Europe,“we are kicking off for Super Cup in August, so this is the final rehearsal. There are many challenges, which we have worked on with our friends from the EBU. It is a heavy set-up to orchestrate and for all this collaboration to happen. But I think we are now confident and we all know each other well enough so that if there’s a crisis we can call each other! We are ready.” “We’ve been pushing the services to broadcasters worldwide for six months in testing; there is high interest and good take up.We’re getting there, both from an interest perspective by the broadcasters and at a project level as well. The vans are all equipped now; we had to upgrade them all with digital ingest capability, encoding and so on. “The complexity of Champions League Match Day, with eight venues in parallel, IP over satellite … it’s not as if we have fibres everywhere.

As we want to be standalone we are working with the EBU; on top of the SNG they provide us with IP capability over satellite so that we can be independent,” said Mas. “We plug our van into the OB production, we do the digital creation, and then we uplink everything through them [the EBU] using IP bandwidth over satellite. And then we downlink into the networks for repurposing. That, over eight games, with latency and so on, is a technical challenge. “In parallel to the clip generation process we have what we call a central resource system.” He said. “In every stadium we have two spotters who are logging action, plus the player-tracking system; all this is compiled by the van into data feeds and those data feeds are re-injected as metadata for the clips. “So what we are following is more or less the timecode of the game, and when a clip is created it inherits automatically all the metadata that is linked to that event. The metadata enrichment is not done manually; it’s actually inherited from the central resource system we deploy. “EVS is playing a big role,” said Mas. “We are using C-Cast, and the partner line-up is constant. This [NGS] has never been done before on such a scale, on such an operational model with eight venues and connectivity over satellite. We are creating clips in broadcast and digital quality, and handing the broadcast quality to the EBU so they can deliver it directly to the box — and then we are populating all those other services ourselves. This production chain has never been done before, never to such a scale.”

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Champions League Final

Sony’s HDC-4300 4K cameras overcomes the depthof-field issues that have plagued 4K productions

4K production takes a leap at Champions League Final BY KEN KERSCHBAUMER

he global game of football continues to drive technical innovation as well as the broader consumer electronics industry and this year’s Champions League Final in Berlin was no exception. UEFA’s 4K production of the match proved that developments related to 4K cameras and lenses in the past six months are ready to make a difference and overcome many of the first-generation 4K production difficulties. The first difference was simple numbers. When UEFA produced last year’s Champions League Final in 4K the production only had four Sony PMV-F55 cameras. But this year’s production included 12 cameras, with new Sony HDC4300 4K cameras working alongside four Sony F55 cameras. Those cameras were then fed into Sony PWS-4400 4K servers and cut using the Sony MVS-X series multi-format switcher inside an OB unit provided by TopVision. The second difference was the production quality. Prior to the first quarter of 2015 any evaluation of a 4K sports production began with a very large negative: the lack of a true 4K camera that offered the depth of field and focus that is required for a live sports event. That not only challenged camera operators to work hard to rack focus but also to maintain focus on the object of interest. The new Sony HDC-4300 cameras solve those issues. The result, from a viewing standpoint, was a more consistent production where the entire image was in focus, 50

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giving the viewer a true sense of sitting in the stands. HD, of course, has provided a similar sense of sitting in the stands. But that is why the third part of the equation on display in Berlin (and across 13 Sky sports bars across Germany) was so important: the size and quality of the display. It measured 85 inches diagonally and when sitting at a proper viewing distance of 1.5 picture heights (approximately six or seven feet) the emotional impact of 4K was palpable. Expressions on players’ faces were readily apparent and tattoos on players’ arms and legs were detailed. And of course the textures of hair, uniforms, the field, and more were also discernable. It was, simply put, an amazing experience swimming in visual information overload. There is still plenty of work to be done with respect to 4K production and even more work to be done when it comes to UHD distribution. But UEFA’s efforts in 2015 lay the foundation for UHD football production in 2016 that will transform not only the Champions League but also UEFA’s Euro 2016 tournament next June and July in France. And given what was on display this year (and anticipated improvements between now and next year from not only Sony but also nearly every other equipment manufacturer) it appears the public will have plenty of reasons to make the investment in 4K/UHD consumer displays. EUROPE SPORTTECH JOURNAL / AUTUMN 2015

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Champions League Final

Berlin 2015: Inside ZDF’s host operation BY KEN KERSCHBAUMER

he Champions League Final once again puts a local broadcast production team to the test and this year it is up to a 220-person team from German public broadcaster ZDF to make sure the world’s football fans enjoy the match in the best possible way. Eckhard Gödickemeier, ZDF, production manager, leads the team that has been hard at work on the project for more than 18 months. The production plan has grown to include a massive compound with more than 10 OB units for the host feeds, 90 vehicles for the unilateral feeds, office trailers, a technology pavilion from UEFA, and a Technical Operations Centre that handles all signal provisioning for rights holders thanks to a massive 1,028×1,028 router. The match is being played at Berlin’s Olympic Stadium, a stadium whose founding stones were laid long ago but is still ready for today’s broadcast needs thanks to a refurbishment for the 2006 World Cup. “It’s brand new on the inside and from my point of view is one of the best refurbishments,” says Gödickemeier.

“There is pre-cabling and the stadium is huge and that is the major problem as the cable runs are really long.” The compound itself is located only a few steps from the stadium with cable running from the compound to the stadium via a cable bridge. Along with the cabling challenge was simply the need to map out who and what goes where in the compound. “By the last stage we had more done more than 20 compound layouts and it was like playing Tetris,” Gödickemeier says. “But we were able to start early compared to others who didn’t have that big of a time advantage. Our first planning started before the last final [in Lisbon last May].” Plazamedia is ZDF’s production partner and TVN will be providing the OB units for the main host feed. The three entities have been working together since the beginning of the 2015 football season to make sure the production team is ready for the big match. “We have also had the same camera and EVS crews working together so they are warmed up,” adds Gödickemeier.

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Champions League Final

Along with the OB units ZDF is also providing a Technical Operations Centre that it has used on previous events, like Winter Sports, where the broadcaster plays host. “We have a specialised team of 12 to 14 people who do the signal provisioning and master control which is great,” explains Gödickemeier.“We have all the equipment in-house and all in boxes so we can set it up easily. The production makes use of 40 cameras and 14 EVS replay servers to deliver what is, for all intents and purposes, a World Cup level production. “We learned from our colleagues who have done this before and asked them how did you handle innovation?,” says Gödickemeier.“But the aim here is not to put in big innovations; the aim is to deliver the production properly. Therefore we really don’t care about innovation.” The stadium does have some quirks. For example the area behind the goals is not steep enough to allow for a manned behind-the-goal camera to simply be set up and cabled. As a result a crane camera is used in order to properly see the goal line. Also look for shots captured from a small Sony HDC-P1 camera

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Eckhard Gödickemeier, ZDF production manager, inside Berlin’s Olympic Stadium

that has been mounted in front of the VIP area.“It is a very small remote HD professional camera that will shoot lower angles for slow-motion replay and analysis,” he adds. Also a small Sony HDC-P1 camera has been mounted in front of the VIP area. The stadium also offers large camera platforms, giving the production team from ZDF and a UEFA production team that are working on a UHD production with 12 cameras plenty of room. “The camera positions are easy because the stadium has a lot of space,” says Gödickemeier.

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SVGEUROPEUPDATE

Wimbledon Championships 2015

Live from Wimbledon 2015: NHK undertakes latest 8K trial BY DAVID DAVIES

he broadcast industry has been keeping a close watch on the development of NHK’s 8K Super Hi-Vision technology for some time now. Following high-profile demos at the London Olympic Games, the Sochi Olympic Games and the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil, 8K made its debut at the Wimbledon championships with a trial taking place on No. 1 Court. Devised to deliver four times the resolution of 4K and 16 times that of standard HD, the 8K format is the result of an extended period of research by NHK into Ultra HD technology. Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications laid out a roadmap last year in which 8K UHDTV is set to begin test broadcasting on satellite in 2016 and roll-out to full broadcasting by 2018. At Wimbledon, the 8K feed — viewable only in a dedicated theatre that was established on top of the

Broadcast Centre and was accessible to accredited media professionals — was created by a total of four cameras: two Ikegami 8K SHV-8000s, one Sony F65 4K and one For-A FT-ONE 4K camera. Upconversion of the FT-ONE camera was achieved using a converter manufactured by Japanese-based ASTRODESIGN, whilst the F65 was used with a live adapter and upconverted with a Sony BPU8000. Vision mixing was undertaken with an 8K switcher provided by NEC Broadcast Products. Sound-wise, NHK primarily relyed on HD host microphones set up on No. 1 Court, but also mixed in the feed from some of its own Sennheiser and DPA mics as required. At the heart of audio world was a Lawo mc266 console, brought over from Japan and delivering a 22.2 mix into the 8K theatre. There will certainly be plenty of 8K material to sift through and assess once from the Championships, as

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Wimbledon Championships 2015

Tetsuya Itsuki — senior manager in the Broadcast Engineering Department for the News Technical Center Outside Broadcast Engineering Division at NHK — reported: “We are filming two matches per day throughout the tournament, up until the last four days.” The 2015 tournament was selected for the trial “as it’s a quieter year in terms of major sports events and we have more crew and resources available. Plus, the Club was keen to have us and made space for the trial to take place.” As for the longer-term 8K roadmap, Itsuki confirmed that the intention is still to undertake trial broadcasts next year. Commercial receiver hardware is now in development, although at present there is no firm date for this to be made available on the market. One of the major targets that the broadcaster has in its sights for 8K production is the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games.

NHK personnel preparing the 8K feed at Wimbledon on 1 July 2015

“We continue to work towards having an 8K service ready to offer in 2018,” confirmed Itsuki. Many thanks to Tetsuya Itsuki (tech producer), Hiroaki Yoshihara (tech manager), Yasutaka Ohira (chief video engineer), Tomohiro Umakoshi (chief audio mixer), and interpreter/production coordinator Haruka Kawaguchi for their invaluable help in the preparation of this report.

Reflections on 8K tests at Wimbledon BY KEN KERSCHBAUMER With the conclusion of the 2015 Wimbledon Tennis Championships Mervyn Hall, broadcast manager of the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, looked back at an event that saw them not only better meet the needs of broadcasters this year with technical and production enhancements but also take a step towards the future thanks to the 8K trial with NHK. “The biggest thing we did this year was the 8K trial with NHK that almost fell into our lap as NHK raised the idea on the last day of the Championship last year,” said Hall. That idea sparked a trip by Hall to Japan to see an 8K production of a Sumo wrestling tournament and learn first hand how an 8K production comes together and what the possibilities are for the format. “It was fantastically impressive,” he recalled. “And we realise the practical applications are not great today as no one can receive it, by and large, and it is expensive to deliver and acquire. But there is also not a fantastic amount of knowledge about where to put the cameras and that is why we did it.” The NHK productions focused on the action at Court One as positions on Centre Court were unavailable. During the production period, which lasted nine days and concluded with two men’s quarterfinal matches, Hall and others who observed the coverage said that there were noticeable improvements as the tournament progressed. “On day one it was a compromised production and I thought it looked

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okay but by the time we got [to the end] I thought it looked really great with really sharp pictures and great colour rendition,” said Hall. “And most of the people who have gone to see it have gone into the viewing area and gone ‘wow.’” More than 1,000 visitors went into the small tented are on the roof of the broadcast centre that had three rows of four chairs, most of which were located at the optimal distance to notice the benefits of 8K on the massive 105-inch display. To really reap the benefits of the extra resolution a viewer needs to be seated at a viewing distance that is .75 times picture height. “NHK was a joy to work with and they are so enthusiastic and embraced everything we do,” added Hall. The next step, said Hall, is to once again sit down with NHK in a few months and share what both AELTC and NHK learned from the experience. “Our view is that knowledge for the sake of knowledge is worthwhile because sooner or later these technologies will be in use, whether it’s pure 8K or a derivation of 4K and 8K or some other form of UHD,” said Hall. “So it would be silly if you have the opportunity to do these things to not do them.” The deal with NHK was straightforward as both AELTC and NHK funded their own contributions to the effort. Going forward the obvious challenge will be camera positions, especially if a format like 4K becomes a reality before 8K becomes a reality. Hall says the process of mapping out those positions would involve first asking what positions are desired and then offering up realistic plans of what is possible and help the production team select the one they prefer.

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SVGEUROPEUPDATE

Rio 2016 Olympic Games

OBS has been Host Broadcaster for the Olympic Games for 14 years. Coverage includes opening and closing ceremonies

Meeting the needs of a global audience: How OBS is preparing for the 2016 Olympic Games BY PHILIP STEVENS

lympic Broadcasting Services (OBS) was created by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in 2001 to serve as the Host Broadcaster organisation for all Olympic Games, Olympic Winter Games and Youth Olympic Games. The OBS brief is to deliver unbiased live radio and television coverage of every sport from every venue. In this role, OBS is charged with developing a reliable approach across Olympic operations, while at the same time optimising resources to continually improve the efficiency of the Host Broadcast operation. Rio 2016 will pack the equivalent of 42 world championships into 17 days of competition, bringing 10,500 athletes to the host city, and it goes without saying that preparation for such a major event takes a considerable amount of time and effort. So with twelve months until the start of Rio2016, how does Yiannis Exarchos, CEO of Olympic Broadcasting Services, see those plans taking shape? “As in every Games, with a year to go, preparations are at full speed. The most significant milestone at this stage is the handover of the International Broadcast Centre (IBC), which must be transferred to us by the Organising Committee so we

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can perform the detailed fit-out. “After this transfer, OBS will build the spaces that the Rights Holding Broadcasters (RHBs) will require for their operations. In addition, it is here that the Host Broadcast technical and operational facilities are installed, including what will be for the duration of the Games the largest Master Control in the world.” The IBC will be located at the Barra Olympic Park, in a new purpose-built building, next to the main press centre. The IBC covers 85,400 square metres of space, housing technical and administrative facilities for both OBS and the RHBs, including edit suites, control rooms, studios and offices. In all, 92 RHB organisations, including sub-licensees, will have a working space within the IBC. Overall, more than 12,000 RHB personnel will be accredited, while the number of OBS personnel will be in excess of 6,600 during the Games. Exarchos reveals that 41 broadcasters will have studios of varying sizes within their space in the IBC. The broadcasters themselves will equip all these studios. “TV Towers will be constructed to house RHB studios in both the Olympic Park and at Copacabana Beach. In total, there will be 16 studios inside the Olympic Park TV Tower and 10 more in Copacabana Beach that can be booked by broadcasters as a dedicated, or permanent, position. There are no studios available on an ‘as required’ basis, but OBS will install a stand-up position in the Olympic Park that may be booked by broadcasters in 10-minute increments, as necessary.” EUROPE SPORTTECH JOURNAL / AUTUMN 2015

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SVGEUROPEUPDATE

Rio 2016 Olympic Games

Exarchos says that any delays in the handover can cause a significant impact on the construction and fit-out of both OBS and RHB space.“However, there is an excellent spirit of cooperation between the OBS and the Rio 2016 teams, and we are looking forward to a smooth transition.” He reports that discussions and clarifications required by the Committee are numerous at this stage and the information flow between OBS and Rio 2016 is at its peak. “All of these meetings will enable OBS and Rio2016 to provide the RHBs with detailed and valuable information concerning all the aspects for their operations during the Olympic Games. Much of this information will be conveyed at the upcoming World Broadcaster Meeting, held approximately one year before the Games.”

