special report In addition, inserts of these reports


may well need to be live, as viewers at home will want to keep as up to date as possible with the action as it happens. Live will make the process much more challenging and will make the need for an appropriate location all the more crucial in addition to, of course, connectivity requirements. Here quality of service considerations are paramount - 100% reliability needs to be striven for with high availability of circuits. If commentary or voice-over is to be added, then the space needs to be extremely well thought out both in technical and environmental terms. Again, this is not something which can be achieved in the local coffee-shop, or even realistically in any old office space or hotel lobby - lack of infrastructure and poor acoustics will inevitably lead to frustration and disappointment. In addition to ‘core’ broadcast, a


rapidly developing trend over the past couple of years has been the demand for multi-platform content delivery. Indeed the London Olympics may well be the first of its kind to reach out to such a vast array of connected devices, from large flat-screen TVs to the most miniature of smartphones. In fact what better example of an event where multi-platform truly fits a purpose? Sports fans across the world will be watching the action and studying the results - for some, events will be taking place during the day, for others this will be in the evening, and others during the night. Many people will be simply going about their daily routine, but will want to keep up with the action. It may be


a case of logging onto an Internet feed in their lunch break, or watching on their mobile phones on their way to or from work. As a consequence, making Olympic


coverage available for multi-platform delivery will add a whole extra angle for broadcasters and mean that not only will they need space and connectivity, but also the means to repurpose and encode content for delivery to any number of devices and platforms, worldwide.


Going for gold


Broadcasting the Olympics will come with its challenges, more so for those broadcasters without a fixed production space in which to handle the hundreds of hours of feeds locally and to customise, package and deliver to broadcasters back home. There are numerous improvised solutions possible - and undoubtedly many broadcasters will do so to good effect and their Olympic coverage will be successful in the end, but I don’t expect it will go smoothly. Unpredictable service outages, producing and post producing content in unsuitable conditions, and unreliable connectivity are but a small selection of the challenges ahead. Production spaces such as the


broadcast-standard facility at SatStream, located just south of the Thames and within line of sight of BT Tower and the Houses of Parliament, is designed to enable broadcasters to ensure that their coverage is broadcast exactly as it should be, with the right commentary, at the right time, to the


olympics everywhere supplement


The broadcast- standard facility at SatStream, located just south of the Thames, is


designed to enable broadcasters to ensure that their coverage is


broadcast exactly as it should be, with the right


commentary, at the right time, to the right people.


right people, whether that is to a broadcast centre elsewhere on the planet or indeed direct to the viewer over the Web or on a mobile device. The facility ensures secure and scalable connectivity both via dedicated fibre delivery or via occasional satellite transmissions and adequate space for all production requirements. With this kind of facility available, and with space in the capital already being booked up for July 2012, why wait?


EVS confirms London Olympics involvement


EVS, manufacturer of live broadcast and media production systems, has announced a major deal with the host broadcaster of next year’s Olympics. The deal covers equipment for the live and near-live production infrastructure, including camera and multiple feed recording, live replays, slow-mo and on-the-fly editing solutions, central media archive, advanced content management and media sharing workflow systems.


A


s part of the contract, EVS will deploy more than 300 multi-channel-XT series servers, across all venues, controlled by the advanced LSM remote system for all slow-motion, super-slow and ultra-slow motion replays. Additionally, based on the EVS server’s hybrid networking operation system, all live recorded content will be fully controlled using IPDirector suites for quick highlight editing, first level logging, and


fast turnaround media exchange with the IBC production teams. 52 IPDirector suites will be operated by all production and editing teams for the management of media across the IBC workflow. The IPDirector will be used for second level logging of incoming feeds, the scheduling of the ingest, quick browsing and media searching based on logs and metatada, media selection and exchange with post-production infrastructure as well as with unilateral broadcaster production teams. The centrally located broadcast centre will see the installation of the new generation of media server, an online archive and media sharing


solution enabling host broadcaster production teams - as well as broadcast rights holders - to access all broadcast feeds and complementary camera feeds coming from the different venues, as well as dedicated highlight packages and clips. The media server will be composed of 12 XT3 servers dedicated to live feed recording, and a live centric near line storage server based on EVS XStoreSAN technology offering a capacity of more than 360TB and enabling users to browse and exchange over 5600 hours of HD content. In order to optimise media handling operations from any remote location, the host broadcaster will introduce EVS’ new web-browsing interface, IP Web-browser, allowing production teams to review and select media hosted on the central server - based on auto-generated proxy files - through the web.


www.ibeweb.com l olympics everywhere supplement november/december 2011 l ibe l 39


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