Sports Video Group Europe
ADI is many things, but the one thing its founder and CEO is adamant it is not is a TV production company. “We are focused on venue-based content,” says Geraint Williams.
Claimed to be the UK’s fastest – and arguably fastest growing – venue network, ADI operates the IP network which links all 92 Premier League and Championship clubs for Premier League Productions (PLP) to deliver the Premier League global feed (comprising up to 30 feeds) to foreign broadcasters via IMG at Stockley Park.
The same circuits (a platform ADI brands ‘Live Venue’) are used to transport much of the same live matchday content to ADI’s headquarters in Preston where streams are produced, switched and customised for distribution back to in-stadia screens in real-time at 14 clubs including Nottingham Forest, Hull City, Newcastle, Spurs and Cardiff FC.
Live Venue is further utilised by Opta to route real-time metadata alongside the live pictures for the PLP’s rights’ holders and by ADI in partnership with the data analytics firm for its own sports stats product, Stat Zone.
With all Premier League and Championship clubs connected, work is underway to connect League 1 and League 2 clubs for the start of the 2015/16 season.
Premier League and Football League head offices at Gloucester Place are also tied-in, and ADI has multiple fibre lines directly into Sky Sports and IMG operations centres.
ADI is looking to expand its service outside of football and has one of the UK’s largest racecourses in its sights. It is close to a wider deal with a federation.
“It’s virtually unheard-of for clubs outside the very top ones to have a manual related to TV,” says Williams. “Most don’t have a TV brand. We work close with club to tailor the content they need. That can be as simple as how that brand wants its club crest to appear on screen, orwhether they want movement in the graphic.”
Box shifter to network provider
All of this is a far cry from its first days as a mere box shifter in 1991. Williams started Audio Design and Install selling specialist audio equipment to the retail trade. It moved into large format video screens in 1994 “realising the business was not about shifting hardware but about providing service. We realised very quickly that what customers wanted was not buying different pieces of kit from different suppliers but an an end to end solution. That is the basis of ADI’s business today.”
A key strength of the company, he says, is the financial security around various income streams. “We deliver feeds for the major broadcasters and internationally for EPL licensees, and we’re also adding value at club level. We also meet the objectives of federations. On the one hand they need to monetise the media value to a mass audience on TV or online, but they need to balance that with grass roots support. The Premier League does not want people viewing its product in front of empty stadia. If we can enhance the experience and emotion of physically attending the live event we are doing our job.”
A turning point seven years ago was ADI’s entrée into fibre. It was running an outside broadcast unit, principally to produce over 50 academy, testimonial, and other non-broadcast matches a year for clubs including Manchester United. These club-owned content rights were produced in three hour blocks built around a 90-minute match and distributed on delayed feed worldwide.
“We were buying huge chunks of satellite time and that started us thinking about fibre,” he explains. “It was a time of unbundling of telco exchanges and access to the last mile. We took a new concept to a few clubs, those not interested in paying high level capex on galleries or head-ends. Back then, the challenge was to encode content quickly, push it over fibre, produce the game, re-encode and push back over the network to be shown on in-stadia video screens. Typically that took eight seconds in transit. Now it’s twentieth of a second. Our real skill was in finding ways to compress the video in transit across multiple networks.”
As of last year that topology is provided in partnership with Nevion. Nevion’s JPEG 2000 codec and VideoIPath managed media services platform is used to control the Juniper switch fabric to provide scheduled end-to-end connectivity and inventory management. The solution enables the deployment of multiple high-quality HD or SD video feeds over a combination of 1 Gigabit Ethernet and 10 GigE circuits. It’s the glue of ADI’s branded LiveVenue product.
“While display costs have driven down the cost of creating content has gone up, as the consumer’s expectation of sports TV content has risen,” says Williams. “Fifteen years ago the proportion of our spend on technology versus content would have high. Now the ratio has reversed.”
ADI studio facility
Nerve centre for the entire service is ADI’s north west base. From there last year, some 8109 live feeds were produced including the matchday (in-stadia) production which mixes eight dedicated feeds per match. The facility has nine galleries with four more being built and an expansion underway “to accommodate significantly more in the future”.
Each is set-up to produce pictures and in-vision commentary for a venue. “It’s very cut down in a TV sense,” says Williams. “Each gallery is set up to deliver a very specified product aimed at delivering on quality and cost.”
For matchday production, the broadcast feed is mixed with ISOs and assigned a dedicated producer sited at Preston. They direct the mix, making key decisions on content to replay back at the ground (avoiding showing contentious on-pitch decisions, for example).
Core kit per gallery includes 3 x 40” NEC X401S displays; Blackmagic Design ATEM 1M/E broadcast panel; BMD HyperDeck Studio and BMD Ultrastudio 4K; Apple Mac mini with Adobe Creative Cloud; Apple Cinema Display, Kroma Telecom TB-4000 matrix and Caspar CG graphics.
“I would hope that we do a good job of understanding the club’s brief and that we offer a very personalised service. While we operate a unified delivery – everybody is ultimately getting streamed content – the different is that each club gets content pertinant to them.”
This is not only about assigning appropriate graphics and team colours to the feed, but also about delivering different types of content to different screens in stadia.
ADI’s largest provision is for Everton FC where fully managed individual content channels across five different platforms are produced on a matchday. With the existing matchday broadcast studio at Goodish Park decommissioned, every screen in the stadium is controlled directly from ADI’s studios.
Goodison Park receives three separate channels from ADI, with different content for stadium screens, concourse televisions and screens in hospitality lounges allowing the club to target content at different fans at different stages of the matchday.
Other services delivered over Live Venue include fully produced stadium screen content and the management of the perimeter digiBOARD content. It rents 3000 LED screens to venues across the UK ranging from soccer, cricket and Premier League rugby clubs, and all the main UK racecourses to recent deals with Red Bull and F1 at Silverstone.
Stat Zone
In 2011 ADI took a 50% stake in Manchester-based sports marketing firm Eleven Sports Media to create a series of digital media services for distribution and display over Live Venue.
This includes Stat Zone, powered by Opta, which integrates up-to-the-minute match stats into the matchday programming displayed on portrait screens located within concourse areas. Team sheets, for example, are automatically updated on announcement prior to kick-off with the content triggered to display the correct player images, rather than a list of team names.
“One of things we are better at than most, purely because we have got an awful lot of experience after 23 years, is delivering engagement,” says Williams. “That’s where the value lies in what we do. If any stadia is looking to create that engagement piece a technology platform to do it is vital. But that platform should be transparent to the consumer and fan. From their point of view the experience is around content and in particular content that connects with and creates emotion.”
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