London lessons learned Detailed planning for Rio started soon after the final event of London 2012. And, like all previous Games, lessons learned from that event have helped with the way forward. “Each edition of the Olympic Games gives OBS the opportunity to evaluate, refine and improve our planning and operations, so both London 2012 and Sochi 2014 provided valuable knowledge and experience. “Of key importance is to continue expanding the broadcast reach of the Olympic Games, without

increasing the economic and environmental footprint. Two examples of how we are achieving this are the Multichannel Distribution Service (MDS) and the Olympic Video Player (OVP).” MDS has become one of the prime ways for distributing the television coverage of the Olympic Games to the world. In London, there were 21 subscribers for coverage; for Sochi 2014, that number grew to 80 Rights Holding Broadcast companies from 70 different countries. Those broadcasters utilised the MDS to fully produce their entire coverage of the Games with little or no staff or facilities within the host city. OBS expects this number to increase significantly for the Rio Games. OVP offers RHBs their own fully produced internet platform containing one of the best live video and on-demand players currently available. Launched for Sochi 2014, 95 different countries utilised the service. Monitoring of audience reaction also demonstrated that the OVP not only expanded viewer hours and reach for the RHBs using the platform, but also played a part in the significant increase of digital coverage. For the first time in Olympic history, the amount of digital coverage exceeded traditional television broadcasts with 60,000 hours available on digital platforms, compared with 42,000 hours on television.

Yiannis Exarchos: “Of key importance is to continue expanding the broadcast reach of the Olympic Games”

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Technical operations details

“Forming an integral part of its legacy strategy, OBS has launched a Broadcast Training Programme (BTP) for the Rio 2016 Olympic Games” YIANNIS EXARCHOS

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The OBS Engineering and Technical Operations Department, headed by Chief Technical Officer Sotiris Salamouris, is responsible for the design and delivery of all of the technical facilities and services of the Host Broadcasting operations, including those required at the IBC and Olympic Games venues, as well as other select broadcast activities. The coverage format will be HD-SDI 1080i/59.94 SMPTE 292 and surround 5.1, and because there has been no interest from the RHBs, 3D programming is not part of the broadcasting equation. “There are five coordinating production teams at OBS who are responsible for developing the coverage plans, and maintaining regular communication with the Organising Committee regarding the layout of the actual venue in terms of Field of Play, camera positions, lighting, acoustics, mixed zones as well as back of house broadcast facilities,” explains Exarchos. “These teams have been coordinating with Rio2016 since 2013 in order to develop the comprehensive OBS production plan. At Games-time, OBS employs expert venue production teams which are either freelance professionals or employed by RHBs with extensive knowledge of the sport, to execute this Plan.” OBS is currently planning on using around 20 different companies to provide venue production facilities for Rio 2016. These companies will not only come from Brazil, but also the United States, Canada and across Europe.“We have laid down a minimum standard, set out in the contract and which all the providers must reach. OBS providers also take part in a full test and inspection of their facilities approximately a year before the start of the Games.” The coverage will require 53 OB production trucks, with their attendant support tenders, and 13 light production units or flight packs. OBS sets minimum performance and critical parameters for these providers, however OBS doesn’t ‘tie in’ the OB Van operators to any single type or brand of equipment. The planning phase consists of examining OBS’ needs and the equipment the OB providers propose to support those specific needs. Coverage for each event will be sent to the IBC via the onsite Technical Operations Centre (TOC) in the broadcast venue compound. At the TOC, it will be split into a main and backup multilateral fibre, which then will arrive at the IBC via geographically diverse paths. All the distributed feeds will include timing and results graphics, production enhancements — such as course animations and virtual effects — and the Olympic Replay Transition. “All text in the timing and results graphics and production enhancements will be in British English,” states Exarchos. “Taking into account the international Olympic audience, OBS minimises the amount of text by using icons and symbols, and enforces consistency in the terminology across all sports, wherever possible, to aid the understanding.

Rio 2016 Olympic Games

“Additionally, athlete names are anglicised across all nations and sports. All of the fonts, colours, graphic elements and layout of the timing and results graphics and production elements are defined, documented and distributed to all Olympic broadcast stakeholders.” To meet comms needs, Exarchos reveals that OBS will implement an extensive fibre optic contribution network to connect the venues and the IBC — a combination of dark fibre for venues in the metropolitan area of Rio and Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH) for distant venues. This network will carry all multilateral, unilateral, commentary and communications signals from the venues to the IBC to provide the maximum levels of quality and resilience of the transported signals. “For the majority of installations OBS will be using standard RF communications at the venues, with diverse reception points cabled from the OB van. At specific venues such as golf, OBS will install an in-depth network that will support transmission and reception of all of the various RF sources including OBS RF Cameras and the communications network.”

Replay and storage The vast majority of core system equipment used for transmission, quality check and distribution, as well as all commentary equipment used in venues and at the IBC is owned by OBS. “In addition, cutting edge equipment such as video servers, picture monitors, quality check equipment and so on, that utilise state of the art technologies will be specifically rented for the Games.” OBS is planning a fully tapeless environment and the final archive stored in hard drives. The legacy archive, however, will be LTO magnetic tape data storage housed in Lausanne. “A video server system will be available to broadcasters who have subscribed to the central archive facility service. A remote access video server will be available and will allow RHBs to browse in low resolution all server content in Rio and offer the possibility to download it locally in high resolution. Our video server solution is a hybrid system specifically developed for OBS, between EVS — Ingest, Logging and Playback — and Avid Post Production and News Room.” In common with many large-scale broadcasting projects, Rio2016 will include a training programme for those wishing to consider a career in the media.“Forming an integral part of its legacy strategy, OBS has launched a Broadcast Training Programme (BTP) for the Rio 2016 Olympic Games, aiming to train the next generation of media professionals. More than 1,200 students will be offered paid roles during the Games after the training,” says Exarchos. Although there is still much work to be carried out before the opening ceremony on 5 August 2016, all in all, the CEO is confident about the success of the whole project.“I firmly believe that we are in good shape at this point in time.” EUROPE SPORTTECH JOURNAL / AUTUMN 2015

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FA Community Shield

Live from Wembley: BT Sport launches 4K Ultra High Def era BY FERGAL RINGROSE

he biggest game-changer in European sports broadcasting in 2015 has taken place with the launch of the BT Sport Ultra HD channel on August 1, followed by the first live exclusive 4K match-day production on August 2 at the FA Community Shield between victorious Arsenal against Chelsea. August 1 in fact saw the launch of three channels by BT Sport: in addition to Ultra HD are the new BT Sport Europe and BT Sport Showcase channels. The timing of the launch relates to BT Sport’s successful bid to become the sole UK rights holder for all 351 games of the coming UEFA Champions League and Europa League season. In preparation for Ultra HD, Timeline Television built a bespoke UHD-1 OB truck in collaboration with BT Sport. SVG Europe discussed the ‘Ultra HD Phase One’ journey with Andy Beale, BT Sport Chief Engineer; Jamie Hindhaugh, BT Sport Chief Operating Officer; and Daniel McDonnell, Timeline TV Managing Director.

4K UHD leaders (L/R): Jamie Hindhaugh, BT Sport; Dan McDonnell, Timeline TV; and Andy Beale, BT Sport

Jamie Hindhaugh: “Today is the first 4K live stream into the home of a football match in Europe. We are the first broadcaster in Europe to be doing 4K. “Yesterday was a fantastic day; we went live at 6am with a whole new graphics look on BT Sport Europe.We launched our first Freeview channel at midday, and have the capability now to do seven linear red buttons and several connected red buttons through IP delivery. “We’ve rebuilt our studios, so when you see Champions League for the first time on 15 September you’ll see augmented reality and you’ll see 4K projection like you’ve never seen before: it’s quite special. “Really key partners on the 4K journey — and they’re not here today — are Telegenic: we’ve worked very closely with them and their 4K

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capability, and with Timeline. The truck is fully funded by BT Sport, so it’s a complete partnership where we’ve worked together with Timeline in commissioning and co-design. Andy Beale: “It’s a very compact unit, the largest we could get into a rigid body, not articulated. It was designed very specifically for that purpose, so that when we get to some of the smaller sports grounds we can squeeze it in. Telegenic didn’t have a vehicle in that space; it isn’t really their market. “From our perspective, the things we had to get green lights on to give us the confidence to go were confidence that the two-thirds inch chip cameras were going to be available by August 1; confidence the lenses to go with those cameras were going to be here (and other elements like Axon tookits and the Snell switcher); and confidence that the chip-sets were available for the set-top box. Dan McDonnell: “It’s been an incredibly tight turnaround. It took 26 weeks to build the chassis.While that happened we selected technology: Andy and I worked closely together to build up everything we have now. We did build a test solution, but this is the first time it has been used in its new configuration. “We’ve got the first twelve Sony 4300 cameras in the world and they’ve got serial numbers zero-zero-one to zero-zero-twelve! We put in the first order and got the first cameras. And yes we’ve got six of the brand new 80:1 box lenses and six 22:1 ENG lenses, and they arrived on Thursday. No-one has used these before. “We have two cameras in the gantry, one and two; two 18-yard

cameras and a hide-behind; low at each side; a beauty shot; and we’re actually doing 4K in the presentation from the commentary box. The commentators can turn around and do all of their introductions and analysis to a 4K camera. World-first: One of the Sony-Fujinon camera configurations pitch-side at Wembley Everything is native 4K. We’ve got 4K Chyrons on the back row, for full graphics.And in the VT area we have six 4K EVS’ handling all of our replays. “The centrepiece is the Snell Kahuna, a 120-input mixer that can do what they call Format Fusion on all its inputs. So it can take in any combination of 4K and HD sources, and uniquely if you put in 4K that signal goes straight through; if you put an HD signal into the mixer it upconverts it for the 4K output, but for the HD output it doesn’t do any conversion at all, just passes it through. “And Axon is the glue. The Axon cards they built and developed for us — which again we only received in the last couple of weeks — are doing the clever embedding and line routing. The control systems chosen is Axon Cerebrum. “The director’s monitor is a domestic £2,000 Sony 49-inch ultra high definition 4K television that you can buy for your home. This is very important because in the tests we did, we discovered that the director really needs to be able to see what the people are seeing at home.”

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Sponsor Update

2015 SPONSOR UPDATE In this extensive overview, SVG Europe sponsors discuss their sports production highlights and new product innovations as IBC 2015 looms into view. As Ian McMurray discovers, remote production, video-over-IP and 4K are again near the top of the priority list for vendors based throughout Europe. ACS MATT COYDE SALES DIRECTOR

If you watched this year’s FA Cup Final between Arsenal and Aston Villa — and, with a global audience in excess of one billion, the chances are that you did — then you would have seen one of the latest developments from ACS in action. The SMARThead3 was created, according to the company’s sales director, Matt Coyde, to fulfil the growing demand for a compact remote head system capable of handling a much wider range of camera and lens combinations. The FA Cup Final wasn’t the only opportunity during the year to see ACS solutions in action, with other notable events for the company including Wimbledon, the Dubai World Cup, the Melbourne Cup, the FIFA Women’s World Cup and the Pan Am Games in Toronto. Wimbledon saw ACS substantially increase its provision this year, with a total of 27 specialist cameras including three tracking cameras and a number of remote heads and minicams. Meanwhile, at The Open, ACS deployed the Aerigon aerial drone, fitted with an F55 and links. It also saw another appearance for the new SMARThead3 Beautycams and SMARTheads with Sony P1s, as well as the provision of an HD Cineflex V14 stabilised mount for the aerial coverage of the event. That’s some advanced technology. But what does Coyde believe will be the influential technologies of the near future? “Like the majority of our colleagues in the broadcast industry, we see the transition from HD to 4K, and the move towards Video over IP,” he replies. “That, and continuing pressure to deliver value for money.”

ADI

continually expanding Live Venue network. The company is the direct network provider of choice to both the Football League and FA Premier League, and is contracted to provide broadcast connectivity to every stadium in the top four divisions in English football. “That makes us the UK’s fastest growing network — as well as the fastest,” smiles CEO Geraint Williams. “This huge success is much driven by the fact that ADI remain a completely agnostic provider, meaning we don’t compete with our users, whether that be TV rights holders or betting data owners. “ This summer has seen ADI bring Adobe Anywhere online across its network in what it believes will be the world’s biggest deployment of a new technology that Williams describes as “incredible.” Adobe Anywhere will, he believes, fundamentally change the way many of ADI’s customers operate, bringing significant workflow and cost efficiencies to moving huge amounts of content about. What does Williams see as the technology trends doing the most to shape sports production workflows? “Undoubtedly remote broadcast is the biggest, together with the convergence of video and data,” he replies. “Live Venue was built from the ground-up to be remote broadcast and convergence-ready, and we’re starting to see real evidence of demand in the market. Inevitably, this is where we see our broadcast customers utilising our network in the future and we’re working in close partnership to drive this emerging workflow.”

AE Graphics STUART COLES SALES DIRECTOR

AE’s most significant projects in 2015 will undoubtedly turn out to CEO have been the Cricket World Cup By the end of 2015 a significant and the upcoming Rugby World Cup, which kicks milestone will have been passed off in the UK in September, says the company. with 100 venues connected to ADI’s For both tournaments, AE is the official graphics

GERAINT WILLIAMS

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provider, delivering world feed graphics and data solutions at every match. “Whilst extremely challenging, both from a logistical and technical perspective, we’re thrilled to be involved in an official capacity with such prestigious competitions,” smiles Stuart Coles, sales director. “We feel that our ability to secure high-profile contracts of this magnitude is testament to our ever-growing global reputation and track record of delivery on major sporting events.” The Ashes was also a major project for Coles’ company. In addition to ball-by-ball scoring data and graphics for Sky Sports’ host broadcast coverage, AE also provided graphics for Channel 5’s highlights show, Australia’s Channel Nine’s live coverage, and in-venue big screens for the ECB. According to Coles, AE’s standard match day service involves the delivery of three separate touchscreen solutions and integration with Hawkeye, Trackman and BBG data feeds. “The use of augmented reality graphics continues to be a highly sought after enhancement for sports broadcasters and AE remains at the forefront of this,” says Coles. “We’ve combined our graphics with both Stypegrip and NCAM systems to produce AR content across a range of cameras. For the IPL Final in Mumbai we worked with Spidercam and Fletchers to deliver AR content using an NCAM unit mounted on Spidercam, which produced some stunning results.”

AJA Video Systems BRYCE BUTTON

PRODUCT MARKETING MANAGER

Some 60,000 spectators descended upon Johnson Valley, California in February 2015 to witness the largest off-road race in King of Hammers (KOH) history. During the event, 430 Ultra4Racing teams navigated more than 200 miles of boulder-laden terrain in an attempt to win the KOH 2015 championship title — but only 17 crossed the finish line. For the fourth consecutive EUROPE SPORTTECH JOURNAL / AUTUMN 2015

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Sponsor Update

year, freelance producer Dan Campbell-Lloyd captured and broadcast the action in HD for fans on-site and more than 400,000 viewers online, with a robust live production workflow that included AJA Io XT, a KUMO router, Ki Pro Mini recorder, and a range of AJA Mini-Converters including Hi5-Plus, HA5-Plus, V2Digital, UDC, HD10MD3 and other equipment. AJA has announced CION in the past several months, its new 4K/UHD/2K/HD production camera, together with new Mini-Converters, with the HB-T-HDMI and HB-R-HDMI able to extend workflows in a variety of scenarios. Meanwhile, notes Bryce Button, AJA product marketing manager, TruZoom is a software and hardware combination that delivers real-time HD Region of Interest (ROI) extraction from 4K cameras. Robust reliability will become increasingly essential as sports production companies and broadcasters push the boundaries — but what else does Button think will be the important developments of the future?

