A head of the start of last year’s football season, Sky Sports ran a campaign featuring David Beckham as a boffin testing top-secret innovations. He rejected drone cameras swarming over a cricket pitch, a sensation suit to experience the physical impacts of a rugby player, and an X Factor-style voting system for refereeing decisions, in favour of new channel Sky Sports 5.
An ironic poke at Sky’s own pioneering attitude to tech, the message was about not using technology for technology’s sake.
“Ultimately, what matters is how any innovation can deliver a more cost-effective operation, deliver more content from the same investment, or create something not done before – anything that enhances the story - telling,” says Sky Sports director of operations Keith Lane.
BT Sport chief operating officer Jamie Hindhaugh agrees: “Technology is a great enabler, but just because you can, it doesn’t mean you should. It’s about subtle improvements to the audience experience without trying to be too clever. That’s a fine balance.”
Drones
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), or drones, cannot be flown within 50 metres of people, restricting their use over crowds and in urban areas. But it is only a matter of time before they are as much a fixture of OBs as wire-hung spidercams and aerial shots from blimps.
Keeping within these existing safety regulations, the BBC flew a drone over the Thames for the last New Year’s Eve fireworks spectacle. Meanwhile, drones were used extensively to track skiers at the Sochi Olympics on mountain slopes with no one below.
“We’re looking to replicate this scenario for our host broadcast of the Henley Royal Regatta by following boats down the Thames,” says James Abraham, digital strategy director and executive producer at Sunset+Vine. “Establishing shots by drone – which used to be only achieved by helicopter – is one of the first items on a producer’s shopping list.”
Jeremy Braben, owner of aerial specialist Helicopter Film Services, adds: “UAVs can be deployed remotely and cover a lot of ground, so you don’t have to have operators everywhere. Cranes and wire-cams are limited in their movement but UAVs offer great flexibility and are very easy to set up.”
Batcam co-founder Jon Hurndall suggests jibs and cranes could soon be relegated. “Imagine console-type camera angles, such as tracking overhead coverage of a football match or following a golf ball as the golfer hits it,” he says.
In-air-collision avoidance systems are being advanced so that even if a UAV were flying low to the pitch, it would be nimble enough to dodge a ball being kicked towards it. “It sounds far-fetched, but it will all be possible as the technology develops,” says Hurndall.
Batcam already provides live-to-air footage from its Batcam Live systems, including for Sky’s coverage of the Capital One Cup Final. Its drones will also be in action for the BBC at Wembley on FA Cup Final day.
BT Sport’s Hindhaugh remains wary of wider adoption because of health and safety issues: “The big hurdle is whether rights holders would permit drones to fly around multimillion-pound playing talent.”
The payload that a drone carries reduces the flight time, and UAVs above 7kg are prohibited without special permission. Much R&D in the sector is focused on new, lightweight batteries.
“We hope to see at least a doubling of flight times to 15-30 minutes within the next couple of years,” says Hurndall. “This alone changes potential uses for broadcasters.”
Meanwhile, producers want drones to carry cameras with full broadcast zooms, rather than point-of-view action cams. Helicopter Film Services has tested heavy-lift flyers such as the Aerigon to carry high-speed cameras like the Panasonic Varicam 4K or Phantom Flex4K. “UAVs are opening up new sports like extreme mountain biking or surfing, which broadcasters have not been able to cover before,” says Braben.
UHD Live
Ryder Cup: Sky used 4K super-zooms on Evertz DreamCatcher for the golf tournament
Sky and BT have yet to announce live UHD services, but it’s a case of who blinks first as both broadcasters get ready to launch them for the start of the next Premier League season.
The new 4K cameras, which arrive this summer, should help them decide which system to use as these will be capable of shooting with lenses already in stock at OB suppliers.
Sony has caved in to market demand and released a 4K camera with 2/3-inch sensors designed to fit standard HD lenses, sidelining its large, single-sensor F55. Hitachi, Ikegami and Grass Valley – the first to push the market in this direction – have competing units that should push down prices.
“It’s heading in exactly the right direction,” says Sky Sports’ Lane. “Our suppliers can take these cameras into any OB environment and start using standard HD lenses. That’s a costeffective approach.”
BT Sports’ Hindhaugh adds: “The really valuable thing about the 4K cameras is that the camera positions don’t need to change. With the next evolution of equipment, there is a real opportunity to capture in 4K and down-res for HD, which already gives you an enhanced look on screen.”
