TECHNOLOGY INNOVATIONS
LIVE SPORT
M a t ch Da y E x p er i enc e
The new Match Day Experience for the BT Sport Ultimate app on iOS brings a plethora of new AR features. “We’re known for our innovation, but everything at BT Sport we do is really credible,” says COO Jamie Hindhaugh. “AR can be a bit gimmicky, but we’ve used it in a very clever way.” We’re speaking just before the first rollout of the new AR features,
for the live Premier League match between Man City and West Ham. Hindhaugh, speaking about the new Stadium Experience component, says: “West Ham are at home. So what you’ll be able to do is hold up your iPhone and it will look like you’re walking through a portal. You’ll be able to go around the West Ham Stadium, you’ll be able to go into the dressing room. It’s all been shot in 8K 360. We’re taking fans to the areas they wouldn’t normally be. And we’re doing that across
“It comes back to the whole sustainable argument
because that problem won’t be fixed in any short period of time,” continues Waters. “Instead of sending large numbers of people on long haul trips and setting up large amounts of infrastructure overseas, a lot of that can be delivered from MediaCity. It’s quite clear that that’s going to be an ideal way to deliver large events in the future. “We’ve got quite a lot of work planned for next year,”
he continues. “When the Six Nations kicks off, the BBC are looking to do some work with their production teams based in Salford.”
C on n e c t i vi t y q u e s t i ons With at least 25 fibre providers coming into the MediaCityUK POP, Waters says dock10 is in a good position to negotiate for the connectivity it requires to link to events and grounds, not just for the sufficient bandwidth for a multi-camera HD or UHD production, but also the speed which the network providers can deliver that service. “As telcos have to deal with a huge increase in
bandwidth consumption by consumers they re-engineer their networks for greater capacity,” observes David Shield. “As an industry we have benefitted from the increased capacity. We have also moved away from the desire for dedicated capacity, embracing the network with its built-in redundancy and diversity to provide the
every Premier League fixture that is a home game.” The Ultimate app already offers viewers a 360° feature to select different camera angles and viewpoints, not normally seen in broadcast, that users can also pinch and zoom to focus on areas, but this too is being revamped. “With 360 you can pick up a different camera stream, but the problem has been when you go into a separate stream you come out of the flow of the game you’re watching. We’ve used what we’ve learned to build an AR graphic jumbotron that actually sits within the 8K 360 camera. So you can look up anytime that it’s showing you the live broadcast, so you don’t have to lose connection with the game.” Also already available is split- screen experience Watch Together. “You can watch the game live with three of your mates, in sync,” says Hindhaugh. “The other thing we’re doing with AR is Match Day
Live - what I like to call a catch up service. If I was out and about tomorrow and couldn’t see the BT Sport game what I could do is use my phone with an AR portal to bring up a stadium on a flat surface and show you the team formations, or at halftime I could just get an AR overlay of stats, to give me that that snapshot into a game.” Then there is Manager Mode. “That basically is live analysis,” which will offer live AR graphics overlaid on the game, such as a mini-map tracking the positions of all players for a tactical viewpoint, plus player names, player speeds and tracers marking the path of shots. “It’s using AR in a sexy way. But again, it’s credible, and over time we’ll start building that out with heat maps,” he adds. “My utopia is when some of the stuff we’re developing for our audience engagement becomes part of the production tools for telling the story in our coverage.”
quality of service we need.” Fibre is not the only option. Remote production is also
operating over the public internet. Solutions such as Sony’s cloud-based switcher Virtual Production can run a small multi-camera remote production from a laptop, while Vizrt has just released Viz Vector Plus, a remote mixing platform which supports streaming over SRT, NDI-based audio application interconnectivity and camera control, multiple version programme output, as well as the integration of video conference call applications as live sources. Timeline created an internet streaming solution based
around the iPhone that was used by BT Sport and others to replace the naff ‘Zoom’ look common to remote contributions early in lockdown. “We’d had custom software that we’d written for the Olympics, and we were able to take that software and build an iPhone remote camera,” says Daniel McDonnell, managing director of Timeline. “That came with a reverse vision laptop and full talkback. The camera is very high quality, but simple enough that people could set them up themselves.” Timeline also uses a lot of 4G and a lot of satellite for
remote connectivity. “It’s very low cost for us to get internet fibre put into
places if we’re going to go there several times, but we can do lots of things now on a combination of 4G and internet,” says McDonnell. “We’ve invested heavily in Mobile Viewpoint – we’ve utilised their 4G backpack and it gives us huge control of the OB over the internet. It allows us to rack
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