“We’ll certainly see continued proliferation of 4K, the rise in interest in HDR as a format for broadcast, faster and better ways of moving files throughout a production pipeline from capture to final delivery,” he says. “There’s also the continuing emergence of HEVC or H.265 for handling HD and 4K delivery needs.”

Arqiva BARRIE WOOLSTON COMMERCIAL DIRECTOR, SATELLITE & MEDIA

When a global sports and entertainment company announced its new long term deal to market and globally distribute a professional soccer league, it faced the challenge of accessing every match (as many as six simultaneously) at studios in London and re-distributing in HD to its broadcast clients in Asia, Europe and the Americas. The three-year contract was awarded to Arqiva, who developed a ‘fast start’ interim solution, followed in July by implementation of a permanent solution in July. This solution provides a 6+1 encoding capability within the

production facility in Florida and feeds up to six concurrent 25Mbps HD channels across dedicated fibre paths to studios in the UK. Once a world feed commentary has been added, all feeds are passed back to Arqiva, from where they are distributed as required, to Europe, Asia and the Americas utilising OU infrastructure. “We continue to grow and support our major sports rights customers in an increasingly dynamic environment,” says Barrie Woolston, commercial director, Satellite & Media, Arqiva. “Satellite distribution continues to be a solid and reliable means of distribution, and we see this continuing. That said, our customers increasing expect more flexibility in the way they can move content globally. As a result we are seeing increased interest in our IP streaming and Internet Contribution services, which offer an alternative method of delivery to address customer demands for more agile means of distribution. In addition, our sports rights holders are engaging with us around VoD orchestration and asset delivery.”

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Aspera RICHARD HEITMANN

VICE PRESIDENT, MARKETING

According to Richard Heitmann, VP of marketing at Aspera, sports media companies are creating more highresolution content and data sets than ever, with increasingly shorter turnaround times in highly competitive markets that also depend upon secure inter-company collaboration. “Consequently,” he says, “the need to conveniently ingest, exchange, and distribute file-based digital media content quickly, securely, and with the scale-up capacity of cloud platforms has never been greater.” “In addition,” continues Heitmann, “advances in broadcast-quality video compression enable web streaming of lower bit rate versions over consumer broadband bandwidths (1-10 Mbps). With technology like Aspera FASPStream, sports media companies can achieve longdistance ingest, remote playout, and even distribution of live video to playout systems without the need for expensive and specially provisioned infrastructure such as live satellite feeds or dedicated terrestrial networks with heavy quality of service — capabilities that can revolutionise live sports video transport.” At NAB, Aspera announced Aspera Files, a new SaaS offering for global media sharing built on the next generation of its FASP software platform. With Aspera Files, the company says that any sports media organisation can establish a branded web-based presence for fast, easy and secure exchange and delivery of any size filebased media. Aspera also announced the commercial availability of Aspera FASPStream, which expands its FASP transport technology for live and near-live data streaming. FASP’s patented transport protocol achieves highly efficient bulk data transfer over IP networks, and FASPStream is said to expand this capability to provide a fully reliable streaming protocol for in-order data delivery over Internet WANs.

Avid TOM CORDINER

VICE PRESIDENT, INTERNATIONAL SALES

Just a couple of months ago, France Télévisions took advantage of the capabilities of Avid Everywhere to produce daily highlights coverage of the world’s most prestigious cycling race, the 2015 Tour de France. 64

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The post-production team relied on the Avid MediaCentral Platform to manage the huge volume of race footage. Another highlight of the last year for Avid was the Super Bowl. NBC Sports embraced Avid Everywhere and implemented a fully integrated Avid MediaCentral Platform workflow for its broadcast. Production teams in Phoenix — where the Super Bowl was staged — were able to collaborate in real-time with producers and editors in Stamford, Connecticut, more than 2,500 miles away — greatly accelerating productivity and increasing production by more than 30%, according to Avid. “Sports broadcasters, leagues and teams are under intense pressure to improve content monetisation and maximise operational efficiencies,” believes Tom Cordiner, vicepresident, international sales. “ To stay competitive they need to find new sources of revenue and differentiation, and provide more services for less. “An integrated media asset management system is essential in enabling any organisation involved in sports production to compete effectively,” he continues, “by reducing media lifecycle costs, unlocking new revenues, and boosting collaboration and productivity by making media assets accessible throughout the organisation.” June 2015 saw Avid complete its acquisition of 3D real-time graphics, video servers and workflow management solutions company Orad Hi-Tec Systems. “Orad solutions are highly complementary to the Avid MediaCentral Platform,” says Tom Cordiner, “and allow us to give media organisations and creative professionals more comprehensive workflows with greater choice, flexibility, and operational efficiency.”

Axon JAN EVELEENS CEO

With major international events from ITV’s regional coverage of the Island Games and CTV’s OB production of The Open golf this week for Sky Sports behind it, and Gearhouse’s OB production of the US Open tennis at Flushing Meadows ahead, it’s a busy year for Axon and its Cerebrum broadcast control and monitoring system. Sitting at the heart of a sports production environment, Cerebrum is described as providing a customised, easy-to-use interface

to seamlessly control and monitor the main broadcast equipment including the production switcher, routers, audio desk, camera control units, multi-viewers and monitors. “It’s this power and integration with third party technology that led Outside Broadcast and Post Provider Timeline Television to choose Cerebrum along with Axon’s Synapse 4K signal processing for their new OB — the first purposebuilt Ultra HD 4K unit in Europe,” believes Jan Eveleens, Axon’s CEO. “The OB will provide content for BT Sports UHD channel, including coverage of the Community Shield, UEFA Champions League, Barclays Premier League, FA Cup and Aviva Premiership Rugby.” Meanwhile, Eveleens sees a steady move towards UHD and says that Axon’s new Synapse 4k signal processing and converters are helping production companies easily upgrade their operations to meet this requirement. This year, Axon launched three new 4K capable products: a distribution amplifier and two production ‘tool boxes’. “We’re also working closely with industry bodies such as the EBU, SMPTE and IEEE to develop solutions to support S2022 and AVB as the industry moves to live IP production,” he concludes.

Blackmagic Design STUART ASHTON DIRECTOR, EMEA

This year’s French Open tennis tournament saw the video production team using eight Blackmagic Design MultiView 16s. The purpose-built 3.2 metre by 1.3 metre video wall provided a complete preview of all the action as it happened at Le Stade Roland Garros, Paris’ international tennis venue. As part of a major video production upgrade for the venue, four of the hardware multi viewers will be used all year round in order to monitor 1080i50 signals across all 20 courts at the stadium. Blackmagic Design also provided an ATEM 2 M/E Production Studio 4K and Teranex 2D Processor as part of a big screen video production system to enhance the crowd’s experience at the Erste Bank Open in Vienna, part of the ATP men’s tennis tournament. EUROPE SPORTTECH JOURNAL / AUTUMN 2015

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Sponsor Update

The company has also been busy in terms of new product development this year. “At NAB, we announced the Smart Videohub CleanSwitch 12x12,” says Stuart Ashton, director, EMEA. “This is a new mixed format SD, HD and Ultra HD router that features full re-synchronisation on every input for completely clean switches between non synchronised router crosspoints.” Concurrently, the company launched the Blackmagic Micro Studio Camera 4K, a tiny Ultra HD and HD studio camera for live production that Blackmagic says delivers dramatically better quality than the biggest and most expensive studio cameras used today. Las Vegas also saw the introduction of the Teranex Mini, whose design to said to solve problems often associated with regular miniconverters.

in the history of the UCI Track Cycling World Championships, some riders’ bikes were equipped with on-board cameras, used to broadcast action live from a completely different perspective during the competition at SaintQuentin-en-Yvelines in France. Working in conjunction with the UCI and HBS, using VideoSys Broadcast as a technical partner, Broadcast RF produced a full HD camera and wireless transmitter small and lightweight enough to be mounted on track bikes as well as many other athlete-mounted applications. “This is a groundbreaking project, the first system of its kind,” says Chris Brandrick, sales director. “With this new combination of camera and RF technology in a single package we can finally bring an angle that has always been missing from track cycling coverage that will delight both the hardcore fans and viewers new Broadcast RF to the sport.” CHRIS BRANDRICK During 2015, Broadcast RF has also provided SALES DIRECTOR the host RF facilities for a range of events Making broadcast history is a bold including the London Marathon, Wimbledon, claim, but one that Broadcast The Open Championships, Six Nations, all the RF was able to make when, for the first time major UK horse racing events, the FIFA Women’s

World Cup in Canada, and will soon be present at the Rugby World Cup. “There’s a big trend towards smaller, lighter and less power hungry transmitter devices,” says Brandrick. “We’re currently working on a 4K RF camera, and that will be able to take advantage of the better encoding/modulating techniques to reduce bandwidth for our ever shrinking available RF spectrum.”

Broadcast Solutions PETER JAKOBSSON

BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT DIRECTOR

Ice-hockey leagues across Europe? Check. Basketball? Check. Handball? Check. Wherever these events are televised, the chances are an OB van from integrator Broadcast Solutions has been there over the past year. In fact, such has been the growth in the company’s business, and having delivered over 300 broadcast units to customers around the world, Broadcast Solutions launched its range of five Streamline OB vans in April this year. Able to support from four to 16 cameras, the company

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SVGEUROPE

says that the ‘pre-engineered’ nature of the range means that they are available for delivery on very short lead times. Broadcast Solutions isn’t just about ‘off the shelf’, however. An example of its customisation capabilities came in the form of an OB van developed specially for production company T-Skyline, who produced the League of Legends matches in Paris and Cologne using their flagship OB HD7 — and attracted an audience of 24 million people. Neither is Broadcast Solutions only about mobile facilities. Recently, the company was challenged to provide a complete broadcast and multimedia infrastructure for the newly-built Otkrytie Arena, home of football club Spartak Moscow. “A crucial part of the job was providing consultancy on multimedia workflows and content distribution throughout the project, enabling the customer to develop new revenue streams,” explains Peter Jakobsson, business development director.“We also needed to ensure compliance with FIFA requirements, and to ensure that broadcast and multimedia professionals could work together without friction.” The stadium is equipped with 170 LCD screens, pitch-side LED hoardings, digital signage, 4K infrastructure and an 8-channel stadium TV capability.

BroaMan MACIEK JANISZEWSKI APPLICATIONS ENGINEERING MANAGER

Fibre network solutions from both BroaMan and sister company Optocore have been widely deployed in the year since IBC 2014, most recently at the SEA Games, where The Show Company constructed a fibre loop at the Singapore Sports Hub around 18 X6R-FX and TP AD/DA interfaces, around a central DD8RP repeater. The attributes of BroaMan’s Mux22 — an application-engineered device featuring up to 16 3G/HD/SD-SDI I/O configurable video ports (with built-in CWDM multiplexer) — also caught the eye of Dutch satellite uplink specialists Multi-Link Holland and BP Satellite Solutions, who deployed the Mux22 within the broadcast facilities provided to their clients at all Formula One circuits worldwide. “In the past year, BroaMan has finalised the Mux22 devices series, which is perfect for any OB truck and is used by multiple customers 66

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providing video, audio and data transport between the truck and sports stadium,” points out Maciek Janiszewski, applications engineering manager at BroaMan. “Thanks to its flexibility, the Mux22 fits any requirements — whenever you need MADI, Intercom, multiple 3G video I/O, Ethernet, serial or GPIO to be transmitted over short or long distant fibre, the Mux22 is always a perfect solution.” “Especially for worldwide sports events, the Mux22 revolutionises and simplifies production,” he goes on. “The only cable needed to connect even a distant stadium with the truck is a single mode fibre pair. In live sports, everything happens really fast — but with the Mux22, any crew can set up a system by just plugging in a single cable.”

Calrec DAVE LETSON

VICE PRESIDENT, SALES

As well as providing support for the Women’s World Cup, Wimbledon, French Tennis Open and the Open at St Andrews, June 2015 saw Calrec at the US Open in Chambers Bay, Washington. “Golf coverage requires a multitude of audio sources to be transported and managed, across large distances and for a variety of broadcasters at any one time,” explains Dave Letson, VP of sales. “In order to successfully manage over 200 mic inputs, an ad-hoc network was created using seven Calrec consoles, networked via Calrec’s Hydra2 technology.” At NAB, Calrec announced two compact format aluminium expansion units that can be used to expand and distribute a Hydra 2 network. The new Fieldbox range is said to bring the advantages of Calrec’s Hydra2 stage box to rugged environments and areas where rack space is at a premium. While there is perhaps certainty in the video world about the future — it’s 4K — there is, according to Letson, perhaps less in the audio world. “Currently, all the buzz is about AoIP — and the publication of AES67 has given it a direction to head in,” he notes. “Calrec has committed itself to an agnostic future; while MADI continues to serve the industry extremely well, AoIP interconnections will increasingly provide more

flexible and elegant replacements. The appeal of audio networking is vast.” Letson continues: “While non-proprietary AoIP solutions are commonly not able to offer the low latency, determinism, capacity, and broadcast feature-rich audio networking that Calrec’s Hydra2 provides, AES67 and other compatible standards are a perfect companion technology for wider connectivity in a broadcast facility.”

Camera Corps BARRY PARKER

COMMERCIAL MANAGER

Sport is often viewed as the most influential genre of broadcasting in terms of advances in broadcast technology, according to Barry Parker, commercial manager at Camera Corps, and this is particularly true of innovations in cameras which are responding to audience demands for immersive viewing. “We understand that our clients require flexibility and the ability to mix and match technology on site for best results,” says Parker, “where the Camera Corps control system allows for multiple cameras to link to one control system with one operator.” In the past few months, Camera Corps has provided specialist cameras to most sporting events. For example, a suite of aquatic cameras was provided to the Asian Games 2014, the European Games 2015 in Baku and the World University Games 2015 in Korea. Onboard camera and effects cameras were provided for Isle of Man TT 2015, and remote heads and cameras were provided to Wimbledon 2015. Camera Corps has recently launched the Q3 MiniZoom and the upgraded MeerCat mini right-angled camera and says that it is continually working closely with its clients to develop new and innovative products, with the primary aim of providing the lowest risk, highest quality and most cost effective solution. The company provided new Stump Cams to the Ashes Series 2015 and the new low level Q3 tracking camera system to the Rugby World Cup at Twickenham. It is also working with the NHL to develop a referee ‘helmet cam’.

