AV Magazine
In a changing media landscape, live sports and events remain a huge draw across every platform and screen. Broadcasters and content producers are covering more live events than ever, however, tightening production budgets are driving a need for more flexible and efficient alternatives to expensive outside broadcast (OB) operations.
“Remote production is the next step change, opening up new ways of working by allowing a production team back at base to have all the resources they need to deliver high quality, captivating content,” says Mark Hilton, vice-president, live production at Grass Valley.
The idea of ‘at-home’ production or REMI (REMote Integration) in which large parts of the OB functionality is decoupled from the event location to edit and switch back at base, is far from new.
Indeed, the FIFA World Cup in Brazil 2014 was the large-scale trailblazer for the technology when, faced with the sheer geographic spread of the Brazilian venues, host broadcaster HBS used EVS’s C-Cast technology to pump video back to edit bays located at the International Broadcast Centre (IBC) in Rio. Since then, every major sporting event has featured broadcasters that have chosen not to take space at the IBC, instead taking multiple camera feeds and creating the live broadcast back at base.
With fewer personnel needing to travel to the actual event, this has the advantage of also allowing the same production crew to handle more productions by having centralised staff and technical resources.
Practical, large-scale implementations are becoming increasingly common, led out of the US and Australia where large distances can be economically countered by REMI, and in Scandinavia where severe winters mean moving expensive trucks around is a challenge.
Swedish broadcaster SVT’s remote IP production for the broadcast of the FIS Alpine World Ski Championships in Åre, Sweden last February boasted the largest number of cameras deployed (80) and the highest volume of remote signals transmitted to date from a live location over IP to a production hub 600 km away in Stockholm. Partners included Net Insight and Grass Valley.
“This was not only about sports but about transforming our entire outside broadcast workflow for live events,” explains Adde Granberg, CTO at SVT. “Our reason to centralise our production facilities was about saving costs and also to really focus on making programmes, not on how to make programmes from a technical perspective.”
For SVT in other words, remote is a means of taking our cost and complexity from the operation. While some aspects of live production, such as switching, have been successfully hived off to remote, others are more resistant. Although automated robotic cameras are being introduced to lower profile sports events, for the most part you still need camera operators and engineers to look after the cameras; the OB compounds of major events are still full of vehicles.
The connectivity costs are a barrier to deployment as well, meaning that scale is important in achieving cost savings.
“If you want to run a match by remote the big saving is meant to be in not travelling people, but you’re only not travelling somewhere between four to six production people and does that pay for your increased bandwidth costs? Not necessarily,” calculates Hamish Greig, CEO of CTV Outside Broadcasts. “However, if you have more than the single event, if you’re going to do thirty events with a dedicated EVS replay centre and schedule matches so the same home-based team can also do two games, then the economies of scale start to work.”
What’s changing now is that remote production is not just about pure cost-efficiency but increasingly about delivering on the audience’s expectation of more content and more engagement.
“The amount of live content surrounding the event is continuing to grow,” says Yvonne Monterroso, director of product management at wireless links developer, Dejero. “Whether it is a live stream from a fanzone, reports from the team base camps or athletes’ village, or post-event interviews, reporters and production teams are continually finding creative ways to provide top quality content to audiences.”
It’s one of the main reasons that SVT is choosing remote for all of its sports and entertainment live events.
“From a viewer’s perspective they don’t care or know if it’s remote or OB,” says Grandberg. “Actually, it’s the reverse. With remote you can collect more camera feeds and make more of them to give the viewer more action and understanding of an event than you ever could before.”
To attract and retain viewers, broadcasters are required to deliver increasing amounts of content and ensure the most immersive fan experience for viewers.
“This means delivering more camera angles and making content available whenever and wherever, via a wide range of platforms,” says Hilton.
“This means delivering more camera angles and making content available whenever and wherever, via a wide range of platforms,” says Hilton.
Vendors are following suit by refining their equipment to replicate more of the nuances of production. Grass Valley, for example, has updated its Live Touch replay system so that the feel of working with a remote server more closely resembles that of a conventional jog shuttle. Mobile video specialist LiveU has a Video Return service to let remote crews remain aware of the programme currently on air and even receive teleprompt information.
Live audio mixing is following the same trends with software interfaces replacing physical console desks. Two mixing systems with no physical control surface recently made their European debuts. Calrec’s VP2 can be accessed from multiple locations via a web-browser. Wheatstone’s Dimension Three is a multi-touch virtual mixer that interfaces to all the major production automation systems.
Crucial connectivity
Connectivity is of course essential for any form of remote production. While live feeds can be contributed to the central facility over the public internet, producers will be concerned about the quality of the signal and its susceptibility to delay and packet drop out especially over vast distances (even between continents). The return feed – the ability for technical and production staff to communicate as live with the video being produced in a remote studio, is another essential.
Connectivity is of course essential for any form of remote production. While live feeds can be contributed to the central facility over the public internet, producers will be concerned about the quality of the signal and its susceptibility to delay and packet drop out especially over vast distances (even between continents). The return feed – the ability for technical and production staff to communicate as live with the video being produced in a remote studio, is another essential.
There are a number of options for this. One might be to process the video at the venue using a technology like Secure Reliable Transport which is designed to manage and smooth jitter. Other solutions include dedicated IP traffic shaping and monitoring solutions offered by companies, such as Net Insight and Nevion (in which Sony recently took a 45 per cent stake). The video here might be compressed using J2K, which is fine if you’re outputting HD.
For 4K quality productions, dedicated fibre or satellite might still be the best option, albeit an expensive one. Very few venues though will be fibre-linked and the cost of sending satellite uplinks is one of the drivers for remote in the first place.
In reality, most premium live events will combine a mix of transport technologies in order to be on the safe side, with one complete circuit held in redundancy.
“Our provision of connectivity from an event back to the broadcaster is based around both the use of traditional fibre connectivity on an ad-hoc low commitment basis and also the use of evolving 5G platforms,” says Chris Pearman, Remote Production Strategy and Architecture, Red Bee Media. “We believe these technologies will enable the dream of full remote production as a ‘pop-up’ service (temporary channel for the duration of the event).”
As the cost of connectivity continues to fall and bandwidth continues to increase, then remote production will become even more cost effective and appealing, especially with the advent of 5G.
The multi-gigabit speed, ultra-low latency network will bring more capabilities to the live events market, such as returning multiple channels of audio, enabling multicamera productions from a single portable transmission solution, 4K contribution and onward streaming, and live Virtual Reality experiences.
“With the capabilities of 5G, we believe that remote production will dominate most sports production globally because of its flexibility and cost-effectiveness and this is already being demonstrated,” says Ronen Atman, vice-president, marketing, LiveU.
It’s a trend likely to continue at pace beyond IBC and into Tokyo 2020. Eurosport, one of the rights holders for the Olympics, has ambitious plans to build three permanent content hubs in Paris, Amsterdam and London which will be fully operational by next Summer.
From there it will produce and distribute live sports programming from live feeds brought in from anywhere around the world.
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