24 TVBEurope News & Analysis
Preparing the BT pitch
Timeline TV led a cast of vendors in the design and systems integration of the most high-profile UK broadcaster launch in years. Adrian Pennington reports on the roll out
BT SPORT has opened the doors of its production studio and gone to air with three sports channels in a move begun just over a year ago when the telco surprised pundits by scooping English Premiership sports rights away from ESPN. The former International
Broadcast Centre at iCity, built for the London Olympics, houses BT’s Production Hub containing three studios — two of which can be configured into one the size of four and a half tennis courts and claimed to be the biggest L-shaped studio in the world.
This 14,000sqft centrepiece
features a suspended floor made of toughened glass embedded
with LED lights. Once illuminated, pitches or areas of a field of play can be virtually presented, with former players acting out scenarios for analysis. The space can additionally accommodate an audience of 160 people.
“The principle is that instead
of a traditional 4-waller, BT has the flexibility to walk presenters between the studios and other channels live on air,” says Timeline Television MD Daniel McDonnell. “It makes for one big creative space.” This innovation makes
extensive use of RF technology and multiple aerials deployed across the facility both inside and outside. This allows a radio
camera-op to walk between areas without any picture disturbance (wired with Wisycom MRK960 receivers, MTP40 belt packs and DPA 460 mics). For example, a presenter could walk from the studio floor down the corridor, into a greenroom, then outside to the stadium all on one shot. All parties suggest that the
time pressure to design, outfit, rehearse and rehearse again before live TX on 1 August was the greatest challenge. BT’s chief operating officer Jamie Hindhaugh (previously BBC head of production at London 2012) and director of TV, Alex Green, sensibly delegated responsibility for getting the project securely up and running to suppliers and equipment with proven track records.
Kit includes Shotoku TG-18 remote controlled cameras
DPP compliance Timeline TV, whose flagship operation has been EVS logging and feed management at Wimbledon for the All England Lawn Tennis Club, landed a five-year
www.tvbeurope.com September 2013
The BT Sport facility will broadcast BT Sport 1, BT Sport 2 and ESPN
managed service contract for technical operations including studios, MCR, post production and workflow support. That’s after designing and specifying the hub, whose technical build was subcontracted to Megahertz Broadcast Systems. The MCR itself will manage over 150 incoming and outgoing HD vision lines plus inbound satellite traffic from BT’s Madley earth station. The production platform itself is based around EVS and includes five XS servers for
ingest and seven XT3’s in the production galleries for clip record and playback. “There are 24 channels purely for ingesting line feeds and two empty ones for hire of additional channels as necessary on a busy week,” explains Alex Redfern, EVS solutions architect. Video leaves the XS servers encoded in AVC Intra and arrives on 1 Petabyte worth of nearline MediaGrid storage from Omneon (now Harmonic). This transfer is delivered by 30 EVS XTAccess systems, the
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