Canon NICKY IIJIMA

EUROPEAN BROADCAST PRODUCTS DIRECTOR

Canon introduced the CN20x50 lens shortly after IBC last year in October EUROPE SPORTTECH JOURNAL / AUTUMN 2015

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Sponsor Update

2014. Featuring an ultra-telephoto angle, 20x zoom ratio and what the company descr ibes as excellent 4K optical performance suitable for field shooting, the CN20x50 is designed for Super 35mm cameras and for Super 35mm production of sports. “We often hear from our customers that they need and ultra-telephoto angle and large zoom magnification,” says Nicky Iijima, European broadcast products director. “This lens completely meets the demand. However, the length of the lens is less than 420mm and weighs just 6.6kg, making it compact and lightweight. Of course, the lens has a servo drive unit on the lens as a standard configuration. With the CN20x50, we have more than met our customers’ expectations, and camera operators can use it with exactly the same feeling as they use 2/3” lenses. “We’ve heard from camera operators that they feel it’s the missing piece in the large format production puzzle for them.” According to Iijima, the new lens13:18 has already 2015_08_SVG_Layout 1 07.08.15 Seite 8

been used at many big events including football, golf and tennis. Earlier this year, Canon made a technology announcement of a 2/3” 4K field lens, responding to the fact that 2/3” 4K TV cameras have become available from multiple camera manufacturers. “As a leading TV lens manufacturer, we felt we must commit to 2/3” 4K lens development for our customers,” explains Iijima. “We believe 2/3” 4K will come to sports production first, so our product line up plan is to strengthen the field lens model.”

ChyronHego JOHAN APEL

PRESIDENT AND CEO

Following the success of its participation at the 2014 winter games in Sochi — at which NBC used multiple Lyric PRO-powered Mosaic XL on-air graphics systems to provide innovative visuals — this year saw ChyronHego undertaking one of its biggest-ever projects. The

company rolled out its TRACAB player tracking system, Replay Builder graphics visualisation tool and TrackMan 3-D ball tracking system to every major league baseball stadium in the U.S. and Canada, enabling teams to generate realtime data on factors such as ball acceleration, route efficiency, and distance covered. “We are continually evolving our product roadmaps and R&D strategy to keep pace with market conditions and take advantage of ongoing advances in computing horsepower,” explains Johan Apel, president and CEO. “Of course, the emergence of 4K broadcasting is

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having a huge impact on our customers, but we’ve always taken a ‘resolution-agnostic’ approach. That means our products can always deliver the highest-quality results in any resolution, and they make it easy to upscale and cross-convert content between all major broadcast standards.” “Another very large trend affecting our customers is the growth of many non-traditional means of distributing content,” he goes on, noting how graphics have become much richer and more integral tools for broadcasters to tell a story, particularly in the news and sports environment. “Media enterprises are expected to do so much more with less. Therefore, we’ve focused R&D efforts around providing solutions that will help them deploy the most efficient workflows with the highest rate of return.”

Sponsor Update

maybe 20 key stations — but it was the first event that attempted to use communications in an integrated way rather than just party line intercom and a bunch of two-way radios. Now, for Baku, we’re talking 1,200 radios and 100 interfaced bases.”

Cobham JP DELPORT

BROADCAST SALES DIRECTOR

The Volvo Ocean Race is the world’s longest professional sporting event and the most extreme offshore race on the planet, with seven identical Volvo Ocean 65 boats taking around nine months to cover almost 40,000 nautical miles of ocean. Thanks to RF and satellite technology, race action could be followed with a combination of packages produced by each onboard reporter. Clear-Com Central to getting onboard information back to PETER GIDDINGS Alicante were two satellite domes, a Cobham SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, GLOBAL SAILOR 250 FleetBroadband and a larger Cobham EVENTS SAILOR 500 FleetBroadband on each yacht, as When Australia’s The P.A. People were well as Cobham’s Explorer 710 Class 1 BGAN awarded the contract to provide terminals from land, all of which use Inmarsat’s ceremonies communications — including mobile satellite communications network. radio, intercom and CCTV — at the inaugural European Games in Baku, the company turned to Clear-Com intercom systems for production communications for the opening ceremony. Among the many complexities challenging ClearCom was the requirement to provide wireless intercoms inside a revolving section of the stage appropriately named the ‘Revolve’. Due to much As every boat approached each of the 11 uncertainty with user-key designation at large scale events, the speed of panel key programming ports, the on-board reporter switched to an “in-shore racing” mode via a combination of for hundreds of users was a necessity. The core installation, located in the control Cobham Solo H.264 transmitters, PRORX receive room, was based on two Clear-Com Eclipse systems and, eventually, IP Mesh networks. HX-Omega frames linked using a fibre ring and Using Cobham’s IP Mesh meant that a wide offering a total of 380 ports. It also featured IVC- range of very solid RF links could be used, and 32 cards, over 100 interfaced radio channels, all at extremely low cost, the company says. “We’ll be unveiling something very important FOR-22s to interface with the radio bases, and more than 200 IP-capable intercom at IBC 2015,” teases JP Delport, broadcast sales panels for the stadium, rehearsal tent and director, Cobham Tactical Communications the Bulvar Cauldron. The matrix frames were and Surveillance. “What is emerging now is a very clearly defined line between what sports interconnected using IP. Clear-Com says it has seen a considerable and events production teams want to do, rise in what is expected of intercoms at major compared with what the broadcasters want to do. Sports and events is all about high picture sporting events over the past ten years. “ The 2000 Olympics in Sydney was quality, 1080P, 4K, what have you, where the comparatively small compared with what news teams are looking more to move data we do now,” smiles Peter Giddings, senior and images over 3g and 4G networks whenever vice-president of Global Events. “I think it had possible. Our transmitter offerings will reflect one radio repeater and about 100 radios and that difference.”

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CTV Outside Broadcasts BARRY JOHNSTONE CEO

Among the bitterest rivalries in sport — not to mention among the longest-running, given its beginnings in 1882 — is that between England and Australia in cricket, and this year saw the Ashes contested for the sixty-eighth time. CTV Outside Broadcasts was there — as the company was for the Ryder Cup for ETP, the London Marathon and the University Boat Race (both for BBC Sport), World Championship Darts for Sky Sports and the NFL Wembley for CBS Sport and Fox Sports, to name but a few of the premier sporting events at which it has provided its expertise over the past year. CTVOB’s CEO, Barry Johnstone, has seen workflows improve over the last few years — and believes they will continue to do so. “In recent times, we’ve seen improved workflows with the availability of the EVS XT3, X-File 3, IP Director and Version 12 software, allowing us to become more agile, more efficient and more creative,” he says. “What we’re looking forward to, and what we believe can do most to shape sports production workflows, is the growth of faster permanent fibre IP networks throughout the UK. We also see how remote outside broadcast can deliver important benefits in the medium term and, perhaps beyond that, 4K over IP can be really significant.”

deltatre CARLO DE MARCHIS CHIEF PRODUCT OFFICER

For the UEFA Champions League 2015/16 to 2017/18 cycle, UEFA is making available an unprecedented content offering, including live video streams, match-based clips, data feeds and graphic assets, with the objective of significantly enhancing the offer for its broadcast partners — and deltatre is offering the “Next Generation Digital Services” rate card. “The services within the rate card are designed to provide flexibility for the broadcast partners through the delivery of innovative componentbased technical solutions along with full turnkey white label services,” says Carlo De Marchis, deltatre’s chief product officer. “The components can be incorporated to enhance existing services to consumers, or the digital services can be used to deliver a complete end-to-end experience in a cost-effective manner.” EUROPE SPORTTECH JOURNAL / AUTUMN 2015

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Sponsor Update

This year, deltatre has announced the Live Virtual Graphics system, which it describes as a powerful tool that enables the creation and rendering virtual graphics on-air within the live video workflow with a quick and simplified process. The system is said to be ready to be used by any broadcaster after a quick setup, to place virtual elements in a live scene and make them look physically “real” and in harmony with the environment they are projected into. deltatre offers a broad catalogue of graphics capable of illustrating almost any aspect of a football match. For deltatre, augmented reality and virtual reality are technology trends that will significantly shape the sports production workflow. “The mix of these two technologies is going to create truly innovative solutions that will definitely change the way fans experience sports,” believes De Marchis.

Dolby ROB FRANCE

SENIOR PRODUCT MANAGER

In the world of sports broadcasting, it often seems as if it’s video that gets all the attention — whereas, according to Dolby’s senior product manager Rob France, audio innovations have frequently led the way. For him and his company, “sport is all about the fans - and they want different stories”. “For example, when their team is winning they want one of celebration and when they are losing they want one of commiseration,” he explains. Audio, he suggests, can help to deliver this appropriately tailored experience. Dolby’s efforts in this area are taking place around four key considerations. Firstly, accessibility that allows basic elements to be adjusted simply. “For instance, some people say they can’t hear the commentator and others want it turned off,” says France. Secondly, he says, personalisation is important — in other words, modifying the presentation to match the listener’s preference. The third consideration is mmersive design that puts the consumer into the action and the venue; EUROPE SPORTTECH JOURNAL / AUTUMN 2015

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and the fourth is adaptability, with objects that can be mixed according to the requirements of the system the person is listening on. “Object-based audio,” believes France, “will see audio carried as elements to the consumer. Choices are then made by the consumer, which along with the equipment configuration defines their personal experience. The system then blends the final mix, under metadata control, while maintaining loudness requirements and quality.” France emphasises that it will still be personnel in OB trucks who create the mixes to avoid the danger of consumers negatively affecting the overall sound.

Elemental Technologies JOHN NEMETH

VICE PRESIDENT, EMEA

Tata Sky, India’s leading DTH operator, launched the first commercial 4K video service and set-top boxes in the subcontinent just ahead of the Cricket World Cup 2015, and Elemental helped bring fans equipped with 4K-capable TVs a view of native 4K content for all 49 matches. Since then, software-based Elemental Live systems have been performing real-time video processing of Tata Sky 4K content in high-efficiency video coding (HEVC/H.265) at 60/50fps for linear streaming to Tata Sky 4K set-top boxes. The Cricket World Cup is just the latest in a string of high profile sporting events and locations where Elemental has provided its technology. “Live sports are one of the major drivers of video technology innovations for content providers,” points out John Nemeth, VP EMEA for Elemental. “The primary trends right now include HEVC/H.265, 4K and UHD, high dynamic range (HDR), wider colour gamut, higher frame rates (HFR) and scaling cloud resource for peak demand that is unique to major sports events.” “The key enabler of these new technologies is software-defined video (SDV),” he continues. “Traditional fixed-hardware approaches can’t keep pace. Increasingly, sports broadcasters and pay TV providers, franchises and venues globally turn to SDV to help deliver a richer, more immersive live sports and VOD fan experience.” “After all of the trials and initial service launches over the past 15 months, it will be interesting to see how the 4K Ultra HD trend progresses,” he concludes. “HDR and other technologies for enhanced displays and viewing will be a major theme at IBC2015.”

Ericsson ANNE-LOUISE BUICK

HEAD OF TV COMPRESSION PORTFOLIO MARKETING

With pay TV revenues exceeding $400 million in the United States alone, representing 4.4 million buys — almost doubling the previous record — the boxing match between Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao was the highest grossing fight of all time. Ericsson supported PSSI Global by equipping 13 of PSSI’s fully operational satellite trucks with AVP 3000 Voyager Video Processors and RX8200 Advanced Modular Receivers, and also provided a support team to assist with the installation of equipment, maintenance and troubleshooting. “The ambition to increase social connectivity, create immersive experiences and empower consumers has driven Ericsson’s most recent product developments in sport,” says AnneLouise Buick, head of TV compression portfolio marketing. “This year, Ericsson hosted the world’s first digital arena of data and content at the FIS Nordic World Ski Championships in Falun, Sweden. The creation of two apps, the Live Results Falun 2015 and Live Arena Falun 2015, allowed fans to access realtime information about any competitor’s performance, take a virtual tour of the ski stadium, and tune into live-feeds of skiers as they compete. The highly interactive solution provided consumers with access to the information and video content they wanted, all in one place, and optimised the growing popularity of second screen use.” According to Buick, today’s consumers don’t just want to watch a sports game; they want to feel like they are part of it. Social media platforms are extending spectator interactions beyond the living room or stadium and into a global arena, with newly-developed apps such as Meerkat and Periscope turning audiences into broadcasters.

EUROVISION GRAHAM WARREN NETWORK DIRECTOR

After a break of 16 years, the FIS Alpine World Ski Championships returned to the USA, and saw Eurovision Production Coordination (EPC) working alongside technology service providers like Game Creek Video and Bexel. A production team of more than 200 was on hand to capture 69

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all the happenings — plus medal ceremonies, press conferences, and more. “EPC is the production partner of choice for the world’s elite sports federations and organisers,” asserts Franck Choquard, EPC managing director. “During major events, EPC delivers all host broadcast services, including provision of the multilateral coverage, unilateral production, transmission, commentary facilities and associated services for world broadcasters.” Graham Warren, network director for EUROVISION, believes that several emerging technologies will allow a gradual transition of the current content production and distribution processes to more flexible, decentralised and efficient evolved workflows. Among these, he says, the advent of equipment and interfaces able to handle high bandwidth data rates is a must. It is, Warren explains, where broadcast video finally meets the IT standard Ethernet — although he thinks there are still some issues to be solved. He also sees the fast development of converged packet optical network gear, facilitating the ability of media service to offer highly reliable long distance 10GB Ethernet services at reasonable prices. This is happening, he notes, while the bandwidth-intensive media networks are being upgraded to 100GB. “Such a constellation of events will facilitate the whole industry finally embracing the utopia of long distance remote production,” says Warren.

deliver live replays and highlights over Europe’s fastest 4G network to mobile devices around the stadium. In golf, the US Open featured a core EVS server infrastructure for the creation of high speed replays from the tournament’s 4K cameras. Also in place was our MultiReviewer system which allowed the operator to call up templates for different holes and see all the available camera angles on screen.” According to Bourdon, C-Cast has been very important to rights holders this year, noting that EVS is seeing more and more organisations taking advantage of is benefits to help enrich audiences’ experience. “As more rights holders are understanding the importance of an engaged audience, we’re expecting multimedia distribution and — by association, C-Cast — to become as much of a key component of sports broadcast infrastructures as our XT3 live production server is,” concludes Bourdon. “Beyond that, IP is clearly going to be important in all aspects of broadcast, but for live feeds we know broadcasters are still looking for the right solutions in both contribution and distribution. With our IP-ready products, we hope to be able to guide both visitors to IBC and the wider industry on the best practice for migrating to an IP future.” Interest in DYVI has spiked as well, says EVS, noting that Gearhouse Broadcast has recently developed a remote production solution which uses the IT-based technology and showcased it to a number of high-level broadcasters. Here, DYVI was used to cut together signals from three EVS HD cameras carried through 10km of 10Gbit NICOLAS BOURDON fibre. It also remotely carried audio and comms SVP MARKETING AT EVS signals. The use of DYVI in this way is expected to “We’ve been incredibly busy over the have a huge impact in the sports world. past year, providing our solutions to Forscene events all over the world — despite JASON COWAN the lack of an Olympic or World Cup tournament,” BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT DIRECTOR says Nicolas Bourdon, SVP marketing at EVS. “At the SEA Games, held in June this year, we In sports, digital content distribution provided a cloud-based infrastructure with is no longer an afterthought as the C-Cast to deliver the first ever second-screen app value of online and social audiences for a multi-sport tournament. The application is recognised, notes Jason Cowan, business — designed by Netco Sports — gave users the development director at Forscene. Realising the ability to view live camera feeds, choose their own potential income from digital content distribution, camera angles, and watch game highlights and many sports rights holders now split the licencing near-live replays. C-Cast delivered over 8,000 clips for broadcast and digital rights content, creating to the application which generated more than 37 space for digitally focused companies to own million user sessions.” the post-production and distribution of web and “C-Cast was also a star of the FA Cup Final at mobile content — and to choose products that Wembley in May,” he continues. “We worked serve this content best. with Wembley Stadium’s lead partner EE to In March this year, the world’s largest

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Sponsor Update

independent distributor of sports programming, IMG, licensed the use of Forscene for all of IMG’s digital rights channels in 2015. Under the agreement, IMG uses Forscene to edit and distribute sports highlight video content from the Forscene platform. “Licensing Forscene to such an important sports brand is a real feather in our cap,” says Cowan, “and testament to the platform’s success in the sector.” In June this year, Forscene partnered with deltatre and Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform to provide what the company believes is the first completely hardware-independent solution for the post-production and distribution of digital rights content. “This ground-breaking workflow has already been utilised on one of 2015’s biggest sporting events,” says Cowan, “and sees Forscene’s ingest servers running as virtual machines in the Microsoft Azure platform to transcode and ingest live video streams into Forscene accounts just seconds behind live events. deltatre’s remote editorial team then use Forscene to create video packages and publish them directly back to the Microsoft Azure cloud and YouTube channels.”

