Broadcast
IP offers a way for OB firms to deliver additional services at little extra cost, but concerns remain around connectivity and its ability to cope with 4K content.
http://www.broadcastnow.co.uk/features/game-on-for-remote-production/5116974.article?blocktitle=Features&contentID=42957
IP offers a way for OB firms to deliver additional services at little extra cost, but concerns remain around connectivity and its ability to cope with 4K content.
http://www.broadcastnow.co.uk/features/game-on-for-remote-production/5116974.article?blocktitle=Features&contentID=42957
The capability afforded by incoming IP-based technologies to relocate part or all of a live sport production away from the venue is proving increasingly attractive to broadcasters and sports producers.
Plugging in cameras at an event and controlling them over a fast fibre network can make more efficient use of technical and editorial resource.
“For the Football League matches we produce for Channel 5, it means that four or five producers can oversee 36 matches each Saturday,” says ITN Productions chief technology officer Bevan Gibson.
“One editor can work on up to four games and deliver edits 15-20 minutes after the final whistle.” “We can deliver this to the broadcaster far quicker than in the past by using economies of scale.”
ITN shoots single- and multicamera EFL matches and streams the video over IP to a data centre in south-east London. Editors at ITN’s Gray’s Inn Road HQ access those files remotely.
“You are able to create content from a smaller number of remote-controlled cameras and a reduced number of staff relatively cheaply,” says Gearhouse Broadcast systems integration manager Martin Paskin.
This approach can open up coverage of lower-tier football or rugby league matches and can be used by producers of premier events to clip up highlights for online distribution.
Gearhouse used Aperi Corporation’s software processors to trial remote production of a match at last year’s European Championships for Uefa. In the test, four UHD feeds were sent from Bordeaux for editing in Paris, more than 600km away.
“With an IP infrastructure, editorial teams have more control over which games they devote most attention to on a week-by-week basis, by upgrading facilities in stadia on the fly,” says Aperi chief executive Joop Janssen.
“They can decide to offer more 4K camera coverage or more slow-motion units, for example, without being tied to a traditional OB schedule determined weeks in advance.”
Remote production also affords an opportunity to generate more media from an event. According to server systems vendor EVS, just 10% of video recorded at a multi-camera event is typically used in the broadcast presentation.
New techniques afforded by the move to IP can unleash much more of this content, such as player cams, ref cams and replay angles. “IP enables broader delivery of media and better monetisation of content, such as social media repurposing, on top of the existing linear production,” says EVS senior vice-president of marketing Nicolas Bourdon.
The editorial, workflow and technical models for remote production, though, are still being worked through.
“One of the big discussions is around what needs to be done on site and what can be taken back centrally,” says Paskin. “This will differ depending on the broadcaster and event.”
Staying close to the action
With the extra space made available in IP-centric trucks as a result of reduced cabling and hardware, additional room can be made for staff dedicated to producing content for social media.
“The production team could be in a more spacious OB van at the stadium to create a ‘wow’ factor for the game, but they will only operate user interfaces and control surfaces connected to kit at a production hub or a data centre,” says Janssen.
Gibson believes that whether a producer is watching in a remote studio in London or in a truck on site makes little difference. “The person making the editorial judgement is detached anyway, so to me, the location makes no odds.”
Outside broadcast suppliers must adapt too. “People are consuming more sport than ever before, but viewing much more on-demand and on mobile,” says Steve Knee, managing director of OB supplier CloudBass.
“For OB companies with a business model built around live production, that presents a challenge and an opportunity. The race to 4K is a red herring. What clients want is more content at less cost.” Much depends on bandwidth into and out of a venue. While some stadia are linked with high-speed fibre, they are the exception rather than the rule.
The more international the event, the more complex the connectivity becomes in terms of linking with local and national telecoms carriers.
“The tipping point [for widespread remote production] is connectivity,” says ITN Productions director of sport Alastair Waddington. “Resilient camera paths will make a big difference to the economics.”
In Australia, the NEP Group has built central control facilities in Sydney and Melbourne to enable multiple, concurrent OBs for Fox Sports’ AFL coverage. Cameras and microphones will be located at the venue, with most of the production team based at the hubs.
“This works well in Australia, where the distances between venues are so great – but the UK is less advanced,” says Rob Newton, engineering and technical director of NEP UK and Ireland. “We’ve done tests of varying complexity for horseracing, for example.
When multiple events happen simultaneously at different venues, remote production will be beneficial.”
Producers of major OBs will demand traditional large-scale scanners for the foreseeable future, not least because the cost of IP connectivity remains high. There is also the question of broadcaster confi dence in IP as the sole contribution mechanism.
“You can relocate all the virtual machines you like, but you have to build in redundancy,” says CTV chief technology officer Hamish Greig.
“You can’t guarantee that IP will get you a signal from the venue all of the time. Broadcasters can’t afford any blip, so why would you risk IP when you can get a satellite uplink at a lot less cost?
“We all see the benefits of remote production, but you can rarely get a 1Gb/s pipe from a venue at a decent price, let alone 100 Gb/s,” he adds. “The price of connectivity is not yet here to make IP production viable on a large scale.”
CTV produces golf tournament The Open for European Tour Productions and Sky Sports.
“We operate a dozen production streams, technical workflows and galleries for clients, employ 500 staff on site and operate 175 cameras of different types,” says Greig. “With today’s technology, no way is all that being taken back to base.”
