SVG Europe
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Slow meandering herds of moose trekking across wintry tundra
doesn’t have much in common with the turbocharged noise and control of rally
cars but right now in Sweden they are virtually joined at the hip.
Swedish broadcaster SVT’s month long round-the-clock live
broadcast of The Great Moose Migration (‘Den stora älgvandringen’) is the
latest test of an organisation-wide digital transformation project that will
soon encompass the next leg of the WRC Rally.
“It’s a slightly insane project,” says Dennis Buhr Head of
Production Development, SVT of the remote production initiated for this year’s
Great Moose Migration. “It’s not that common that your show is 500 hours long.”
About the Moose Migration
Every spring, for thousands of years, Sweden's population of
moose (or European Elk) in Västernorrland in the north of Sweden migrates
across the same tracks in the forest to get to greener pastures. Since 2019,
SVT has live streamed the ‘action’ over the course of several weeks.
This ‘great moose migration’ has proved hugely popular with
the public with viewers rising from a million in 2019 to about 9 million this
year on SVT Play alongside more than 300,000 chat interactions - an increase of
30% on 2023.
The show has also been broadcast live on Twitch reaching
nearly 15 million views around the world. Men aged 16-25 seemed to enjoy the
respite from hardcore gaming.
The livestream is now a national springtime phenomena and a
classic example of ‘Slow TV’ which this year is also being aired on Finland’s
YLE and RTL in Germany.
“It’s always been a huge technical struggle to get this to
work in a forest with a wild river and at a time of year that turns from winter
into spring with huge ice melts,” says Buhr.
SVT lays thousands of metres of cable across the forest area
to connect 30 camouflaged cameras and 28 mics. In the past these feeds were all
sent to a remote production gallery built on site.
This year the Great Moose Migration has gone truly remote.
New cloud based workflow
“First and foremost we decided to keep all our production
staff inside our TV building in Stockholm,” says Buhr. “Immediately that cuts
down the costs of having staff on site for a month.”
In this new set up the cameras (a mix of Sony PTZ during the
day and Axion surveillance cameras at night) and mics are converted from SDI to
IP by VideoXLink and transported as H.264 streams over the internet to SVT’s northern
hub at Umeå, a 3-hour 250km drive away.
Two cameras in this year’s production were positioned next
to a wild bear spot. Unable to run either power or fibre to that location they
used solar power and a Starlink satellite internet connection.
At Umeå the rest of the IP streams are captured into Agile
Live, a software-based system jointly developed over a number of years by SVT
and Agile Content. Image
mixing and graphic overlay is performed by operators in Umeå with rendering
done on-prem in Stockholm 650km away.
“The technical cloud workflow of this is not particularly
difficult,” says Buhr. “The actual work is the shift in mindset we have gone
through at SVT. We have had to rethink production.”
He elaborates, “You can’t stream high-res images everywhere
as you are used to. You have to think who needs to see what, when, and in what
quality. You need to understand and communicate the advantages of it rather
than comparing this workflow to how it used to be done.”
This year’s production has brought together SVT broadcast
engineering with its IT teams. Many, it seems, had never met before, yet here
they are working to deliver the production together.
“All of a sudden you have meetings and you see people inside
the organisation you do not regularly see. They might be responsible for
computer services in whole other areas of the business. They are experts in
networks, computer hosting and IT security. Everyone gathered to make a TV
show. That was a new thing for me – and for everyone.
“I’ve been doing broadcast for twenty two years and this is
the first time I’ve seen computer guys getting a credit on the show. It made me
extremely happy.”
The culture clash between IT and broadcast worlds that are
often mentioned as a management nightmare didn’t materialise. Or, if it did,
everyone treated each other professionally and understood the overall mission.
“We have had our discussions shall we say, but it has not
been a hassle - more of a learning curve,” says Buhr. “Early on we asked for a
feature from the network department and gave them four days notice. They said,
‘You can’t have this short a time span.’ But when you work in live TV with the
red light about to flash, four minutes is a long time, let alone four
hours. That was one cultural difference
but people have genuinely been getting on very well and understand it is a
joint venture.”
Having previously trialled the arrangement on a local sports
production, the 2024 Great Moose Migration is by far SVT’s biggest proof of
concept to date of its transformation project Next Generation Online (NEO).
NEO is an organisation-wide glass to glass approach to
making production and distribution under the same roof. It is aimed to be 100%
software, based on COTs servers and standard IT using the internet.
“It’s a huge scope but we started early, in late 2018, and
now we are live with a working product.”
The same set up will be used by SVT to produce the ERC
Bauhaus Royal Rally, part of the WRC calendar, on June 13-15 at several
different locations in Värmland, near Karlstad.
“We are also adding in a new product which is our
re-invention of the intercom 4 wire system as an entirely software-based system
web technology and standard IT hardware.”
The software- based 4 wire intercom is a collaboration with
fellow Scandinavian broadcasters NRK, YLE and TV2.
“We still produce TV today the same way we did in the ‘60s
but in a software environment if you want to be more efficient with money and
cut the carbon footprint you must rethink who does what and why and when,” Buhr
stresses.
“If you want to transform TV production from cables to
software and you don’t think about how your staff will work in a facility you
will only not have the cost of investing in new technology but the same staff
costs as before if you adapting it to an old school way of making TV.”
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