Broadcast
As
politicians make their final pitches, Adrian Pennington examines
broadcasters’ strategies for ensuring their OB teams will be first
past the post with the election results.
Political
parties are not the only ones trying to be first past the post in the
early hours of 8 May. In the most closely fought general election in
generations, the major broadcasters will do battle to be first to
declare the results.
ITV
made use of the fixed-term election date and got its planning in
early. Eighteen months ago, it began booking OB trucks and secured
around 60, all but one from the UK. In contrast, the BBC is fielding
around 100 SNG vans, including Globecast vehicles from Istanbul,
Lithuania, Sweden and Portugal.
The
scale of the OB this time around is broadly comparable to previous
elections, with a greater emphasis on the Scottish electoral story
and digital output.
Sky
News has recruited and trained 270 students as stringers, equipping
them with Sony PJ620 Handycams and a LiveU LU400 transmission unit to
scale coverage to more than 270 declarations at 176 locations. The
concept was trialled for the Scottish independence referendum.
This
time, the students will typically be paired: one operating the
camera, the other entering results data into a custom-built phone app
as soon as it is read out. Before going public, the data will be sent
back to Sky’s Osterley HQ and checked against a PA results feed
before it is put on air.
Sky’s
technical team, led by deputy head of news technology Richard
Pattison, has assembled each camera pack, which contains four sim
cards (one for each main network operator) for belt-and-braces
connectivity. Since around 20 of the sites will not provide reliable
connectivity, Sky has installed high-speed broadband fibre on
location and erected temporary broadband over a satellite dish from
Eutelsat service Tooway.
All
150 LiveU feeds will be routed to Osterley over IP in what Sky says
will be the largest IP OB of its kind. Each stream will be sent to
Google cloud servers to be streamed live to YouTube. Simultaneously,
an SD proxy will be sent to Sky’s News Operations Control (NOC)
room in Studio B and displayed on 10 4K monitors.
“When
our producers choose what they want to put on air, the stream is
converted to baseband video and sent to the gallery for playout,”
says Pattison.
“To
the best of my knowledge, no one has attempted to stream 150
concurrent live streams over IP before,” says Chris Smith, Sky’s
news technology development executive. “We considered doing 450 but
thought that was too much of a stretch this time.”
The
students will film the declarations but will not provide commentary.
In addition, Sky’s NOC will ingest 43 satellite feeds from trucks
for mixing into the TV broadcast. It is buying capacity for 33 on an
ad-hoc basis from providers Globecast, SIS Live and Arqiva.
Due
to the number of locations, recces took five months, much longer than
usual. “Aside from the technical logistics, we have to gain
permission from the local councils, and editorial teams tend to
change their mind about the seats they want covered,” explains Sky
head of operations Jackie Faulkner.
ITV
and STV are producing separate programmes but sharing resources and
aiming for 150 live counts. They have more than 300 lenses at various
locations, wielded by professional news crews and media students with
iPhones, hired by ITV regions. Material is fed to hubs in each region
then made accessible to the network.
“Delivering
the overnight live programme is hard but getting decent pictures of
declarations for next-day packages is harder,” says ITV News head
of special events Emma Hoskyns. “It’s one thing to be everywhere,
but there’s no point if you can’t land or manage it, or get it on
air.”
Working
from a database that took months to build, ITV stringers will punch
in results as they come in, with tweets automatically feeding the ITV
Twitter account and live programme straps. “We like to get a bit
competitive with headline results on election specials,” says
Hoskyns. “We want to get them out as early – and as accurately –
as possible. It’s a fine line.”
The
BBC is making every effort to populate home pages for all 650
constituencies with pictures and video, by sending TV and radio
journalists equipped with iPhones to each declaration. However, BBC
political programmes managing editor Sam Woodhouse believes that
measuring a broadcaster’s election night success by how many counts
it covers is of little value.
“A
declaration lasts three to threeand- a-half minutes. If you broadcast
them back to back, it would take at least 32 hours,” he says.
“There’s no prospect of getting even half of them on TV. Of the
ones we will record live, 80% won’t get on air.”