If golf does not lend itself to remote production, other sports might. “As IP technologies develop, there will be a demarcation between sports taking advantage of it,” says Waddington. “Snooker is ideal for robotic cameras since it’s indoors in a small, controllable space.”
ITN will be expanding its remote production model out to the Bahamas this month for the IAAF World Relays.
As host broadcaster, it will produce the live feed on site and also provide digital highlights and social media content to editorial teams at Gray’s Inn Road.
“We will be trialling human telemetry from sensors worn by athletes, which could form part of a future host broadcast,” says Waddington. 4K uplift
OB suppliers report an uptick in interest in 4K, but expect migration will take longer than the move from SD to HD. The dial has only just tilted towards UHD production at the top end of sports properties. Consequently, those without a contract from Sky or BT are holding fire on upgrades.
“The message we get from clients is that unless the consumer is prepared to pay for an uplift to UHD, they want it cheaper,” says Knee.
“We keep a watching brief on UHD, but there isn’t a massive mainstream requirement anytime soon. Our challenge is to find new ways of bringing costs down.”
One way of doing this is to use smaller vehicles that reduce diesel bills. “There’s less need of riggers, you can be more agile in deployment of cabling and smaller trucks need less generating power, which saves money,” says Knee.
The leap to UHD is inextricably bound up with a move to IP. While end-to-end IP chains are being built, the protocols and technologies are developing rapidly, making suppliers cautious.
“4K technology is very difficult to engineer at the moment because manufacturers have not come up with a way of doing it consistently and reliably over IP,” says Knee.
The move to IP is considered such a risk that last year a number of US-based OB firms, including NEP Group and Game Creek Video, called on manufacturers to deliver new high-bandwidth 12 Gbps SDI (serial digital interface) equipment.
They wanted to make SDI over a single coax cable a viable alternative to the cumbersome use of 3 Gbps SDI signals to transport 4K. FOR-A is among the vendors that have brought out 12Gbps equipment since then. “Both Quad-SDI 4K and IP are very messy technologies just now,” says
Richard La Motte, director of Video Europe, which supplies ITN Productions with HD facilities for 60 EFL games a season and operates a dry hire division including rental of Arri Amira cameras.
“Because of our expertise in digital cinema and live events, we are developing a way of adapting the Amira for use in live UHD broadcast,” he says. Paskin also reports “a lot of nervousness” around IP from Gearhouse’s clients.
“We’re still waiting for reliable control, monitoring and fault-finding solutions, and there are debates about whether you need to have a qualified data centre engineers on site.”
The “green shoots of these solutions” are emerging, he says, but the technology is still very expensive. “While you can build an all-IP production operation today, it could take five years before this is as easy to build as an SDI one.”
NEP UK is building its last SDI trucks this year before a debut IP vehicle in 2018. CTV is also upgrading three of its existing mobile units to
UHD and planning its next new build to be its first with an IP core. “There’s no advantage for us in putting in IP just now for our current contracts and workflow,” says Greig.
Both suppliers are waiting until the industry agrees the SMPTE 2110 standard, which will make it possible to route audio feeds separately from video and make HDR workflows easier to manage. This is expected to be ratified in 2018.
Timeline is one supplier that is not waiting for SMPTE. Its 32-camera triple-expanding UHD2 is due on the road next month, and managing director Dan McDonnell says the fi rm greenlit the million-pound investment with no contract in place. Timeline’s main 4K client is BT Sport. “It will be, without doubt, the most advanced 4K truck on the market,” he says. “By plugging in 10 or more EVS additional machines at a venue, you wouldn’t have to call in another two or three large OB trucks. You can do the event with one. Moreover, since
UHD2 is stripped of a lot of the bulky hardware of a conventional vehicle, there is room for more production galleries for enhanced editorial.”
SKY TAKES F1 UHD
Formula One Management (FOM), which controls broadcast rights and the production of televised feeds, will position and operate a new set of multiple UHD cameras trackside at each circuit.
With delays in transmitting 4K signals wirelessly still too great for broadcast, all radio cams remain HD, albeit upgraded from 1080i to 1080p/50.
Race footage is mixed in the FOM broadcast centre on-site, and the output is distributed to Sky’s HQ in Osterley over Tata Communications’ fire network.
Sky manages the encoding process at its master control room (MCR) using compression scheme HEVC. “This gives us the confidence to be able to distribute the UHD feed to other European rights partners,” says Sky Sports head of operations James Clement.
Sky will enhance its presentation with its own commentary and video before and after each race, in the paddock and pit lane. This kit is supplied in flyaway form by Gearhouse Broadcast.
Since the ENG cameras must work without cables (for health and safety reasons) these are also HD.
“The approach we take is in line with our Premier League coverage, where some radio elements will be upgraded in time,” says Clement.
The sport’s new owner, Liberty Global, is keen to innovate F1’s digital coverage, believing it is under-exploited.
But the focus this season appears to be on UHD.
For Sky, too, the priority is ensuring coverage of UHD on Sky Q, rather than revamping the second screen.
One of the sport’s global sponsors, Heineken, has also expressed interest in virtual reality potential.
Sky has post-produced VR short films, but accepts that live streaming is some way off. “We’re testing the whole experience of how 360, 180 or augmented video works,” says Clement. Once again, the EPL is Sky’s testing ground.
“There are specific challenges with F1, such as the sensation that a VR point of view can have when cars corner at 100kmph, so it’s likely we’ll want to deliver live VR around other sports first.”
Next to get the UHD treatment from Sky will be its roster of England cricket internationals, beginning this summer.
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