TECHNOLOGY INNOVATIONS
LIVE TV
F o c u s o n t h e e n v i r on me n t
Extreme E finishes its first five-race season on the Jurassic Coast in the UK on 18-19 December. Designed to highlight environmental damage and raise awareness of climate issues, any broadcast solution for all-electric off-road racing series had to be designed to be in line with the series’ climate objectives. Therefore NEP Group, Aurora
Media Worldwide, and Extreme E spent 18 months designing a technical solution that could reach the most remote locations whilst reducing the environmental impact across the entire production. Remote production is, of course, a big part of this. The remote workflow sees 12 ‘pipes’ across two satellites bring all images, audio and data via NEP’s MediaCity teleport and its AnyLive network to its centralised Broadcast and Media Centre at Gray’s Inn Road in London,
while NEP’s Netherlands-based team in Hilversum contributes AR tools for drone tracking and in-car GFX. “There was an initial concern about the latency of that, but the round trip latency of the video to Hilversum and back is around a frame,” explains Donald Begg, Senior Director of Technology, Broadcast & Media, NEP UK & Ireland. With a brief to avoid cable runs and minimise impacts, some impressive innovation has been developed for capturing the race footage too. “We put up to three nodes out around the site and we have the normal connectivity you’d have for radio cameras, whether in car or handheld or POV, all coming back to those nodes,” explains Begg. “There, demodulators produce an ASI signal that we encapsulate into IP to send over redundant wireless links. These all go back to the main compound.” In an ideal scenario, all three nodes
on different timing planes and quality thresholds. Ultimately it is about adapting to new workflows and trusting that the solution you develop delivers the goods. I think that as we move more and more into a content streaming model, latency may well become more of an SLA item. If you don’t want it to be latent then you’ve got to spend some money on either quite a robust backend, multi-path hardware, or managed service connectivity and obviously those have accompanying cost implications. This is one of the new trade-offs clients and solution providers are having to look at and think about now.”
CLOUD WORKFLOWS It is increasingly difficult to tease talk of remote production and cloud-based workflows apart as they are becoming steadily more intertwined as cloud services continue their industry roll out. Again this is an area where Covid has had an
accelerating impact. “March last year, everyone’s obviously out the building
and no one was actually allowed into Sky unless they were absolutely needed,” says McCue. “So we built out some basic facilities in the cloud; actually I just built them at home. We trialled a few things around some watch-alongs and that proved to us that cloud was viable; we had people working in a distributed environment with some people at home, some in the broadcast centre, some people on site. We did over 4000 hours of content on that particular system.”
feed back directly to a central compound via mmWave. In reality, topography often interferes so the team have a system where they can daisy chain two nodes together. Additional demodulators at the compound provide local pick up while the cars are nearby, while the immediate area is also cabled. Three drones compete the coverage. “The car sets off and you might be on the local area which is cabled into the compound, but it then goes around the corner where it’s picked up by the first RF node, and the system automatically selects the best signal and tracks the car round the circuit,” says Begg. “It all works well. The first race was in Saudi Arabia and that was by far the most challenging from a radio frequency coverage point of view. But the guys got it done. And we breathed a sigh of relief and said well if it worked in Saudi, it’ll probably work everywhere else.”
It’s evolved since too. At the tail end of last year and
the start of 2021, Sky produced a large proportion of their Vitality Super League Netball in the cloud, a full multi-camera production with replays, graphics and all achieved via public internet contribution. And Sky News has recently been on air with a dedicated and completely cloud-based Cop 26 channel for Sky News. “That takes us to the next level,” says McCue. “Every
function that Sky News has in the traditional gallery is in the cloud, and for the most part it works exactly the same way that Sky News would operate with their traditional facilities; Viz graphics, Mosart automation, NDI contribution…all from a standing start in six weeks.” It’s an impressive achievement and a good indication of
how far we have already come with cloud workflows. Another upcoming project worth keeping an eye on is BT Sport’s Ashes 2021/2022 coverage, which is exploring a cloud-based set up as part of its Ashes support programming. “It’s about enabling us to understand the opportunity
around the cloud,” says BT Sport’s COO, Jamie Hindhaugh. “When you start looking at long-haul remote production using the cloud, you’re not having to do cable routes halfway round the world or put it up and bring it down again. That could be a game changer once we understand what the lag is, how the tools work, and what the opportunities are.” But while cloud is now pretty firmly established for editing
and media management, integrating it fully into live workflows comes with a couple of potential gotchas along the way.
Winter 2021
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