Broadcast
New tools helped make regular live UHD transmissions a reality, while IP networking advances brought remote production to the fore.
AUGMENTED SERVICES
The number of companies solely engaged in supplying outside broadcast trucks continues to shrink, with the largest two players in the market diversifying into associated businesses.
“It is difficult to grow an OB company focused purely on outside broadcasting,” says Euro Media Group managing director Barry Johnstone. “Media management of content services is a key growth area for us.”
EMG, which owns the continent’s largest fleet of trucks, added British links expert Broadcast RF to its roster in May and, more significantly, French second-screen specialist Netco in September. Netco helped to deliver the mobile app and web player for the Fifa World Cup 2014 and, in March, inked a partnership with sports media service company Deltatre to offer a similar set of services to the wider sports broadcast market.
Rival NEP Visions was even busier on the acquisitions front. A year ago, the US group landed Dutch LED screen rental firm Faber Audiovisuals; in January, it added Irish post-production and OB provider Screen Scene; in March, it bought Swedish LED screen and mobile facility provider Mediatec Group; and in May, it swooped for Germany’s RecordLab and Belgium’s full-service facility Outside Broadcast.
Then, in June, it snapped up the Nether lands’ Consolidated Media Industries, which includes remote production systems and studios.
Visions was able to call on these new assets to cushion the loss of equipment when a fire destroyed its Bracknell HQ (pictured) last month.
“If companies don’t have a disaster recovery plan, they should get one, and if they have one, they should revisit it,” advises NEP major events director Brian Clark.
WORKFLOWS
The modus operandi of live event broadcasting is in transition, as IPbased transport, cloud collaboration and faster broadband links are making centralised, remote production feasible. While this has budget-saving potential for producers able to send fewer crew to venues, it may not be editorially desirable for the most prestigious occasions.
In any case, the technology has not yet matured enough for broadcasters to risk more than occasional elements of production.
The largest and highest-profile OB of the year was the Rugby World Cup (11.6 million viewers for England v Wales on ITV was the largest rugby audience in the UK since the 2007 final). The action was captured by five trucks from Arena, with eight scanners from CTV, NEP Visions and Telegenic servicing the host feed. The RFU adopted a conservative approach to technology. No 4K footage of the tournament was captured, even for archive. However, an IP network was established to route comms, match data and Hawkeye angles for the Television Match Official (TMO) back to the International Broadcast Centre at Stockley Park. TMO decisions, foreign-language graphics and press conference translations were all performed remotely.
Meanwhile, ITN Productions emerged as a significant new player in sports production. It set up a half-way house between traditional and future OB workflows to deliver Channel 5’s Football League coverage.
In a break from the past, feeds from trucks at each ground were issued over ADI’s fibre network to ITN in London, removing tape entirely and speeding up turnaround.
ITN wants to base all production, including camera control and direction, either at Gray’s Inn Road or at a dedicated data centre, potentially as early as the 2016-17 season.
“If we can deliver remote production in a reliable and cost-effective way, we could produce more multi-camera coverage from more stadiums, rather than the single-camera coverage of the majority of the games,” explains ITN chief technology officer Bevan Gibson.
IP DELIVERY
The cost-slashing advantages of routing live events over IP rather than satellite were graphically illustrated during the 7 May general election. The BBC, Sky and ITV employed varying degrees of IP delivery to enhance coverage from hard-to-access sites. Sky News was the most ambitious, sending 150 live streams of declaration results from LiveU cellular backpacks carried by student stringers back to its gallery in Osterley and onto YouTube.
“We considered doing 450 but thought that was too much of a stretch this time,” says Sky news technology development executive Chris Smith.
By 2020, it should be possible to stream all 650 parliamentary seats live online. However, warns BBC political programmes managing editor Sam Woodhouse: “A declaration lasts three minutes. Even if you broadcast them back to back it would take 32 hours, so there’s no prospect of getting even half of them on TV.”
LIVE ULTRA HD
There was speculation over Ultra HD live channels at the beginning of the year but it was not until August that BT broke cover with Europe’s first 4K channel. BT Sport Ultra HD kicked off with the Community Shield final between Arsenal and Chelsea.
“We’ve done about 30 UHD jobs in four months for BT, having done about three before August. So for us, UHD OB is a mainstream operation,” says Dan McDonnell, managing director of BT’s outside broadcast partner Timeline TV. “We’re doing at least one UHD OB a week. The biggest was the MotoGP at Silver stone in August, where we had 19 4K cameras including two 4K radio cameras.”
All eyes will be on Sky in 2016 as it swaps out existing set-top boxes for its UHD-tuned Sky Q unit. The broadcaster will want to make sure the market and the production technology are aligned before launching into UHD, having learned lessons from the 3D channel it quietly closed in June.
4K WORKFLOW
The technology to produce 4K live has moved from workarounds to a fully-fledged equipment chain. One significant development is the introduction by several major manufacturers of systems cameras carrying 2/3-inch chips, rather than large-format single sensors more suited for cinema. Long called for by OB firms, the 2/3-inch cameras allow outside broadcasters to continue to use their existing inventory of zoomable lenses, which maintain the characteristic depth of field of sports action.
Sony HDC-4300s were used for the 4K production of the Champions League Final in June and selected by Timeline to record BT Sport’s UHD output.
“You can now do 80% of a normal HD OB in UHD,” says McDonnell. “The cameras, lenses, matrix and vision mixers all slot into production very well, but items around the edge, like radio cams and super slow-motion, are still catching up.”
4K wireless camcorder solutions for touchline camera work are emerging. Broadcast RF married a Sony F55 with its own 4KRF system to claim the first UHD radio camera system for hire, based on a new HEVC/H.265 encoder from Vislink. BBC R&D’s design uses multiple-input/multiple-output techniques to halve the bandwidth required for UHD, and therefore reduce the cost for news and sports gathering.
“The big challenge is how to store and move content offsite, especially when you factor in high frame rates that increase the data, and to manage the data so that in future you can play it back,” says Clark.
8K ADVANCES
Just as 4K capture is already used by broadcasters to zoom into and resize pictures for HD output, so 8K cameras could soon be used for 4K output.
“One idea is to generate different viewpoints from a live 8K feed at a soccer match to give a viewer the sense of being a fan in a stadium,” Discovery chief technology officer John Honeycutt declared at IBC. “Using data at this volume, you are going far beyond a pretty picture and giving audiences real engagement.”
Discovery took full ownership of Eurosport in July (buying TF1 Group’s 49% stake for £345m), a month after winning European TV rights for the Olympic Games in a £922m four-year deal from 2018.
Japanese broadcaster NHK tested its 8K 22.2 surround-sound Super HiVision format at the Fifa Women’s World Cup this summer and plans to do the same at Super Bowl 50 in February. Hitachi and Ikegami launched 8K studio and handheld cameras but development is not confined to Japan. RED and Canon announced 8K cinestyle shooters; SAM’s Rio is sold as an 8K finishing platform; and Cinegy, V-Nova and Spin Digital demonstrated means of compressing the data into manageable sizes.
At IBC, NHK challenged visitors to examine a 12-inch OLED display replaying 8K pictures with a magnifying glass to spot any pixels. None of them could.
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