Gearhouse Broadcast ED TISCHLER

HEAD OF PROJECTS

“We will have been involved with the provision of technical facilities at 31 tennis tournaments during 2015,” says Ed Tischler, head of projects for Gearhouse Broadcast, “which means we have effectively been on air with tennis for 35 weeks, including at all four Grand Slam tournaments.” He goes on to point out that, as part of Gearhouse’s regular work with ATP Media, his company put on a live 4K production at the end of year Barclays ATP World Tour Finals. Using newly-acquired Hitachi SK-UHD4000 4K cameras, Gearhouse was able to capture 4K footage, while at the same time delivering the regular HD production for broadcasters around the world. Other important developments have seen the company put on a proof of concept demonstration of a remote production solution — a version of which it will be running at IBC — and Sky Sports’ decision to become the first broadcaster to use OBPod, Gearhouse’s flyaway production solution, subsequently using it as their flyaway production system for the entire 2015 Formula 1 season. EUROPE SPORTTECH JOURNAL / AUTUMN 2015

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Sponsor Update

The company’s investments over the past year give a clear indication of where it thinks the future lies. “Remote production opens a world of creative and logistical opportunities that can enable a broadcaster to produce more live content, particularly covering events that may have been overlooked due to budgetary constraints, affirms Tischler. “There’s also more and more interest in shooting in 4K, whether for delivering a sharper HD image, or for preparing workflows for future 4K productions, or even for archiving for future monetisation opportunities.”

challenges — not least the fact that the venue was switched to Equatorial Guinea as the host country as late as the end of November last year. Globecast gathered a highly experienced team and began the process of configuring and shipping seven HD flyaway uplink kits — a total of 4.5 tons of equipment — and then organised local logistics and seven different satellites for contribution and distribution. Malabo, to where all the equipment had to be shipped, is also a 45-minute flight from the mainland.

Globecast FRANÇOIS PERSIAUX

Globecast supplying a field team of engineers and a coordination manager in Africa as well as an MCR in Paris with a dedicated engineer and coordinator for each match. There was also a supervisor for worldwide distribution, plus remote live monitoring for each downlink on every satellite. Some 170 hours of live HD transmission were produced, using four C-Band and three Ku-band satellites. “This was clearly a very big project carried out in a very short space of time,” says François Persiaux, head of global contribution France. “We are very proud to have succeeded so well.”

Grass Valley

HEAD OF GLOBAL CONTRIBUTION FRANCE

SAM PETERSON

According to Globecast, a prime example of the logistical challenges presented by some sporting events was provided by the Orange Africa Cup of Nations in January/February this year. It took, says the Globecast supplied uplinks and contribution company, all of Globecast’s years of experience from the four stadium locations for its customer, to overcome the obstacles. sports marketing agency SPORTFIVE AFRICA. The tournament presented sizeable Distribution was global to 51 broadcasters, with

SENIOR SEGMENT MARKETING MANAGER — LIVE

Dorna Sports, a leading international sports management, marketing and media company in Spain, has taken delivery of 20 Grass Valley K2 Dyno replay systems to deliver instant replay and highlight generation with pan/zoom technology for SD/HD/3G and 4K, as

Our systems team has built over 50 Outside Broadcast vehicles in the last five years.

#justsaying @wts_broadcast

EUROPE SPORTTECH JOURNAL / AUTUMN 2015

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well as three GV STRATUS video production and content-management systems in order to have a full set of production tools in one application to produce highly creative content with an efficient and flexible workflow.

Sponsor Update

Dega Broadcast Systems was contracted by the BBC to provide the additional technical facilities required to cover the events, and the company deployed multiple Studer Vista digital audio consoles, among them a 52-fader Vista 9 digital console, which was used for BBC Three’s coverage of the games.

“At the heart of the Vista V is the Infinity Core, which uses CPU-based processors to deliver an unprecedented 800+ audio channels with superb sonic quality, and more than 5,000 inputs and outputs,” enthuses Watson. “The use of CPUbased processors suggests exciting possibilities for scaling up to even larger channel counts, and for running third-party algorithms. Being able to program in high-level languages like C++ speeds up the time of implementing new features — which was never possible when using DSPs and FPGA processing technology.”

Harmonic IAN TROW “This strategic partnership will allow Dorna to create more — and better — content for live production and support the ever-growing need for more sources and destinations in international sports production,” says Sam Peterson, senior segment marketing manager — live. “Dorna is using the solutions to increase coverage of Moto GP competition around the globe with an enhanced replay system and unique content-management tools.” Grass Valley recently launched the LDX 86 Universe, its LDX 4K/6X HD switchable camera, in tandem with the K2 Dyno Universe Replay System. Described as a first-of-its-kind system, the company says it brings 4K and extremespeed storytelling into the mainstream, enabling any camera or replay position to be set up for regular HD, 4K or extreme-speed acquisition/replay, and requiring no additional positions or equipment in order to achieve this flexibility. K2 Dyno Universe makes the power of 4K or 6X acquisition affordable for all camera angles and replay positions, halving the number of servers, rack space and replay-operators that would otherwise be required. “Consumer demand and expectation for higher image quality will drive the way sports production professionals view workflows over the next few years,” believes Peterson.

Harman Professional KEITH WATSON

GLOBAL MARKETING DIRECTOR, MIXERS

The 2014 Commonwealth Games represented the largest multi-sport event ever held in Glasgow, Scotland, bringing together athletes from 71 nations and territories competing in 18 different sports. 72

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SENIOR DIRECTOR, EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES & STRATEGY

The Vista 9 was also deployed in the evenings for an entertainment highlights show on BBC One called Tonight at the Games. In addition, Dega supplied a Vista 1 console to equalise and balance all the incoming commentaries, and a Studer Route 6000 routing and signal processing system, which was connected to the Vista 9 and Vista 1, as well as a Riedel MediorNet system. The Route 6000 was used to route commentary and coordinate circuits between feeds and venues under the control of BNCS software. “Processing power, connectivity and intuitive control surfaces continue to be the most important requirements of our customers in sports broadcasting,” says Keith Watson, global marketing director, mixers, HARMAN Professional, “all of which allow them to quickly and effectively manage content while enabling them to make on-the-fly adjustments for live events.” In September, Studer added to its Vista X digital console with the new 52-fader Vista V. The console is based on the same Quad Star technology as the Vista X, but in a more compact footprint said to be ideal for smaller studios, OB trucks and large live productions. Driving the Vista V is the Infinity 200 processing engine, which is designed for smaller facilities that require lower channel counts and full system redundancy. The Vista V features a built-in meter bridge, high-quality motorised faders, and what Harman describes as a sophisticated, built-in dynamic automation system with DAW remote control. The console is fully surround-sound capable, with versatile panning and monitoring functionality.

Sports broadcasters around the region have been using the Harmonic MediaGrid for coverage of major events such as Wimbledon and Formula 1. At this year’s UK Grand Slam event hosted by the All England Lawn Tennis Club, a 1.5 petabyte MediaGrid system was used in a workflow that included EVS for proxy and browse. “MediaGrid as an ideal fit for digital media applications requiring shared, real-time storage, such as ingest, playout, archive, edit-in-place, collaborative editing, transcoding and overthe-top adaptive bitrate streaming,” notes Ian Trow, senior director, Emerging Technologies & Strategy at Harmonic. “It’s simple to deploy, manage and scale, and is designed to accelerate file-based workflows and provide the ability to manage the entire asset lifecycle.” Harmonic Electra is the company’s family of compression platforms, and the past year has seen it benefit from Harmonic’s PURE compression engine for the Electra X3 appliance and Electra XVM virtualised encoder, enabling UHD workflows for sports broadcasters around the world. Electra X3 and Electra XVM offer realtime full-frame UHD/HEVC broadcast encoding and great video quality at the lowest bit-rates. Electra X3 was used earlier this year as part of a full live and linear Ultra HD broadcast to a cable system, in a technology partnership demo with SES. “Sport is rapidly transitioning towards IP production workflows in the short term,” observes Trow, “with an eye towards 4K/UHD in the medium-to-long term. The forthcoming Rio Olympics not adopting 4K highlights the challenges associated with production — interfacing, high bandwidth ingest and graphics integration.” EUROPE SPORTTECH JOURNAL / AUTUMN 2015

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Sponsor Update

Hitachi CEMAL YILMAZ

GENERAL SALES & MARKETING MANAGER

According to the organisers, the AFC Asian Cup was “a stunning success”. Attendances were 650,000 — far outstripping the hoped for 500,000. From a broadcasting point of view, perhaps more significant was the size of the TV audience, which was in excess of one billion. Making that possible was Gearhouse, whose equipment roster included 18 cameras comprising Hitachi SK1200 production units and SK1500 super slow motion cameras at each of the five stadiums. Also deployed were Hitachi’s new 2/3 ınch SK-UHD4000 4K cameras. Key features of the SK-UHD4000 — which has a 4-sensor high-precision optical system employing dual-green sensors to capture the 4K resolution image, giving it 8.8 million effective pixels — include the fact that traditional broadcast lenses can be exploited by the use of the B4 lens mount, with no optical filtering

required. A 2/3”broadcast lens can be used without loss of sensitivity or MTF (modulation transfer function). Even newer than the SK-UHD4000 is H itachi ’s new OB-BOX concept, which was launched at CABSAT. “OB-BOX offers entirely new levels of outside broadcast operational flexibility, cost-efficiency and technical performance right up to ultra-HDTV capabilities,” says Cemal Yilmaz, general sales & marketing manager. “In essence, Hitachi’s OB-BOX is a fully featured modular OB facility which is delivered to the customer and then mounted onto a vehicle’s chassis using a proprietary fixing kit. This approach significantly reduces the manufacturing and delivery time to any market worldwide since it removes the need to source and ship an appropriate vehicle for each customer.”

Imagine Communications MATHIAS ECKERT VICE PRESIDENT, EMEA

Deployments involving both outside broadcast trucks and in-house facilities, and stretching across several regions, were, says Mathias Eckert, vice president, EMEA at Imagine Communications, instrumental in the delivery of major sporting events viewed by hundreds of millions of viewers over the past 12 months. In Asia, the company recently completed the overhaul of an entire sports production and playout facility for a leading broadcaster that operates five sports channels across 169 countries — dramatically improving productivity through workflow optimisation across its entire infrastructure, from ingest to playout, according to Eckert. Over the same period, Imagine Communications has also been active in further strengthening its offering. “What resonates most strongly with sports production professionals are the post-IBC 2014 advancements in scale, reliability and flexibility we bring to their outside production

SPORTS SPORTS BROADCASTING BROADCASTING FUND FUND Supporting our own Supporting our own in in times ofof need... times need...

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units,” believes Eckert, “allowing them to fortify space-constrained facilities with unprecedented performance. “At the heart of our sports production portfolio is the Platinum IP3 router. The IP3, which will be housed in an even more compact form factor by IBC2015, can expand to sizes of 2048 x 2048 and beyond, with signals of up to 3Gb/s video or 10 gigabit Ethernet. Most importantly, the router can be reconfigured or expanded without taking it off the air.” Imagine Communications says that it is a major influential force in the gradual and practical transition of media operations to IP-based (Eckert notes how this could enable some media companies to bypass remote trucks), COTS equipment, and sees IT-based technologies as being essential to providing the headroom that new, higher resolution formats will require.

I-MOVIX LAURENT RENARD CEO

There can be little doubt that, for armchair sports fans, slow motion replays provide invaluable i nsight into the action — and I-MOVIX has been helping deliver that insight over the past year. Touchdowns at the Super Bowl; the efforts of finishing riders in the Paris-Roubaix race; the sublime skills of Lionel Messi in El Clásico; goalmouth incidents from the Emir Cup in Qatar; and the action at the Cricket World Cup. All were enhanced by X10 ultra slow motion solutions for sports broadcast from I-MOVIX.

Many of these events were captured in 4K resolution, thanks to the latest developments from I-MOVIX that have seen the company launch the X10 UHD and the X10 UD RF, as well as combining the X10 Spine with the Miro 320 high-speed camera from Vision Research and the Polecam crane systems. “The X10 UHD is the industry’s first 4K ultra-slow motion system to support both continuous Super Slow Motion and Ultra Slow 74

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Motion at frame rates of up to 1,000fps,” says Laurent Renard, CEO. “The X10 UHD RF adds more flexibility: it can be used in wireless mode for sport productions where being close to the action makes the difference.” “4K zoom, the use of freeze frames within the replay, is a recent trend, and it looks like becoming a must-have feature,”he continues.“Commentary teams in particular like the ability to stop the replay at a certain point, zoom in, and discuss a detail of the action. The images are all rock-solid, perfect, and with no sign of motion blur.”

Lawo WOLFGANG HUBER PR MANAGER

This year’s Tour de France bicycle race, with RF coverage provided by Euro Media, made use of a new Lawo-equipped OB truck. The new Euromedia OB hybrid production vehicle, C42, supports 10 to 12 cameras, and is designed specifically to meet the demands of sports. On the Tour de France, it coordinated all the RF audio feeds before forwarding them to the truck responsible for the international broadcast feed. Among other recent highlights, the last three Formula One seasons have seen Videe specify a 32-fader Lawo mc²56 MkII 16-16C-0 mixing console for audio, equipped with three DSP boards, giving 144 DSP audio channels. On the video side, Videe chose a Lawo V__pro8. 2015 also saw Lawo at the ASEAN Games, with around 10 IP-based Lawo Commentary Control Units (LCU) and ten Lawo mc² consoles deployed. At IBC, Lawo will announce the V__remote4. “In fact, the V__remote4 is already in service in some applications,” explains Wolfgang Huber, the company’s PR manager, who believes that the transition to IP technology, and with it the possibility of remote production, will be one of the biggest evolutions in sports production workflows since the introduction of television. “The V__remote4 is ideally suited for IP-based remote productions,” he believes, “providing everything needed including interfacing for four SDI sources and destinations, productionquality J2K encoding and decoding, QoS monitoring, audio embedding/de-embedding, A/V delay management, and much more. Packaged with our 19“ audio processing engines and our VisTool control software, this allows for a very slim production set-up which even includes comprehensive audio interfacing and no-latency monitoring for the remote site.”