Sky’s tests at Ryder Cup and Football League OBs have focused on 4K super-zooms using Evertz Dream- Catcher and kit from replay stalwart EVS. “The idea is to get a sense of how the 4K cameras fit into an HD workflow and to get feedback from operators about how the cameras perform in different lighting conditions – day, night, floodlight – and with different depths of field,” explains Lane.
The intention is to record a 4K image onto a replay server and then zoom electronically into the picture to reframe the image and pick out detail to inform analysis on playout. “There wasn’t much appetite for this in HD because the resolution wasn’t good enough, but it is now,” says Lane.
BT Sport is doing something similar with its Owl cam, trialled at Aviva Premiership matches. Images from a pair of F55s are ‘stitched’ together using software to provide a panoramic angle, from which four virtual camera positions can be extracted. The broadcaster has streamed the Owl to its mobile app and is working with Sony to enable viewers to zoom in and out of the picture from a tablet.
Israel’s Pixellot has developed an unmanned 50-megapixel, 10-camera array for extraction of even more virtual camera angles, but its real application lies in the remote production of an event, negating the need for a traditional on-site OB crew.
As Sony 4K and sports head of business development Mark Grinyer observes, this is a period of transition between HD and 4K, and outside broadcasters want to be able to shoot HD now, but UHD at the press of a button.
Wearable Cameras
Remote-controlled cameras are a staple of events like the Volvo Ocean Race and Formula One. However, technology is advancing into smaller, lighter and higher-resolution optical and transmission units capable of being mounted on virtually anything, or anyone.
Sunset+Vine’s Ref Cam is a recent addition to its Rugby Premiership and European Champions Cup coverage for BT Sport. “It’s a periscope- style camera worn on the referee’s chest, giving a unique perspective when he sets the scrum,” explains Abraham.
For Gillette World Sport, S+V deploys GoProand Garmin-mounted cameras on professional BMX bikes for a unique rider’s perspective and distributes this as an ‘extra’ for online audiences.
Sky employs umpire and ref cams for cricket and rugby league. “It offers an opportunity to see some facial expressions that we would only see from their eye-view,” says Sky Sports’ Lane. “Wearables give an insight into the field of play. The key is to get sporting bodies to accept the use of these devices, which they will, provided it doesn’t interfere with the game.”
Sony’s 4K Action Cam has a steadyshot function designed to alleviate some of the problems of shooting from a moving object. “The real issue with wearable cameras is getting a reliable RF feed for transmission,” says Grinyer.
Links specialist Vislink may have cracked this with HEROCast, a tiny transmitter capable of streaming HD images from GoPros, which has been used to broadcast live from cameras attached to players, refs and goalposts at National Hockey League matches. However, it needs a licence to operate in a certain bandwidth, which may add to its expense.
More sports are on board. At the UCI Track Cycling World Championships in February, mini-cams on bike saddle tubes contributed live race images to the broadcast for the first time. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) plans to do the same in Rio on yachts, on referees in basketball, and on select athletes during pre-Games training sessions.
IMG’s production of this year’s Grand National for Channel 4 included four minicams and RF links on the helmets of four jockeys, including the winning mount Many Clouds. “One ended up in a fence, but using the cam, we had lovely footage of him going to apologise to his horse,” says Alan Bright, director of engineering at IMG.
“Wearable cameras are a great addition but you have to use them sparingly,” warns Abraham. “It’s important that the overall TV package is robust and that we don’t diminish the editorial of the game.”
Second Screen
EVS C-Cast technology: app used for Fifa World Cup
Data is one of the keys to companion apps, and few people believe the second screen has been cracked. This could be down to the different structures of individual sports. In a game of two intense halves like football, viewers don’t like being distracted from the action. In the US, the NFL, on the other hand, has regular time-outs, permitting more natural second-screen interaction.
BT Sport holds up its mobile app for MotoGP (below) as a shining example of how to get it right. “You can watch on your TV and follow by helicam or follow four different riders from bike-mounted cameras on a tablet,” says BT Sport’s Hindhaugh. “It is second screen as a complement to the main action.”
As digital coverage competes with – and in the case of the Olympics, far exceeds – linear coverage, it brings a tension that sports broadcasters have yet to resolve.
“Broadcasters have been very keen to control what is being produced, but today everybody can curate the live event from multiple angles,” says Yiannis Exarchos, chief executive of Olympic Broadcast Services. “The most important challenge for broadcast is how to integrate a more democratic storytelling into coverage of a sport event.”
