SVGEurope
When the Olympics was cancelled last year, Ron Chakraborty,
lead executive, major events at BBC Sport, had to decide whether to continue to
plan for a rescheduled Games by sending an entire OB team or do it remotely.
Having deployed remote galleries for the PyeongChang 2018
Winter Olympics and for the Commonwealth Games on Australia’s Gold Coast, the
corporation is used to having a production gallery back in the UK.
“We decided to bring operations back to the UK to manage the
risk to the team of COVID,” said Chakraborty, speaking at SVG Europe’s Sport
Production and Technology Summit last week, on a session chaired by SVG Europe
editor, Heather McLean.
Two groups were set up; a set of 100 production and
technical teams with some production management to go to Tokyo and the larger
remote and presentation set up in the UK.
They had to stay nimble as the IOC released updates to the
Games rule book on tests and visas in the run-up to the starting gun.
Back home, it quickly became clear that the BBC’s sports
facility in Salford didn’t have a big enough ready-made studio or operations
environment to handle the scale of an Olympics.
Luckily, dock10 did and it is next door. “We went across the
road to dock10. It was a combination of them saying what do you want and us
saying what have you got,” he recalled.
Dock10 studio 3 became the main presentation studio, studio
4 housed all post operations and studio 10 catered for commentary, including 10
off-tubes.
The biggest technical casualty was derailment of plans to
broadcast at least some of the action in 4K HDR. The requirement to backhaul 4K
streams back to the UK for production was deemed too costly in terms of
bandwidth.
They had more luck with the studio presentation. “Usually,
the plan is to give a sense of being there,” said Chakraborty. In Rio 2016 the
BBC had a set-up on Copacabana Beach, for example.
“It was [BBC director of sport] Barbara Slater who pointed
out that the time difference with Tokyo would mean that all our daytime output
would be prime evening time over there. That would create a very dark
background which wasn’t great. So early on we had decided on a virtual set,” he
added.
The physical set design and build at dock10 was by Toby
Kalitowski at design house Scott Fleary and the virtual studio was designed by
Jim Mann at Lightwell with Moov executing production.
“The amount of work that went into the virtual Tokyo skyline
alone was incredible,” said BBC Sport creative director, motion, John
Murphy. “It was still being tweaked up to the moment we went on air.”
Contribution was via 10Gb fibre connections managed by
Telstra to the UK which connect into the BBC network in London and were then
delivered to the MediaCity studios.
The main change was the temporary replacement of a router
with enough capacity to handle 33 sports, plus ISO feeds and mix zone to
deliver the live feed and segmented coverage to news and nations and regions.
“We put in a new router and promised to replace the existing
one exactly as we found it,” said Murphy.
There were issues: commentators who normally rely on being
adjacent to the field of play had to work from banks of screens. The Olympics
Village remote camera was “okay, but lacked the energy” of an ENG crew.
On the plus side, whereas a normal Olympic production would
work with a handful of pundits on site, the BBC was able to pull in a wider
variety of contributors live over Zoom.
“We were able to include relatives of athletes competing in
Tokyo, seamlessly over Zoom and live in a way not possible had we done this even
a year earlier,” Murphy said.
The Tokyo experience also provides a template for the
Beijing Winter Games in early 2022; which is just as well since no-one wants to
reinvent this wheel.
“The time-zones are similar so we’ll operate a similar
catch-up editorial model,” Chakraborty explained. “Presentation will all be
back here to manage risk.”
While the BBC does not have rights to the Olympics beyond
2024 (when UK rights revert to Eurosport) Chakraborty said that LA and
Brisbane, the Summer Games in 2028 and 2032 “feel like remote” operations.
“Paris merits a big discussion,” he said. “Salford is two
hours by train from London and so is Paris, so on balance the costs could be
similar.”
Since the summer, the BBC has installed its own permanent,
smaller green screen virtual set at the BBC Sport facility in Salford. It has
already been used to host tennis and Match of the Day.
“Not everything we do going forward will be from a virtual
studio but the fact that what we now have our own green screen studio in Salford
gives us far greater flexibility to present multiple sports,” Murphy said.
On the other hand, the XXII Commonwealth Games, which run
from 28 July to 8 August 2022, will have coverage hosted by the broadcaster in
Birmingham.
Chakraborty said: “As much as you want to show off the
virtual tech it makes sense for us to be there in the heart of Birmingham for
that.
“I’d add that working with virtual sets is a lot of hard
work. The problem is you need the launch date of the event to give you that end
point. You can always tweak the design in Unreal. At some point you need to
draw a line under it.”
Opportunity and complexity: Discovery talks Wildmoka
workflow
In a separate session at the summit, Discovery testified
about the services provided by cloud-based ‘media factory’ Wildmoka to aid its
Summer Olympics effort.
“We produced 3500 hours of content over two weeks needing to
reach 50 markets in 19 different languages,” explained Robert Hodges, director
of audience and content strategy at Discovery. “We needed to make sense of that
and distribute to a multitude of platforms.
“At the start of 2021 we looked at who would be the best
provider to help us do that. What we didn’t want to do was take all the feeds
and content and deliver it to a different platform, which creates its own
complexities. We were looking for a tool to layer over the top of our global
video platform.”
He continued: “I want to get all this content from A to B in
all required aspect ratios to all different end points, including Eurosport’s
digital experience on our app and our website which is localised in terms of
language and content, alongside that of all third-party syndication platforms
and rights partners. We don’t want multiple workflows. We wanted one that
delivers the same content to all end points.”
Using the media factory from Wildmoka, Hodges said Discovery
was able to train its editors and those of its media partners to select any
feed in any language, clip the video and deliver it in the required format.
“The scale we were able to deliver in digital shortform was
extraordinary. We discovered that we can onboard our partners in France or the
Nordics and they can use the platform in the same way at no extra cost.”
Eurosport reached close to 400 million digital users across
the two weeks of the Games. “From my simplified point of view everything
worked. At no point were we not able to deliver clip A to destination B.”
Discovery says it is now looking at how it can go deeper
with Wildmoka into automation, subtitling and integration with its internal
platforms.
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