English Premier League football has an international following. UK radio station talkSPORT is tapping into this with internet coverage of all this season’s matches for a global audience, based on customised commentary equipment, streaming technology and specially written editing software, writes Kevin Hilton
TELEVISION HAS brought football massive audiences and huge amounts of money over the past 20 years but radio is still the way a great many fans catch their teams in action. OK, so radio doesn’t have pictures
there can be up to six games being played simultaneously; commentary can come from a double booth, housing a commentator and summariser, for ‘A’ matches featuring at least one of the big teams; or a single booth for a solo commentator. Technology manager Neil Sedley explains that more booths can be added to cope with up to 30 matches on the same day.
All commentary is done ‘off tube’, with the commentators watching live coverage of a game on a TV monitor. This comes from the Premier League and features clean effects at the ground to give atmosphere. New broadcast equipment was
talkSPORT is reaching more people from its studios
but it is free and UK sound broadcasters, notably BBC Radio 5 live and commercial service talkSPORT, as well as local stations, strive to cover as much of the play as their visual counterparts. TalkSPORT and 5 live share the UK broadcast right to the English Premier League but earlier this year the commercial broadcaster signed a four-year international audio broadcasting deal covering the next four seasons starting from this August. This coverage runs as a separate service from talkSPORT’s UK analogue and digital broadcasts. The contract with the Premier League involves live commentary of all matches, broadcast online in English, Spanish and Mandarin. To accommodate this talkSPORT has built a series of voice booths at its headquarters. On a single day
needed for the standalone service, and in March 2012 talkSPORT’s senior station engineer Peter Ockelford approached Glensound Electronics to discuss commentary systems. The operation is based on 32 commentary mixers; 25 three-channel models and six six-channel versions. Ockelford specified individual faders on the units, which Marc Wilson, sales and marketing manager at Glensound, says is unusual: “This is something we have not developed before on a commentary unit and it was great to have an opportunity to work through the requirements that Peter had for the project and develop three new units that meet what he wanted.” These discussions produced the analogue Fader 3 (three-channel) and Fader 6