olympics everywhere supplement
special report
The city of London is famous the world over and is the perfect setting for the next Olympic Games. Contractors are busy working away getting the stadia and arenas fully prepared for the action next year. However, one thing London is not famous for is its space. So, in a packed, busy, and expensive city, how will broadcasters and producers manage the logistics including the all-important feeds to base - wherever they are in the world? Alan Mercer, operations director at SatStream, reports.
nations. These events will be taking place at nine different venues within the Olympic Park, a further 13 venues across London, and another 10 venues across the UK. With so much sporting action across a large number of venues, it will be a real challenge to organise and manage such a huge amount of live and post-produced coverage for media audiences around the globe. Broadcasters are likely to be
stretched to the limit, taking feeds from many of the sports to ensure their coverage is as all-encompassing as possible, enabling them to cater for sports fans from a wide variety of disciplines - not forgetting those special moments when they hope to capture their home country winning races and events, and the subsequent medal ceremonies. Major channels are, of course,
accustomed to this kind of global event and will be suitably prepared and equipped, through pool feeds and an army of SNG and OB trucks scattered across London and the UK to ensure they have access to all relevant feeds and to effectively produce and deliver programme content to host networks both in live and post-produced environments. For these larger broadcasters such
requirements won’t be an issue as they will have access to full facilities
Fighting for space T
he London 2012 Olympics will play host to 205 nations, taking part in a total of 300 events. The Paralympics, which takes place following the Olympics, will host 147
Alan Mercer,
operations director at SatStream.
at the Olympics Media Centre, including production and connectivity to base. The real challenge comes for the smaller broadcasters, who will be required to use their initiative and find their own sites from which to send content to the home broadcaster, with the added challenge of ensuring they have resources for production and connectivity - and as close to the action as possible.
Space and connectivity
The real challenge comes for the smaller broadcasters, who will be required to use their initiative and find their own sites from which to send content to the home broadcaster.
In any big city the problem of space can be a big issue at any time, but a high profile event such as the Olympics will naturally bring a whole host of additional broadcasters, people and services into the city. Some broadcasters already have facilities - but even so, space will be an issue, given the level of activity. In this context, smaller-scale
broadcast players will need to use 'light' and highly portable solutions. Fortunately, new technology has revolutionised equipment footprint in recent years, so much so that a great deal of the editing and playout requirements can be handled using desktop editing on small-scale equipment, such as laptops. In terms of production,
improvisation will be the name of the game with any suitable backcloth used in pieces to camera, preferably with an Olympic or London theme. However, one of the biggest
challenges will be ensuring adequate connectivity to receive and send feeds. A ‘Starbucks solution’ may work
38 l ibe l olympics everywhere supplement november/december 2011 l
www.ibeweb.com
even SDSL solutions, the strain on the public Internet networks will be immense. As an example, it’s expected that there will be an extra 500,000 visitors to London during the Olympics and Paralympics, most of whom will be using all forms of Internet access to access news feeds, send images, emails, check out venue details etc. Watch those bit-rates fall! As if this challenge wasn’t enough,
the Olympics will be taking place in a whole host of venues across the country and the broadcasters need to somehow gather those feeds quickly and efficiently. For those with adequate budgets, feeding by satellite or dedicated fibre is an option, whereas for some the public Internet will be the only option, which harks back to the connectivity issues discussed above.
Adding value
For most broadcasters, the Olympic coverage will, of course, not simply be shot and broadcast with no post or pre-production services needed - adding voice, graphics and editing packages to conform to broadcast quotas and so on will be key requirements, and such requirements may once again be a huge issue for those broadcasters with no studio or production space booked locally.
well in terms of coffee and connectivity via Wi-fi for e-mail and such, but of course quite a different level of service is required to be able to move gigabytes of video and audio back to the waiting broadcaster. Even with standard ADSL or perhaps
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