Game on for sport OB firms

This is one of those bumper years for live sport, with the Rio Olympics and European Championship football dominating the summer schedules. But the bread and butter of domestic outside broadcasts (OBs) is getting a shake-up too.

With Sky prepping an Ultra High Definition (UHD) service before the start of the 2016-17 Premier League season, and with most of its OB contracts – not coincidentally – up for tender, suppliers are racing to get their assets in order.

Gearing up

“We are gearing ourselves up so that when we get to the stage of renegotiation, we can prove that we have the expertise, the kit and the roadmap to fulfil the needs of an HD/UHD simulcast,” says Telegenic commercial manager Eamonn Curtin. “We’ve been at the forefront of testing for UHD since 2013, when we went to Brazil and shot the Confederations Cup in 4K.”

Telegenic shares Sky’s existing Premier League contract with NEP Visions and is the main contractor to both the BBC and ITV for the Six Nations. It covers rugby union (U20s, Aviva Premiership and Junior World Cup) and rugby league for Sky and BT Sport, and is sending four of its trucks to the Euros (Marseilles and Nice) as part of Uefa’s host coverage.

The company recently purchased 14 Sony HDC-4300 cameras for its T25 truck. These are capable of shooting not only 4K, but also HD and super-slow-motion footage for live broadcast. “At the moment, we are not in a position to build any new trucks, since we have heavily invested over the past few years.

But you can expect another push for investment from us and other companies over the next year,” says Curtin.

By deciding not to take the plunge into 3D, Arena Television had the necessary reserves to pull the trigger on three new large mobile UHD facilities costing £20m in total. It has a 38-match-per-year Premier League deal with BT Sport (in HD), which expires at the end of the season.

“We tend to build a truck every 18 months and the tipping point has now come to move into UHD,” says managing director Richard Yeowart. “We didn’t think 3D would move mainstream, and we got that right. What that meant for our business is that we were better positioned when the next major upgrade came along.”

Timeline is the most experienced 4K live supplier by some margin. It has completed more than 50 OBs for BT Sport, making production in the format “mainstream”, according to managing director Daniel McDonnell. “We turn up, switch on 12 cameras and do full match coverage, whereas others are still testing workflows and it’s still kind of a special thing.”

Timeline’s 4K truck is not solely committed to BT and McDonnell is seeking music concerts and opera productions, in the UK and overseas, that want to acquire at a higher resolution.

A large part of the hesitancy in committing to 4K equipment is the unsteady state of gear that works with transport mechanism IP. Standards to move audio and video around in a live environment have yet to be agreed and key items from video switchers and audio desks to monitors and routers are only just being tested working together.

What’s more, RF links and super-slow motion – core elements of a conventional OB – are not yet possible in 4K.

IP investment

Having built its facility using circuits that require four lots of HD signals to be routed around (Quad-HD), Timeline’s next investment is likely to be IP. “IP technology is on the cusp,” says McDonnell. “The standards are up in the air. We want to make sure we can use best-of-breed technology – a matrix from one company, cameras from another, a switcher from another – rather than be tied to a single manufacturer’s way of working in IP.”

CTV’s sole 4K truck also works in Quad-HD but the company is looking beyond that to IP. “We want a full end to- IP chain without limits and we haven’t seen any manufacturer with that solution,” says technical director Hamish Grieg.

“We want interoperability so that we can put any IP tool in place for use now and in future. We don’t want gateways where you need to convert the feed to and from IP.”

CTV will continue its regular outings for Match Of The Day and will fi eld facilities for Sky’s coverage of England test matches against summer tourists Pakistan and Sri Lanka, alongside its perpetual contract for European Tour Productions’ golf. But its biggest event of the year will be The Open at Royal Troon. It will array 130 cameras, including 24 RF units, to cover every shot from every hole on every day of the championship for NBC (plus ETP and Sky) – an unprecedented degree of saturation.

CTV has also opted for 15 Sony HDC- 4300s, part of a larger order by parent outfit Euro Media Group. “We evaluated rival models from Hitachi, Grass Valley, Panasonic and Ikegami,” says Grieg. “While there were pros and cons for each, the Sony is backwards compatible, meaning it can work in HD SDI today, but will also accept IP inputs.”

Arena has gone with a dominant vendor to outfit its three triple expanders. OBX, OBY and OBZ may be the first all IP-UHD-HDR (High Dynamic Range) trucks anywhere in the world. “They are primed to go beyond 4K to 8K should the industry go in that direction, or they can cope with high frame rates,” says Yeowart. “It’s a very expensive but future-proofed investment.”

He says his crew are having to learn both how to rack (change focus) UHD cameras and what it takes to monitor an HDR feed in different areas of the truck.

“As communications get faster, IP will allow broadcasters access to the data stream back at base for remote production,” says Yeowart. “It means we can employ IP engineers at our Redhill HQ for remote diagnostics.

That changes the way the industry works. When a truck has an issue on site now, you have to deal with it locally, but the ability to monitor remotely on the road will be incredibly benefi cial.”