Limelight JASON THIBEAULT

PRINCIPAL TECHNICAL EVANGELIST

Two of the highlights of the past year for digital content delivery company Limelight have been the live streaming it provided for the BBC of both the Wimbledon tennis championships and the Formula 1 British Grand Prix from Silverstone. As well as its operational highlights, Limelight has also seen a sports product development highlight since IBC 2014 with the launch of its MMD Live service. “MMD Live enables us to do on-the-fly transcoding and transmuxing of live video streams, allowing customers to get their content to any device, anywhere in the world,” explains Jason Thibeault, principal technical evangelist at Limelight. “Incoming requests for a live stream are analysed at the edge of the CDN, from which is determined the requesting device. If the stream is not currently being delivered, it can be transcoded or transmuxed in real time to the appropriate format.” According to Thibeault, Limelight sees cloudbased transcoding and delivery technologies as empowering sports organisations to more effectively and efficiently reach their audiences no matter where they are or what device they are using. “This migration of what was once a manual, hardware- and infrastructure-intensive process into the cloud,” he says, “will continue to happen throughout 2016 and beyond.”

Linear Acoustic TIM CARROLL FOUNDER

“The long road from Beijing to Vancouver to London to Sochi has led us to better audio for sports broadcasting,” says Tim Carroll, founder of Linear Acoustic, reminiscing about the role his company’s products have played in sport production and broadcasting over the past 12 months. According to Carroll, Linear Acoustic first developed upmixing for television as a sort of homage to techniques that had been used on film mix stages for years to help rapidly create music and effects (M+E) beds. The original UPMAX was designed to perform upmixing and one additional trick: three channel mode. By upmixing the stereo M+E EUROPE SPORTTECH JOURNAL / AUTUMN 2015

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and mixing the mono dialog or announcer in afterwards, the so-called surroundfield is kept wide and stable — even with excited announcers, laughs Carroll. “The first units were a cumbersome 3RU, but quickly advanced to 2RU with analogue monitor outputs to directly drive powered speakers, and evolved to a 1RU form factor that includes the useful original features and more,” explains Carroll. “The latest UPMAX v4 accepts stereo, three channel and 5.1 channel audio, and automatically produces a consistent and engaging 5.1 channel output. [It] has enabled several major sport producers to adopt dramatically simplified audio workflows without compromising quality.” The UPMAX v4, he says, is extremely low latency, includes an ITU-R BS.1770 loudness meter, dual power supplies, and relay bypass. It features HD/SD-SDI and AES I/O, plus a monitor section with calibration tones and eight +4dBu balanced analogue outputs. “These features,” concludes Carroll, “make the compact 1RU UPMAX v4 perfect for production environments and OB trucks alike.”

LiveU RONEN ARTMAN

VICE PRESIDENT, MARKETING

According to Ronen Artman, VP of marketing, there are two events — at different ends of the sporting spectrum — that particularly stand out for his company since last year’s IBC. The first is the 2015 Copa América football tournament hosted in Chile, at which numerous broadcasters used various types of LiveU units for tournament coverage, including the LU200 ultra-small transmission device, and LiveU’s Xtender to ensure stronger cellular signals in highly congested areas. The second event, in May 2015, saw production company Tividoo provide significantly increased online and broadcast-quality coverage of the Mainz Gutenberg marathon using LiveU’s LU-Smart smartphone bonding app. Tividoo worked with OB provider Simon Media to capture and deliver the enhanced coverage, and the combination of iPhone 5 with LU-Smart allowed footage to be captured in a moving vehicle especially tailored for the event by Tividoo — meaning that the race could be followed as it moved through the city, providing viewers with a real sense of the occasion. The iPhone used 3G/4G connectivity bonded EUROPE SPORTTECH JOURNAL / AUTUMN 2015

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with Wi-Fi in a car — provided by a multichannel VPN router — as well as additional SIMs in the router. “The sports sector has adopted cellular bonding technology at a very rapid rate and LiveU continues to evolve its solutions to allow customers to select precisely the technology — or technologies — that are best suited to their needs,” says Artman. “Deals with BT Sport for the creation of cellular newsgathering cars, as well as the 70 per cent year-on-year increase in the number of LiveU units at Super Bowl XLIX, testify to that.”

NEP Visions BRIAN CLARK

COMMERCIAL AND TECHNICAL PROJECTS DIRECTOR

“It’s been another bumper year for NEP Visions since the last time we were at IBC,” says Brian Clark, commercial and technical projects director. “The start of 2015 has been jam-packed — Premiership, Championship and Champions League football, including the final in Berlin. We’ve covered all of the‘crown jewel’ horse racing events: Cheltenham, The Grand National, The Epsom Derby and Royal Ascot as well as covering the racing every weekend, 52 weeks a year. And then there’s athletics, WWE, UFC, cricket, golf, snooker, NBA…” Wimbledon 2015 saw NEP Visions successfully complete its second year as OB facilities provider for three major clients, having provided extensive broadcast facilities at the tournament for eight years as OB partner for ESPN and also for the last two years for host broadcaster, the BBC. In total, NEP Visions had over four hundred crew working on the tournament, along with four OB trucks and eight production flypack galleries. These facilities covered 150 camera positions, 12 presenter positions, and used more than 55km of cable. The company also found the new sixspeed super slo-mo camera a great innovation. “It’s an enormous undertaking,” smiles Clark. “We also support AELTC with its coverage for the club, ranging from Wimbledon Extra to coverage of the outer courts.”

“The continuing trend towards 4K coverage will be a strong influence on sports production,” Clark continues, “with new innovations from complementary 4K systems while working in HD, to full 4K broadcasts. The drivers in this will undoubtedly be frame rate, UHDR and colour space.”

Netco Sports JEAN-SÉBASTIEN CRUZ FOUNDER & CEO

There can be few in the world of sports production and broadcasting who don’t believe that mobile is a key technology of the future. Looking to establish itself as a leader in the field, Netco Sports has launched several new mobile solutions, including: two second screen apps for TVA Sports Canada; the official app of DirecTV sports Latin America; a new version of the Eurosport Player app; the Canal F1 app for Canal+; and a new version of Fox Sports Australia’s apps. “These apps offer a combination of live streaming, VOD, news, stats, social media and live gaming to users to enhance their viewing experience,” says Jean-Sébastien Cruz, founder & CEO, “and provide them the possibility to engage with their favourite sports whenever they want and wherever they are.” In June 2015, Eurosport introduced a completely new look and feel for its Eurosport Player app, developed in partnership with Netco Sports. The new app not only feeds high quality live streams from Eurosport channels, but also provides a broad range of live features, including360° coverage giving users multiple camera access and allowing a bespoke viewing experience. According to Netco, one of the ambitions of the organisers of the 28th SEA Games was that it should be more viral. Netco Sports was enlisted to provide what it believes is a first: an interactive multi-camera feature for a multisport competition. “It became the most popular sports app in Singapore for the duration of the games,” smiles Cruz, “and achieved impressive session length and user engagement.” 75

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NewTek ELLEN CAMLOH SENIOR DIRECTOR

The International Judo Federation (IJF) uses video to reach those that aren’t able to attend events, and this is streamed on the internet. It turned to NewTek for a production system that was compact enough to travel in the truck to every event and take up a small footprint, while providing high quality, professional images and streaming capabilities. It needed to be reliable and affordable, and the combination of TriCaster 8000 and 3Play 4800 met all these requirements. “3Play’s replay function is a first for the IJF as they can use it to help the judges to award points,” says Ellen Camloh, senior director. “The recorded material is also available to re-play immediately after a match, which is great for the players and coaches to review their matches.” According to Camloh, the release of theTriCaster and 3Play video production systems in the ultra-portable form factor are gaining traction with the changes they’re making for professional and amateur leagues, and even emerging sports, to engage a global audience. “Their size makes it possible for smaller crews to cover sports and locations that previously were too remote or logistically difficult to cover,” Camloh notes.“Their price point and HDMI I/O for prosumer peripherals lower barriers dramatically for sports programmes, even with professional 4-channel replay, at an affordable cost.” “Fan experience technologies are important drivers of sports production workflows, because producers need to adapt to viewer preferences,” she continues. “Instant replay tools are more important in the arena than ever, in order to keep audiences buying tickets instead of watching from home.”

Presteigne Broadcast Hire DAVID O’CARROLL HEAD OF TECHNOLOGY

The University Boat Race is one of the more challenging sports events for broadcasters — but, as with many sports, wireless technology is increasingly coming to the rescue. That was the case with Presteigne Broadcast Hire’s support of this year’s event, when the company enabled the race to be covered via a wireless mesh over the whole length of the course, allowing RF cameras (towards which the company sees an increasing shift) to be placed where they were needed — on the race boats, on 76

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the following vessels, and on shore where cabling would have been difficult. A recent development has been that Presteigne has put together a package aimed particularly at touchline cameras, working alongside NEP Visions and Sky. The SC100 is a single unit wireless camera, including a standard Sony P1 camera, Cobham two-way links with diversity reception, monitors and a Steadicam mount, and can be assembled and set-up quickly. A colour matrix and control filter allows the camera to match automatically whatever main cameras are being used — Grass Valley as well as Sony — and to be managed from the same OCP as the rest of the show. “We continue to supply kit to virtually all of the big sports, and we work with the production companies and outside broadcast businesses to anticipate what might be needed,” notes David O’Carroll, head of technology. “We have ramped up our 4K offering, for example, because we see greater interest in this in the future.”

Quantel TIM FELSTEAD

HEAD OF PRODUCT MARKETING

“When you’re as busy as we’ve been, the events you remember best are the most recent ones,” laughs Tim Felstead, head of product marketing at Quantel and Snell. “In our case, that would be the job EPC has just done with a Quantel Enterprise sQ system integrated with MBT’s logging software at the first European Games in Baku, to record, log and edit content for highlights packages at the competition.” For Felstead, the most important recent Quantel/Snell developments in the sports field have been the LiveTouch studio sports highlighting system and Kahuna 4K. LiveTouch is now deployed with its first users, he says, with a number of further systems soon to be shipped. “LiveTouch has been very well received not only because of its slick, sure control panel, but also because it offers an integrated editing capability — so selected highlights don’t need to leave the system to be edited together. It can be done instantly on the same server, with results ready to go to air as soon as the edit is complete,” he explains. “No other highlights system offers that speed to air.” “Timeline’s choice of Kahuna for its new 4K truck for BT Sport demonstrates its leadership

in the push to 4K,” continues Felstead. “Not only is Kahuna the most powerful and capable 4K switcher in the market by some margin, it also effortlessly handles other formats simultaneously with 4K.” I/O scale and complexity and the challenges of 4K are, according to Quantel, the driving forces behind its product development.

Quantum GEOFF STEDMAN

SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT

Professional sports leagues — including Major League Baseball — professional sports teams and university sports organisations are among the organisations that have taken advantage of Quantum’s StorNext 5 for their workflow applications. The past year has also seen what Quantum describes as a major deployment of its production and archive solution at BBC Sport, enabling centralised production and archive of all its sports-related content. Notre Dame University athletics department implemented a complete StorNext workflow storage solution that Quantum says allow projects that once took hours to be completed and out to their consumers in minutes. “The past year has been an exciting one for Quantum and our StorNext product line,” says Geoff Stedman, senior vice-president. “We’ve continued to extend our StorNext Pro Solutions offerings, including the introduction earlier this year of the new entry-level StorNext Pro Foundation. StorNext Pro Foundation gives smaller sports teams, stadiums and arenas a cost-effective way to get all the benefits of a StorNext-enabled workflow in a package that is perfectly sized for on-site work.” “We’ve seen several implementations of our workflow storage specifically for 4K sports production,” he adds. Stedman is excited about what he sees as the accelerating transition to 4K (and higher) resolutions for content acquisition and production in sports production workflows. More and more sporting events are being shot with 4K cameras, he points out, enabling content producers to acquire in the highest possible resolution which increases long-term value for this content and gives producers more flexibility in what they can do with that content creatively. EUROPE SPORTTECH JOURNAL / AUTUMN 2015

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Reality Check Systems MIKE WARD

MANAGING DIRECTOR, EUROPE AND MIDDLE EAST

Earlier this year at NAB, Reality Check Systems (RCS) launched new features for its interactive touchscreen solution LaunchPad, such as predictive analysis and social media integration. “Our customers have responded well to the additions,” says Mike Ward, managing director, Europe and Middle East, “and RCS’ in-house development team will continue exploring new features to add to the system.” RCS recently worked with SBS Discovery to incorporate Opta data feeds for the Europa League and Bundesliga into its LaunchPad touchscreen, and also collaborated with Sky Deutschland to customise its system for Wimbledon broadcasts. Ward says his company has also seen a growing interest in LaunchPad from broadcasters since NAB, with BeIN Sports adding two systems to its kit, and Middle East Broadcasting Center using LaunchPad for its coverage of the Saudi Professional League. Ward believes that industry professionals are beginning to see cloud technology as a path to virtualised workflows — which is why RCS has been focusing its R&D energy on adding new functionality to its cloud-based DataCenter. Something else, though, has also caught his — and the industry’s — imagination. “Even though augmented reality (AR) is an established trend in sports production, the excitement around AR in sports production is fuelling new interest and innovation,” he declares. “Networks like Sky Deutschland are pushing the limits of AR beyond traditional full screen standings table or match-result AR graphics, and into full virtual graphics. We recently worked with them on a virtual tower that can be interwoven with live action game coverage on-demand.”

Riedel MARC SCHNEIDER

DIRECTOR, GLOBAL EVENTS

As well as its annual round of participation in Formula 1 and many of the Red Bull extreme sports events such as X-Fighters, World Run and the Air Races, the year since IBC 2014 has seen Riedel also support the SEA Games, the European Athletics Championships, the FIS World Ski Chamipnships and the Giro d’Italia. Riedel also used its STX-200 EUROPE SPORTTECH JOURNAL / AUTUMN 2015

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Pro Skype interface to help Real Madrid connect to their fans. “Sports are huge for Riedel,” explains Marc Schneider, director of global events. “Customers have come to understand that the networked approach to signal acquisition, transport, and routing offers the greatest amount of flexibility and that having fully integrated solutions that are designed to work together is far easier to setup, use and take down than anything else.” The newest members of Riedel’s MediorNet family are MetroN and MicroN, which the company claims offer a level of flexibility and customisation that is unmatched in the industry. As signal counts increase along with the size of sports productions, says Schneider, the ability to easily move high bandwidth signals around is invaluable, noting that MicroN and MetroN can be used in many different ways, from high-density signal breakouts to de-centralised routers. Just as IP networks are gaining popularity, signal networks over fibre are absolutely the way to go for sports productions, Schneider believes. With every signal available at every node on the network, there is, he says, no better way to react to the inevitable “oh-by-the-way” last-minute signal requests and changes that come up.