Sky uses EVS C-Cast technology to give online viewers the option to view replays and select camera angles. “The biggest conflict is between what is happening live and what is provided in an app-based environment,” says Sky Sports’ Lane. “We need to reduce the delay in getting content to the app, but key to any second screen is making it complementary, not a distraction.”
For BT, the second screen is all about choice. “Our role is to curate the story and give an ultimate experience of the coverage that 99% of the audience expect,” says Hindhaugh.
Increasingly, viewers can personalise their live experience, to the extent that they might soon be able to self-select different live audio tracks. “We have to be aware of compliance,” says Hindhaugh. “If we were to isolate a portion of the crowd chanting religious abuse at a football match, we would be the ones falling foul of our licence.”
Virtual Reality
Virtual Reality (VR) will likely exist as a second-screen promotion for cinema and TV until someone devises a killer entertainment app. But in the US, sport federations like the National Basketball Association (NBA) are keen on live streaming VR as a premium service to fans who can’t attend the game.
“Live transmission is really the killer app for virtual reality, enabling viewers to witness sporting events as they happen from locations beyond a front-row seat,” says DJ Roller, co-founder of NextVR, which claims to be the only company with the technology to transmit live VR. “If there were 200 million VR headsets to make a mass market, we could be transmitting any live event today,” adds the company’s chairman, Brad Allen.
NextVR’s system uses a compression algorithm originally devised for 3D TV. It’s been tested by the NBA and Nascar, where a 360-rig was mounted in the pit lane. Allen says the company demonstrated the tech to the IOC last September. The IOC has confirmed that it will experiment with VR in Rio 2016. Sky and football clubs including Manchester United and Chelsea are also interested, says Allen.
“The holy grail is live VR and how you integrate that across platforms,” says Sky Sports’ Lane. Sky has test-shot VR boxing and football for Jaunt, the US developer in which it has a financial stake.
Sunset+Vine’s Abraham is more sceptical. “VR means a large barrier of entry for the average audience, and in operational terms it could be tricky to set up. Calibration of lenses for tennis or basketball may be straightforward because the court lines are identical at each venue, but the different sizes of British soccer pitches might add time, and therefore expense, for a broadcaster.”
Allen dismisses this, saying that NextVR’s system can be set up in just a few hours and no camera operator is required. “You can have multi-camera VR positions so that the viewer [within a Samsung GearVR application] can switch between cameras at each goal or on the manager and coach,” he says. “This year is about seeding the market. 2016 will see the first pay-per-view live VR stream.”
Eighteen months ago, 3D would have been high on the agenda, but even Sky has quietly pushed live production into the long grass this season.
“3D may come back in the future with 4K,” suggests Lane. “4K resolution will provide a true 3D HD and full dynamic range product. We are still interested to see how 3D goes and we’re still working on selective events.”
Data
The acquisition of data is arguably the most significant trend in sports broadcasting. Technology is enabling sensors to be placed on objects and athletes, opening up a wide range of previously impossible applications and insights.
“Broadcasters have had data available for some time, but the rise of social media and armchair analysts has forced them to up their game,” says Paul Every, product manager at Opta Sports, who pinpoints the 2010 World Cup as a watershed.
Opta is the official data partner to the Premier League and assigns two analysts to log significant events during a live match. The information, including every touch of the ball, is funnelled into a database, from which its editorial team extracts, then distributes, contextual insights. “The challenge for a production company is to make stats meaningful and entertaining, so viewers will want to share it before anyone else does,” says Sunset+Vine’s Abraham. “While they push a piece of branded content out to their peer group, it’s up to us as a production business to editorialise that data.”
Since the 2013/14 season, ChyronHego’s TRACAB video tracking system has been fitted at every Premier League ground to produce real-time 3D positional data and speeds for all players, referees and balls. Opta, Sky and BT Sport can use the X, Y and Z co-ordinates for each object to create graphical analysis such as heat maps. Sky is further exploring how TRACAB can be used to augment other sports.
Sky Sports’ Lane says the next step is to work out precisely what is relevant to Sky’s immediate audience while extrapolating elements to feed its other platforms and programming. “We want to build a digital platform that aggregates data and makes it searchable for parties across the sports business to use,” he says.
Most professional sports teams already track their players for health science and post-match analysis. Much of this data remains sensitive, but it is likely that more data from sensors on wristbands or in clothing will be opened up to fans.
Opta has spoken with every Premier League club about using it. “The prevailing opinion is that performance data can be used by a player’s agent to play off one player against another in transfer dealings, which is why clubs don’t want to stir it up,” says Every.
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