Timeline has devised its own remote production editing platform, which will allow editing staff to create highlights packages away from the broadcast centre. “The idea is that all rushes are held centrally and logged remotely and the edit could happen anywhere – at a venue, in an offi ce or at home,” says McDonnell.

Telegenic is taking a watching brief on the technology. “While other companies are using it as their USP, there is still a lot of kit that’s required for an effective IP chain,” says Curtin. “We have to take remote seriously. You still need cameras, FX mics and reporters pitchside, but in time the production gallery, sound mixer and vision switcher could move to a central location. Potentially, that means not having a fleet of big trucks but specialisms.”

Tier 1 events like Wimbledon will still be worked with large vans on site but remote production will increaingly put pressure on traditional OB firms to adapt. “Do you need the big edit suite and integrated vehicles and tape trucks when perhaps there is a model around providing gallery services by the hour?” asks Bevan Gibson, chief technology officer for ITN, which provides the technical production for Channel 5’s Football League coverage.

“It’s getting to the point where I want to pick up the phone to an OB team at a venue and ask them for an encoding specialist who can get low-latency, high quality pictures from a certain camera back to us. That’s something OB providers have not got into, but it’s where the industry is going.”

Within a couple of days of winning the contract to produce Channel 4’s Formula One coverage in early January, Whisper Films had to commission an OB supplier, as the window to ship equipment to Australia was just a week away.

“Normally when rights change hands, you get six months or more to prepare. We had eight weeks,” says Sunil Patel, Whisper managing director and executive producer of F1 coverage. “That timeframe was a major reason why we worked with Presteigne. We inherited their set-up and the flyaway kit they’d already built to manage this operation.”

Presteigne Broadcast Hire had been supplying fly-packs for the BBC’s F1 coverage since 2009.

The limited turnaround time left little room to change the kit’s specification, although editing has switched from Apple to Adobe and the production will make use of four RF cameras rather than three, plus a Sony F5 to lend a glossy look to features.

Since Formula One Management dictates the race coverage itself and demands that broadcasters only leave its feed after the podium interviews, the biggest difference Whisper will make will be in on-screen talent, with Steve Jones fronting the coverage alongside Suzie Woolfe, David Coulthard and a host of others.

The C4-backed indie scooped the three-year, 10-race-a-season contract from under the noses of more established sports producers like IMG and North One, and has hired seasoned F1 staff to bolster its credentials.

Former Match Of The Day chief Mark Cole joins as head of television and former BBC F1 editor Mark Wilkin is also on board.

Patel says the company proved its mettle producing BBC2’s weekly NFL highlights show leading up to the Superbowl.

“We will be looking at other rights once F1 is up and running,” he reveals. “The pressure comes from our own high expectations. We are duty bound to keep fans entertained and to improve coverage where we can. The pressure to succeed because we had this high-profile win doesn’t come into it.”

The nature of OB is changing as broadcasters road-test IP connectivity to cut costs and distribute richer live content. “Perception is a big thing,” says BBC Sport technical executive Charlie Cope. “It is not acceptable for public service broadcasters – even if it’s more efficient editorially – to send large numbers of people overseas for major events.”

For live events, IP can mean more centralised production, reducing the cost of crew on site, but also the ability to do more at a venue should the occasion demand it. One example might be the Euros. “Heaven forbid that one of our home nations actually does well; there’s then an aspiration to follow them as they progress through the competition,” says Cope. “If you’re able to be flexible about moving a studio operation into a local gallery, clearly that gives you last-minute flexibility.”

Cost benefits

The cost benefits of IP also support the BBC’s move into airing more women’s sports, says Cope. “As rights become more of a challenge, we have to think outside the box in terms of how we deliver that content.”

Like the BBC, Sky Sports has been trialling IP production for several years, gradually adding complexity into the mix. It has tested IP on F1 principally to reduce cargo weight, on the presentation graphics and virtual sets of Monday Night Football, and on Soccer Saturday, for which 30 reporters are kitted out with lightweight satellite and bonded cellular links to stream live video over IP.

For last year’s US Open tennis, Sky left the entire production team in Isleworth for the whole two-week tournament. “Why build an expensive edit platform when you have all those facilities at Sky?” Gordon Roxburgh, technical manager, Sky

Sports, told a BVE seminar. “This workflow kept the majority of the production team in their environment, where they produce tennis week in, week out. It also let us better resource the OB, to put extra cameras court-side. We could cross to our reporters who could use Sky Pad [a high-brightness touch screen], and players could analyse their matches.”

For the World Championship of Ping Pong at Alexandra Palace in January, Sky covered 111 matches over three days with six remote-controlled cameras (plus roving RF link). It had no on-site studio and a only limited OB crew, including camera engineering and sound supervision.

“Instead of being stuck behind a wall of monitors in an OB truck or gallery, the executive producer was able to freely move around the venue, confident he could communicate with all the crew and monitor the transmission on his iPad,” says Sky Sports senior director Andrew Finn.