Ross Video PHIL VENTRE

BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT — SPORTS (EMEA)

Ross Video’s Acuity production switcher was, according to the company, the first switcher in EMEA to be used in a live 4K production last year at the ATP Tour Final. Since then, Ross says that it has been working with a number of top-tier football clubs and stadia to help them make their content more creative and involving. “Since the last IBC, we have been steadily growing our footprint in EMEA from a sports perspective,” says Phil Ventre, business development — sports (EMEA). “We’ve started working with Liverpool FC, Paris St. Germain, Spartak Moscow, Twickenham stadium and FC Basel in Switzerland, and we’re definitely benefiting from the top clubs and venues focusing more on fan engagement and ways to improve the fan experience within the stadia.” A year ago, Ross Video launched openTruck — a new, open standard for mid-size (sub $2 million) OB units. “We’ve been very pleased by the number of manufacturers signing up as openTruck technology partners and the number

of our Ross business partners and SI who have expressed an interest in the blueprint,”says Ventre. “openTruck delivers exactly what the market has been asking for: a high-quality standard that’s free to access and offers much greater security to clubs, stadia and production companies.” According to Ventre, the big buzz in 2015 has been around remote IP production. He notes that it offers a huge number of opportunities, but only really starts to stand out at higher frame rates and higher resolution content such as 4K and 8K.

RT Software LUKE HARRISON

TECHNICAL PRODUCT MARKETING MANAGER

A significant achievement of the last several months for 3D graphics company RT Software was to be chosen by BT Sport, says Luke Harrison, technical product marketing manager, to provide augmented reality graphics for the studio coverage of its new UEFA Champions League and UEFA Europa League shows. “At launch, BT Sport announced that it would be investing in groundbreaking new augmented reality sets and digital analytics,” he notes. Accordingly, BT Sport selected RT Software’s tOG-VR3D for the job, as it is designed specifically to meet the live graphics needs of the most demanding broadcasts. The package chosen by BT incorporates the delivery of a three camera VR studio with n+1 redundancy, as well as services to commission the VR studio with BT Sports’chosen camera tracking technology from Ncam.” Harrison is also enthused by his company’s latest product development, which he describes as “groundbreaking technology”. 4K Stitch consists of two 4K static cameras mounted close to each other at the field of play, the outputs from which are ‘stitched’ into a live panoramic view. “Off-camera” incidents become a thing of the past, notes Harrison, while higher production quality is possible at lower cost — a key benefit for minority and/or localised sports events. “4K Stitch can make an important contribution to remote production,”claims Harrison. Like many, he sees“the whole IP thing”as assuming increasing importance over time, with SDI progressively disappearing. He also believes that higher frame rates, as opposed to higher (8K) resolution will be highly beneficial to sports coverage. 77

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RTS JON RIDEL

SALES MANAGER UK & IRELAND

Broadcast coverage of Wimbledon, t h e F I S Al p i n e S k i Wo r l d Championship, and the worldwide MotoGP motorcycle race championships all saw the deployment of RTS intercom systems. For the Wimbledon broadcast, NEP Visions provided OB facilities for all national and international feeds during the whole fortnight — relying on RTS OMNEO IP-based media networking technology to optimise communications between its OB facilities on site. “Wimbledon 2015 saw a major increase in the use of IP technologies,” notes Jon Ridel, RTS sales manager UK & Ireland. “This not only enables providers to offer quality of service, but also means increased flexibility at such high profile occasions. The new RTS KP-Series, which offers OMNEO and 4W connectivity as standard, will feature heavily at ongoing events as the new keypanel can ‘talk’ 4-Wire, OMNEO, and additionally has full audio options as standard.” In February, RTS introduced the first keypanel series with OMNEO onboard. According to the company, the KP-Series keypanels set a new milestone within the RTS product range, combining HD colour displays, improved single key operation and full compatibility with all existing RTS matrices in a modern design. KP-Series keypanels are said to be suitable for a wide range of intercom product customers such as sport venues and outside broadcast vans. RTS believes that IP, and its OMNEO solution, offers significant advantages — among them, the ability to take advantage of existing networks, and the opportunity for customers to avoid getting locked into a proprietary backbone infrastructure. Linking via trunking and interfacing to third party devices also becomes easier and more flexible.

SIS LIVE JOHN BOZZA

COMMERCIAL DIRECTOR

Celebrity winter sports show The Jump was an unexpected TV hit in the UK at the turn of the year, with uplink facilities provided by SIS LIVE, working with CTV Outside Broadcasts and TwoFour on the Austrian slopes. A dual antenna satellite uplink vehicle sent back live coverage from series two — SIS LIVE had also worked on the first series — of the eight-day competition. As 78

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well as providing video and audio links for crews on the ground, the truck sent back two feeds — one live, one back-up — to the SIS LIVE MCR at MediaCityUK. From there it was forwarded to BT Tower and on to the company’s broadcast partners. Since IBC last year, SIS LIVE has installed fibre links at Premier League football grounds and also at rugby venues for the upcoming World Cup where the company is providing connectivity for ITV Sport. Key advantages of the new fibre services are said to include high-bandwidth internet connectivity, voice communications and reverse vision feeds, offering commercial benefits with enhanced capabilities. “SIS LIVE has a unique position in the UK marketplace as the only one stop shop for multiple HD video and data feeds from any location, delivered via fibre and satellite,” claims John Bozza, commercial director. “We can also offer broadcast in 4K, and COFDM wireless camera links at some venues, which allow roving TV reporters to link instantly into the fibre network and deliver multiple live video streams for sport, sports news and breaking news stories.”

Sixty HENRIETTE SÆTHER MARKETING DIRECTOR

A major project from the past year saw Norwegian TV experience company Sixty rebrand Norwegian broadcaster TV 2’s sports broadcast graphics. In addition to the rebrand, the company created a Sochi theme for TV 2’s broadcast of the winter games, comprising on-air graphics, bumpers and studio design. “The brief from TV 2’s sports broadcast was all about creating a clever interface design that could easily be branded for any sports event,” says Henriette Sæther, marketing director. “At the same time, it was important to keep TV 2’s sports identity strong throughout any new theme that was made.” Sixty also created a full football league identity

for the Norwegian first division football league, Obosligaen. The deliverables included both Ross Xpression and Vizrt on-air graphics, a custommade logo, and a new ident for the league’s new sponsor, OBOS. The company also devised the pattern design on the football in the ident, which is a part of the league’s identity and is also used on merchandise footballs by OBOS. “We create the wrapping around the television experience, from linear live broadcast to on demand experiences on any screen,” explains Sæther. “Our on-air broadcast team is widely recognised for its work within sports broadcast design. We´re technology agnostic, and work in an agile way. To us, it´s the user experience that matters.” At IBC, Sixty will introduce Ease Live, a product that Sæther says merges the capabilities of what the company’s developers can create in TV everywhere sphere with the design experience of its broadcast design experts.

Sony NORBERT PAQUET

STRATEGIC MARKETING MANAGER

When Timeline, a major provider of outside broadcast, post production, and studio-based services for all major UK networks, designed and built — in conjunction with BT Sport — what it claims is the first purpose built Ultra HD outside broadcast unit in Europe, it became the first user of Sony’s new HDC-4300 2/3 inch UHD cameras. The truck also includes a Sony UHD 4K PWS-4400 server and PVM-X300 4K monitor. The HDC-4300 was similarly deployed in the broadcast of the 2015 UEFA Champions League final from Berlin, as well as PMW-F55 4K Live System cameras. UEFA’s end-to-end live production workflow also included Sony’s PWS4400 4K servers and MVS-X series multi-format switchers. In use as well was Sony’s 30-inch BVMX300 OLED 4K monitor for live monitoring within the OB truck. In addition to the BVM-X300, Sony’s 85-inch FWD-85X9600P BRAVIA Professional 4K LED screen showed live ultra-high definition footage from the match in the dedicated UEFA EUROPE SPORTTECH JOURNAL / AUTUMN 2015

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showroom in the broadcast compound. “We launched the HDC-4300 at NAB,” explains Norbert Paquet, strategic marketing manager, Sony Professional at Sony Europe. “It’s the first camera in the world to use three 2/3” 4K image sensors, and supports the same B4-mount lenses as well as the same control surfaces as our industry leading HDC-2000 series cameras. The existing HDLA-1500 series, control and shading systems, viewfinders and master setup units are all interchangeable between the HD and 4K systems. “The HDC-4300 is multi-format for daily HD applications, sports on the weekends with up to 400fps, and future-proof with 4K acquisition.”

SOS Global MICHAEL TENENBAUM

MANAGING DIRECTOR, EUROPE

In February this year, the 2015 FIS Alpine World Ski Championships got underway in Vail-Beaver Creek, Colorado, USA. As a small and inaccessible resort, it presented significant challenges — but that didn’t stop SOS Global delivering over 110 tons of broadcast and technical event equipment by sea, air and road freight from Asia, Europe and the USA. In fact, it seems that there was scarcely a sports event — large or small — during the past 12 months that hasn’t benefited from SOS Global’s capabilities. Its destinations have included the 28th SEA Games in Singapore; the first European Games in Baku; the Australian and French Open tennis tournaments, as well as Wimbledon; the NBA Europe tour; the FIFA Women’s World Cup in Canada; and the British Open. SOS Global is truly a worldwide business — which is how it is that SOS Global Hamburg, Germany has just celebrated its second birthday, while SOS Global UK has just turned four. “We’re continuing to grow our worldwide experienced team of specialists, handling time-sensitive and fragile cargo and offering global, tailormade logistic solutions to manage all our clients’ transport needs,” says Michael Tenenbaum, managing director of SOS Global Europe. “Our philosophy and service are designed to enable our customers to focus just on their core business, while we take care of their cargo needs.” Such are the complexities of SOS Global’s business, and the demands its customers place on it, that the company is already planning well into the future. EUROPE SPORTTECH JOURNAL / AUTUMN 2015

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“We’re already finalising the set-up of our active participation at the Olympic Summer Games 2016 in Rio de Janeiro, and the set-up of the Euro 2016 football tournament in France,” notes Tenenbaum. “Beyond that, preparation for the FIFA World Cup in Russia has already begun, with SOS Global Russia beginning operations this year.” Besides the sports broadcast industry, SOS Global operates in many other markets as diverse as film production, corporate and marketing events, fairs, exhibitions and industrial projects.

Tata Communications BRIAN MORRIS

VICE PRESIDENT AND GENERAL MANAGER, GLOBAL MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT SERVICES

Having been appointed official connectivity provider to Formula 1 in 2012, 2015 represented a landmark for the company when the agreement was extended to cover GP2 and GP3 — the ‘feeder’ competitions for

Formula One — and the Porsche Supercup. Those competitions will now be able to take advantage of Tata Communications’ Race Network Operations Centre located in the Formula 1 Technical Centre, the 150 tonne, 750 sqm nerve centre present at every F1 event. That agreement followed one reached with Red Bull Media House which sees Tata become the global connectivity and innovations partner for Red Bull’s new television channel, due to launch next year. Originally known as a supplier of extreme sports content, Red Bull Media House now produces a broad range of formats and offers more than 1,000 hours of content to broadcast channels and digital platforms around the world. Tata Communications was also selected as the preferred media connectivity partner for the Red Bull events globally, transmitting live data over its fibre

network to the Red Bull Media House HQ. In the same month, the company launched its Media Ecosystem. “Market dynamics continue to reshape the media and entertainment industry,” notes Brian Morris, vice-president and general manager, Global Media & Entertainment Services. “Technology platforms are evolving rapidly, new business models are emerging, consumer viewing habits are changing, and more competition is arising from multiple sectors. Tata Communications’ Media Ecosystem provides the flexibility and scale businesses need as they evolve their strategies in response to this changing landscape.”

TSL Products PIETER SCHILLEBEECKX PRODUCT DIRECTOR

The past twelve months has seen TSL Products continue to succeed in the sports broadcast market. Highlights include audio monitoring and SoundField upmix units for the Women’s World Cup, SoundField DSF-B MKII surround microphones and PAM PiCo loudness meters for the cricket coverage in India, as well as a large order of PAM2 MKII Dolby audio monitors and MDU12-PAi intelligent power distribution units from the Delhi-based sports channel, Ten Sports. “SoundField, with its DSF-B surround sound microphone system, was recently upgraded to the DSF-B MKII, and the UPM-1/X-1 stereo to 5.1 upmix processor has continued to build on its recognition in markets such as the UK and is finding a global audience in countries such as India, Brazil and the US,” notes Pieter Schillebeeckx, product director. “We are being approached by a large number of live sports production companies from across the globe who are just starting out with live 5.1 sports coverage and they are turning to us for advice on live 5.1 production.” “We are continuously looking to improve and innovate our product offering,” he continues, “and this would not be possible without being in close contact with the leading providers of major sporting events worldwide. Based on their needs, we’ll be launching some key audio and video over IP products over the coming months.” At IBC, TLS Products says it is launching an entirely new range of audio monitoring units developed with OB trucks in mind, covering audio I/O such as MADI, Dante, Ravenna, AES67 and Hydra2. 79

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SVGEUROPE

Viaccess-Orca

transmitter and Omni antenna had been designed into Broadcast RF’s compact and EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT, lightweight one-man camera transmitter for MARKETING, PRODUCTS use at the Open Championship constituted just AND SECURITY the latest in a series of sporting events that saw One of the biggest challenges faced Vislink’s technology deployed. by producers, broadcasters and rights owners of sport content is piracy. The NFL, NBA and Major League Baseball alone believe that millions of dollars have been lost to it — and, to compound the felony, it’s been estimated that online piracy of sporting events generates more than $200 million in advertising revenue. That’s the challenge to which Viaccess-Orca is responding. This year, for example, it helped OSN, the MENA region’s leading pay-TV network, eliminate over 60% of the illegal links to the top Formula E is a new FIA championship featuring matches at the 2015 ICC Cricket World Cup, and Formula cars powered exclusively by electric interrupted illegal viewing for over 50% of the energy. The requirement was for consistent, audience. real-time, close-up action from the track and pit lanes, and to fulfil it Vislink engineers designed and tested a vehicle on-board camera system, as well as a track-wide receive system. Formula E cars now race with four micro-sized on-board HD cameras and H.264 on-board transmitters provide live HD video, as well as audio and data related to the car’s speed, The company’s solution is called ‘Eye on position and other metrics. Piracy’ — and at IBC, Viaccess-Orca will be showcasing the most recent feature enhancements that have been made to the product. These include Snapshoter, an EOP video/image capture service, the goal of which is to capture all illegal live video redistribution of content. “Snapshoter will automatically check if there is a video behind a pirate link, and it will detect “No less challenging than the shock, vibration black video as well as fixed video,” explains David and fast acceleration/deceleration of motorsport Leporini, EVP marketing products and security.“It is providing coverage of a long distance event can also perform logo detection, and can gather such as the 2015 London Marathon,” says evidence which can be stored for possible future Ayes Amewudah, vice-president of sales legal action.” and marketing. “Those challenges include Viaccess-Orca will also integrate Twitter transmitting from the entire length of the course, into Eye on Piracy, enabling users to assess gaps in coverage due to obstructions such as the popularity of an avent, monitor the social bridges and overhanging trees, and ensuring network for tweets containing an illegal link and high-quality video from all assets.” to delete illegal tweets. “User behaviours often For the second year in a row, Broadcast RF drive technology trends,” believes Leporini. was on scene with Vislink equipment to provide continuous live coverage of the entire marathon Vislink course. One of the reasons Broadcast RF chose AYES AMEWUDAH the L1700 transmitter to be mounted on the VICE PRESIDENT, SALES AND five motorcycles deployed along the route was MARKETING because Vislink’s proprietary deep interleaving July’s announcement that Vislink’s error correction is designed specifically to L 1 7 0 0 w i r e l e s s m i c r o w a v e handle interruptions to the link path.

