BBC Sport and BBC Resources have constructed a 1,500sq m multiplatform HD production facility in Beijing to produce tele-vision and interactive coverage of the Olympics.

Based in the 90,000sq m Inter-national Broadcast Centre (IBC), the dedicated space includes an HD production control suite and an interactive control room for managing streams of video being sent to London to be repurposed for the web and mobile phones.

In total the BBC's facility will produce 300 hours of broadcast television and 2,450 hours of interactive content over the 17 days of the Games.

The complexity of the operation is justified, according to BBC Sport head of major events Dave Gordon. “Forty or 50 years ago it was a miracle to get pictures from one side of the world to the other. The audience now expects a level of sophistication we need to satisfy,” he said.

The facility's post-production area houses 18 edit suites, two large server systems and connectivity to the host broadcaster server and the sporting venues. It was project-managed by Siemens with Gearhouse Broadcast as systems integrator.

Feeds from the host EVS server and logging operation will -supply the BBC's EVS media server, which will also support fast turnaround editing. The EVS server will be fully integrated with an Avid ISIS server, with file-based transfers enabling packages to be edited and features to be made while feeds are coming in.

There will be centralised access to the media, with all BBC departments able to make use of the content and metadata.

Basic metadata will be ingested alongside content into the host server and the BBC will supplement this, where necessary, using EVS IP Director logging and media management software.

The split-site operation will see media storage and editing carried out in Beijing and logging done in London.

There will be 16 logging stations at BBC Television Centre where IPTV enabled feeds will be logged and then synchronised back onto the Beijing database.