LIVE SPORT
TECHNOLOGY REMOTE OPERATIONS CENTRES
the action. Remote production has been deployed at Sky since the
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US Open Tennis in 2015, while Formula 1 has been produced remotely at the broadcaster since 2018. In 2019 a purpose- built gallery was designed and constructed with multiple teams at Sky to allow the English Football League (EFL) production team to operate remotely. “Connectivity at all the venues was installed to enable us to backhaul discrete camera feeds back to our Osterley broadcast centre,” says Jena Mihalovic, operational delivery lead in Sky Sports. “We had a four-year plan that aimed to transition most of our key rights to be remotely produced. This was accelerated with COVID but it is here to stay. We had planned to take cricket remote in 2020 but that was put on hold as we restarted the football season with 100 games in 40 days; cricket has just started operating remotely in 2021.” IMG also has a long history of
nder the pressures of COVID lockdowns and social distancing, remote production has come of age. Centralised remote operations centres and hubs have risen across the world to enable live pro- ductions to be directed and produced often hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles away from the cameras and
and ATP tournaments for Amazon UK to a remote gallery at Stockley Park. European Tour Productions, part of IMG Productions, has used remote production based at CTV’s ROC for some golf production during the pandemic.” The ROC Shield refers to is the Remote Operation Centre
in High Wycombe created by CTV and Telegenic, part of the EMG UK group. It consists of four remote galleries at the time of writing, serving leagues such as the EPL. EMG UK has also worked with In Touch Productions to build an additional gallery, the ‘Stream ROC’, which uses a combination of the ViBox system from Simply Live and connectivity from Aviwest and Micron Video, currently being used to remotely produce Championship RFL matches. NEP has recently unveiled a dedicated remote facility in
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remote production of World Feeds from its Stockley Park Studios including international production of English Premier League (EPL) matches from the 1995/6 season onwards. SVP David Shield says having 10 live galleries enabled IMG to experiment with full remote production. “Pre-COVID we trialled a 12 camera remote of a Sky Premier League game with a parallel cut being made on site,” he says. “From the 2019/20 season onwards, IMG has re-motely produced 4-camera coverage of EFL Championship games together with single camera coverage of League One and League Two games all with commentary, replays and graphics. The coverage is produced using the Simply Live single operator system and is used for EFL’s iFollow offering, which became crucial to fans during the COVID pandemic. “In tennis, IMG Studios provides remote galleries for ATP
Media to produce World Feeds of ATP 1000, 500 and 250 tournaments and feeds on-site studios at the US Open Tennis
the shape of Production Centre – London, but the majority of production kit is housed elsewhere in the world in serviced and resilient data centres. “This facility is designed to service multiple clients for different events or become a large production centre for larger events,” says Malcolm Cowan, head of engineering and technology for NEP UK. “A prime example of this is the broadcast of the Extreme E International Off-road racing series.” The facility is highly scalable, an
emerging theme in this sector. “Our multifunctional production spaces can be adapted to serve as shading and/ or replay areas, or with the addition of a vision mixer panel, they can run an entire production,” Cowan says. “The flex rooms can be easily set up to provide space for edits, graphics, replay or even a channel in a box type workflow for smaller events. We also have a green screen studio that we use with our sister company CT and experts in NEP NL to provide any complex augmented reality capability.” Timeline has been running a
number of remote galleries out of the Ealing Broadcast Centre (EBC) for some years now, but a recent weekend witnessed simultaneous remote productions for Sail GP racing, Formula E and the Women’s Super League, all from dedicated galleries. According to Dave Harnett, head of operations at Timeline, the EBC is a remote operations centre “through and through”. “We have tailored all of the facilities to ‘dual-hat’ and be
able to work across both disciplines, whether it be a remote or traditional gallery,” he says. “We’ve also got studio spaces available. Quite often that will work into remote shows because they’ll do an on-site element that’s being remotely produced from EBC and then wrap around an analysis show, which is where the studio floors come in. It gives us that ultimate flexibility to be able to tailor it to whatever the production is looking to achieve.” Other recent developments include the £1m that dock10
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