DAVID LEPORINI

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Sponsor Update

Vizrt

DR. STEPHAN WÜRMLIN STADLER EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT, SPORTS

A unique feature of Digital Center 2, ESPN’s recently-completed production centre, is the extensive use of on-screen monitors in the studio. Some 127 monitors are used between the two main studios, and driving content for those monitors are multiple Viz Engines from Vizrt, each with eight output channels. Dubbed Octoviz, the system controls the display of real-time graphics across any combination of on-set monitors across walls, floors and banner displays — all in their native resolutions and aspect ratios.

Vizrt’s participation in 4K tests at the Ryder Cup saw it provide two 4K-compatible newlyreleased Viz Engines, with Matrox DSX LE3 4K SDI video cards and the Viz Trio character generator to Sky Sports to generate and deliver the on-screen graphics. “We’ve recently updated Viz Arena to include a downstream version and internal recorder which makes it a completely independent live replay enhancement tool,” notes Dr. Stephan Würmlin Stadler, EVP Sports. “By adding features to enhance coverage for new sports including American football, soccer, basketball, tennis, rugby and volleyball, the product has allowed us to reach new markets and countries.” The company is also responding to customer demand for the integration of statistical data into broadcast graphics by developing new features to Vizrt products which let operators use data to enrich content. Like many companies, Vizrt sees 4K and IP as influential technologies.“We’ve been working hard on adapting our current systems for the change to IP,” concludes Würmlin Stadler . “At IBC2015, we’ll be showcasing both J2K and a SMPTE 2022 compatibility as well as with Sony’s IP-based systems.” EUROPE SPORTTECH JOURNAL / AUTUMN 2015

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SVGEUROPE

Sponsor Index

EUROPE SVG EUROPE SPONSOR ADI UK Ltd Adobe Aerial Camera Systems AJA Video Systems Alston Elliot Arqiva Avid Axon Bexel Global Broadcast Solutions Blackmagic Design Broadcast Manufactur GmbH Broadcast RF Broadcast Solutions Calrec Audio Canon Europe ChyronHego Clear-Com Cobham CTV Outside Broadcasts deltatre Dolby Elemental Technologies Ericsson ES Broadcast Eurovision EVS Forscene Gearhouse Broadcast Globecast Grass Valley Harman Harmonic Hitachi Kokusai IBM I-Movix Imagine Communications Lawo Limelight Networks Linear Acoustic LiveU NEP Visions NETCO SPORTS NewTek Presteigne Quantel / Snell Quantum Reality Check Systems Riedel Communications Ross Video RT Software RTS SIS LIVE Sixty AS sonovts Sony SOS Global Express Tata Communications TSL Products Viaccess-Orca Vislink Vizrt WTS Media Group

PAGE 52 8 10 11 53 12 15 15 21 17 19 54 18 19 9 22 23 24 57 59 C2 25 25 30 27 C4 27 59 28 29 1, 63 65 13 31 32 33 7 35 36 61 37 37 60 39 40 41 41 43 44 45 45 47 67 48 5 49 9 49 51 51 71

LEVEL OB/SI Gold Gold Gold OB/SI Gold Gold Gold Gold Gold Gold OB/SI Gold Gold Gold Gold Gold Gold OB/SI OB/SI Platinum Gold Gold OB/SI Gold Platinum Gold OB/SI Gold Gold Platinum Gold Gold Gold Gold Gold Gold Platinum Gold Gold OB/SI Gold Gold OB/SI Gold Gold Gold Gold Gold Gold Gold Gold Gold OB/SI Gold Platinum Gold Gold Gold Gold Gold OB/SI

CONTACT Oliver Brindley Matthew Gyves Antonia Wood Gina Georgallis Neale Connell Grant Parkinson Stephanie Genin Geert-Jan Gussen Sally Jimson Patrick Hussey Tine Helmle Chris Brandrick Peter Jakobson Kevin Emmott Katie Simmonds Mark Gederman Judy Cheng JP Delport Adam Berger Katie De Paoli Venkat Venkateshwaran Keith Wymms Anne Louise Buick Edward Saunders Agnieszka Czerska Nicolas Bourdon Candice Rose Siobhan Murtagh Bazeli Mbo Rob Watson Katy Templeman- Holmes Nik Forman Paddy Roache Lisa Borga Nadia Sinigaglia Oliver Abadeer Andreas Hilmer Natascha Rรถsgen Chris Shaw Ronen Artman Joanne Adams Benjamin Causse Jane Johnston Mike Ransome Roger Thornton Christine Bachmayer Mike Ward Christinan Bockskopf Stuart Russell Mike Fredriksen Josef Penker Donna Palumbo Henriette Sรฆther FRANZ OLBERT Barbara Rosseel Stefanie Helms Richard Craig-McFeely Chris Exelby Atika Boulgaz Alex Lowe Andre Torsvik Terry Murphy

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PHONE [44] 1772 708 200 [44] 7713 074944 [44] 1483 426767 [44] 7984 143 056 [44] 7976 611186 [44] 20 7255 6891 [44] 1753 658628 [31] 161 850 452 [44] 1284 776772 [44] 1565 830 049 x616 [49] 89 8999 64 60 [44] 1322 520 202 [49] 6721 4008-0 [44] 1422 842159 [44] 208 588 8177 [1] (631) 845-2069 [1] (510) 337-6676 [44] 1489 566 750 [44] 20 8453 8989 [39] 011 384 18344 [44] 207 4063219 [1] 503 222 3212x420 [44] 23 8048 4041 [44] 19 2365 0080 [41] 22 717 2138 [32] 4 361 58 10 [44] 330 380 1130 [44] 845 820 0000 [33] 155952604 [44] 20 8867 6320 [44] 1707 668 234 [44] 1252 555 490 [44] 845 1212177 [44] 203 651 2846 [32] 65 320 451 [44] 208 339 1810 [49] 173 727 04 33 [49] 176 76 97 5532 [1] 216 622 0247 [972] 9 763 2414 [44] 1344 356743 [33] 1 4483 06 67 [44] 7920 521065 [44] 1293 651300 [44] 1635 48222 [49] 89 94303 200 [44] 7799 66 0792 [49] 202 292 9516 [44] 7827 019494 [44] 20 7168 8820 [49] 9421 706 496 [44] 19 0886 5604 [47] 97 60 22 36 [49] 89 419 671 114 [34] 934-02-6744 [49] 40 611 6407 11 [44] 2070 299685 [44] 1628 564610 [33] 1444 56460 [44] 1442 431300 [47] 5523 0025 [44] 207 871 0700

EMAIL oliver.brindley@adi.tv mgyves@adobe.com awood@acsmedia.com gina@phosphor.pro Neale@aelgraphics.co.uk Grant.Parkinson@arqiva.com stephanie.genin@avid.com geertjan.gussen@axon.tv Sally.Jimson@VitecGroup.com patrickh@blackmagicdesign.com t.helmle@broaman.com chris.brandrick@broadcastrf.com p.jakobsson@broadcast-solutions.de kevin.emmott@calrec.com Katie.Simmonds@canon-europe.com mgederman@chyron.com judy.cheng@clearcom.com jp.delport@cobham.com adam@ctvob.co.uk Katie.DePaoli@deltatre.com venkat.venkat@dolby.com keithw@elementaltechnologies.com Anne-Louise.Buick@ericsson.com Edward@esbroadcast.com czerska@eurovision.net n.bourdon@evs.tv candice.rose@forscene.com smurtagh@gearhousebroadcast.com bazeli.mbo@globecast.com rob.watson@grassvalley.com Katy.Templeman-Holmes@harman.com Nik.Forman@harmonicinc.com paddy@hitachi-keu.com lisa.borga@uk.ibm.com nsinigaglia@i-movix.com Oliver.Abadeer@imaginecommunications.com andreas.hilmer@lawo.de nroesgen@llnw.com chris.shaw@telosalliance.com ronen@liveu.tv JAdams@visions-ob.com Benjamin.c@netcosports.com jjohnston@newtek.com MikeR@presteigne.tv roger.thornton@quantel.com christine.bachmayer@quantum.com m.ward@realitychecksystems.com christian.bockskopf@riedel.net srussell@rossvideo.com mike.fredriksen@rtsw.co.uk josef.penker@de.bosch.com dpalumbo@sislive.tv henriette@sixty.no Franz.Olbert@sonovts.de Barbara.Rosseel@eu.sony.com s.helms@sosglobal.eu richard.craigmcfeely@tatacommunications.com chris.exelby@tslproducts.com atika.boulgaz@viaccess-orca.com alex.lowe@vislink.com ATorsvik@vizrt.com terry.murphy@wtsbroadcast.com

IBC BOOTH 7.G27 7.F11 1.B61 7.J20, 7.J14 10.A21, 10.B21 11. E55 7.H20 8.C60 9.D14 0.B01, 8.A84 8.C61a 11. E50 7.D11 10.D29 0.G04, 1.F41 MS1 & MS2 2.A11 4.B80 1.D61

8.B90, 8.A96 8.B38e 10.B39 1.A29 1.D11, 1.E02 8.D60 1.B20 11.D39 7.B27 11. E43 4.AMT 8.B50 3.C22 8.D47 3.B62 8. E25 7.K11 7.G20 7.B26 10.A31 9.C23, 9.C10, 9.B08 7.F33 10.B48 1.C55 8.B68 12.A10 MS23 10.B41 1.A51 1.A69 7.A20

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EUROPE THANKS ITS SPONSORS GOLD

速

Pantone + Solid Coated 2623 Process Match C 70 M 100 Y 28 K 16 Process Black C 0 M 0 Y 0 K 100

OB/SI

Broadcast 82

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BROADCAST

EUROPE SPORTTECH JOURNAL / AUTUMN 2015

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PLATINUM

GOLD

OB/SI

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SVGEUROPEUPDATE

CLOSING COMMENT

A PUBLICATION OF

PUBLISHED BY SPORTS VIDEO GROUP

Summer of change for European sport

low sports summer? Think again. EuroSport snags Olympic rights away for TV and all digital platforms from an entire continent of public broadcasters. A conservative British government seems intent on strangling the BBC until it turns into a second-rate service so as not to compete with commercial TV, newspapers, and web sites. The NEP Group announces it is going public and on the hunt to raise $208 million. BT Sport officially launches the Ultra HD era in the first week of August with a 4K subscription service. And then that same week the NEP Group announced it is not moving ahead with the IPO. On one level these events seem to be disparate but they really are, ultimately, connected. Commercial services like those offered by BT and EuroSport are much more easily able to rationalise rights deals that outpace those that can be offered by public broadcasters who need to squeeze the most out of every euro. There is also more competition within the commercial channel market for content, driving demand not only for rights but also for next-generation services. And production services providers are also looking for the financial freedom to be able to respond to next-generation technology needs like 4K. For those who make a living in sports production and distribution, this past summer of change portends at least two or three years of change. Rights for events like The Open will change hands in 2017; UEFA will continue to ramp up 4K services for both Champions League and the Euros next year; the transition to IT-based signal paths will require a new way of thinking

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

BY KEN KERSCHBAUMER Executive Editor, Editorial Sports Video Group Europe

and designing OB units and facilities; and, of course, public broadcasters across the continent will continue to be challenged to do more with less. Oh...and I forgot to mention that a number of key industry executives (and countless production professionals) will most likely retire into the next 24 to 36 months, taking decades of experience with them. The changes ahead will most likely be challenging times but they will also provide plenty of new opportunities for not only technical innovation to be monetised but also business models to be matched up more appropriately with those innovations. And perhaps most importantly from an SVG Europe perspective (and SVG in the US), we plan on making sure weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re there to help you learn from the experts. As rights change hands we promise to help you understand how the new broadcast channel partners will work to bring new energy to their newly acquired properties.We will also continue to go behind the scenes at the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s most important events, like the Euros, the Olympics, and, this autumn, the Rugby World Cup. Our mission here at SVG Europe is quite simple: to provide a neutral ground where traditional competitors and long-standing partners can come together to drive the industry forward. Week in and week out that is done with our great industry-leading newsletters that you receive. And on a quarterly basis you can look for us to create valuable live events where you can network and learn in person. The challenge for you, our members and sponsors, is to figure out where your business is headed and where the new opportunities lie. Look to SVG Europe and our team to help you meet that challenge.

Ken Kerschbaumer, Executive Director, Editorial kenkersch@sportsvideo.org Tel: +1 212.481.8140 Fergal Ringrose, SVG Europe Executive Editor fergal@sportsvideo.org Tel: +353 1 294 7783 David Davies, SVG Europe Managing Editor david@sportsvideo.org Tel: + 44 7989 139816 Clare Sturzaker, European Sponsorship Sales Manager clare@sporstvideo.org Tel: + 44 7710 991595 Chris Cope, Sponsorship Sales chris.cope@sportsvideo.org Tel: + 44 7496 270322 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 Hayley Gordon, Sponsorship Coordinator hayley@sportsvideo.org | Tel: 646.524.7497 Andrew Lippe, Membership & Client Services andrew@sportsvideo.org | Tel: +1 212.481.8133 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 Magazine Printing Partnion, Laansloot 42, 1721 HM Broek op Langedijk, Netherlands www.partnion.com | Tel: +31 6 13624321 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.

EUROPE SPORTTECH JOURNAL / AUTUMN 2015

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213x2

RAI Amsterdam Conference 10 - 14 September : Exhibition 11 - 15 September

Reflecting the Industry’s Progress and Innovation Stimulating debate and sharpening strategy, the IBC Conference attracts the industry’s most influential and authoritative speakers. Join in this 5-day programme packed with headline-grabbing keynotes, masterclasses, revered technical papers and posters, Q&A’s, panel discussions and more. The conference consists of: • 5 day, multi-stream conference programme consisting of: - Advances in Technology - Business Operations - Content Innovation - Strategic Insights - What Caught My Eye (free to attend) - IBC Big Screen Experience (free to attend) - New Disruptors • 300+ world class high profile speakers • over 60 conference sessions

IBC2015 speakers include: • JB Perrette, President, Discovery Networks International • Brenda O’Connell, Director, Business Development EMEA, Twitter • Rhys Noelke, SVP Strategy, RTL Group • Richard Friedel, Executive Vice President & General Manager, Fox Networks • Spencer Stephens, Chief Technology Officer, Sony Pictures

www.ibc.org IBC Third Floor, 10 Fetter Lane, London, EC4A 1BR, UK t. +44 (0) 20 7832 4100 f. +44 (0) 20 7832 4130 e. info@ibc.org

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GET MORE OUT OF NOW 4K / UHD

12 Channels

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IP enabled

The demands are high to make the most out of every moment. With EVS, your technology is always up to speed. Now the Multicam engine for your XT3 and XS servers delivers even more, with increased SuperMotion 6X camera configurations; studio ingest and playout options with the XS server; and added audio channel / MADI support. Technology you can trust to make the most out of today, while anticipating the demands of tomorrow

www.evs.com/xt3

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