It’s
a historic occasion in one more way: this is the first time since
1959 that BBC election night has not come from TV Centre. At Elstree,
a gallery previously used for East Enders Live has been kitted out to
accommodate up to 120 live feeds, covering about 230 live
declarations. Around 20 BBC OBs will also be delivered via IP. The
technology, already trialled during last May’s local elections,
promises to excise the cost of satellite and crew by enabling remote
operation.
“IP
has great potential for delivering sound and pictures from a
declaration you couldn’t get from an OB truck,” says Woodhouse.
“But it’s not more cost-efficient as IP tends to take an awful
lot more planning. You’ve got to make sure the internet provider
and local council are in the loop, which is nerve-racking. Trucks
give you immediate flexibility of using monitors, ear pieces and
mics.”
Most
constituencies and party HQs will be covered unilaterally, but the
broadcasters are pooling resources with multi-camera OBs at the seats
of the three main party leaders, plus Ukip’s Nigel Farage. The BBC
is pooling coverage of Witney (David Cameron); Sky will do the same
at Doncaster North (Ed Miliband), while ITV has Sheffield Hallam
(Nick Clegg) and South Thanet (Farage).
A
seven- to eight-camera operation is stationed at Downing Street with
a jib. Another pool will be at Sunderland South, which is expected to
be the first to declare.
The
BBC will air a main live programme for each nation. Each flagship
will source its own OBs, with all the feeds routed into hubs at
Pacific Quay, Cardiff, Belfast and Elstree, to which all four
editorial teams will have access. Like ITV/STV, BBC Scotland’s OB
resource “is significantly larger this time, since most of the
seats are expected to change hands”, says Woodhouse.
With
English local government elections polling at the same time, many
counts are likely to be slower and the result looks likely to be in
the balance until mid-morning.
“I’ve
done every election in 27 years and each one has more adrenaline than
the last,” says Faulkner.
Woodhouse
adds: “You can rehearse the studio and the graphics all you like,
but there’s no way to test whether your system can handle 120
simultaneous feeds until you go live.
“In
2010, we had five declarations a minute during the Today programme
and we’re not expecting things to be any quicker. It’s like
pushing an enormous rock very slowly uphill for six months then
watching it plummet off a cliff. Things you spend days setting up
whistle by in 30 seconds on air.”
SIS
LIVE DRIVEFORCE
SIS
Live is the largest supplier of contribution feeds for election
night. It is fielding 39 trucks and staff from its fleet, plus 29
vehicles leased on long-term contracts to Sky, ITV and ITN.
Branded
DriveForce, these vans feature an automated, roof-mounted VSAT
antenna. The company is also selling satellite capacity and providing
14 additional camera crew, 55 engineers and a trailer with 10
receiver dishes on board.
“Our
crew co-ordinates the contribution links, live stand-up and two-ways,
as well as managing tape or hard-drive playouts,” says managing
director David Meynall.
This
is the first election to use satellite capacity in the Ka-band, a
more powerful frequency than the traditional Ku-band.
“The
big advantage is that customers get the flexibility of guaranteed
bandwidth but at far lower cost,” says Meynall. “DriveForce’s
design makes for fully automated acquisition of links and simple
online booking that frees operators to do other work.”
C4’S
ALTERNATIVE ELECTION NIGHT
Channel
4 is leaving rolling coverage of the declarations to other channels.
Its Alternative Election Night, produced by Endemol and ITN, is
billed as a mix of comedy, entertainment and comment. “We try to
cover a lot of ground on a smaller budget than our competitors,”
says Channel 4 News deputy editor Shaminder Nahal.
“We
planned some signature coverage in the run-up to 7 May that we think
spells out who we are.”
This
includes live OBs in Birmingham and Leeds and other ‘pop-up
reportage’, such as Krishnan Guru- Murthy cycling between towns in
the north of England and a roving OB featuring Jon Snow. Pictures for
both were streamed via Aviwest camera-backed TX units over wi-fi and
4G with satellite truck back-up.
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