SVG SPECIAL REPORT: BEIJING GAMES IN REVIEW RAISINg THe

Transcription

advancing the creation, production,
& distribution of sports content
fall 2008 Vol. 2, No. 2
SVG Special Report:
Beijing Games in Review
Raising the Bar on
Sports Broadcast
& Production
NBC Olympics, Broadcasters Ride Venue Network
The Wide World of Olympic Coverage
Tough Times Mean Tough Road Trip for Stations
Digital Downpour: NBC Takes Its Olympics Content
Across Platforms, Time Zones
Audio, Too, Is High-Def in Beijing
ALSO
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sports technology
journal / fall 2008
ADVISORY
BOARD
From The Chairman
Sports Broadcasting HOF
Gains Momentum
CHAIRMAN
Ken Aagaard, CBS Sports, EVP Operations and
Production Services
by Ken Aagaard,
Chairman of the Advisory Board, Sports Video Group
L
ast year at this time, I took the opportunity provided in this letter to introduce the inaugural 2007 Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame class. The Hall of Fame was subsequently
transformed from promise into vision, culminating in a ceremony last December that exceeded expectations of everyone involved.
This year, I have the honor of introducing the next class of inductees, one that is as strong
as the first and shows the depth of excellence in our industry. And I also have the honor of
announcing an exciting new relationship with the Sports Museum of America (SmA) in lower
Manhattan.
For those of you not familiar with the museum, it is a showcase that gives visitors an overview
of the history of sport in America. Thanks to relationships with dozens of sports hall of fames from
across the country, it houses a first-class collection of sports artifacts.
Given the important relationship between sports and broadcasting, we believe that establishing ties with the museum is a great first step towards giving the Sports Broadcasting
Hall of Fame a future home and showcase. It’s my pleasure to say that those first steps have
been taken, as the Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame is now a founding partner of the SmA,
and the SmA is a founding sponsor of the Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame.
Thanks to the support of SmA president John Urban, co-founder Philip Schwalb, and marketing manager Jayne Wise, our two organizations have begun a relationship that will allow
sports broadcasters and leagues to enhance future exhibits and special events at the SmA.
At this point, the relationship is in its infancy, but there is great potential to give visitors to the
museum insight into the history of sports broadcasting and the people who have made the
industry what it is today.
As for the 2008 class of the Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame, more than 80 industry leaders
from national broadcast networks, cable sports networks, leagues, teams, and related organizations participated in the selection process this past summer. Honorees were elected in seven categories: management, production, technical operations, engineering, leagues and teams, manufacturers and vendors, and on-air talent.
Here are this year’s inductees:
Marvin Bader was responsible for all the production services during ABC’s three-decade
string of Olympics coverage (1960s, ’70s, and ’80s).
Chet Forte was the first director of ABC’s Monday Night Football in 1970, redefining NFL
coverage in the process.
Curt Gowdy did it all during a 34-year career, covering 13 World Series, 16 MLB All-Star
games, nine Super Bowls, 14 Rose Bowls, eight Olympic Games, and 24 NCAA Final Fours,
not to mention co-creating and producing Wide World of Sports with Roone Arledge and
working on American Sportsman.
Teddy Nathanson oversaw some of the greatest TV moments in sports history during
his career as a director at NBC. For his work, he garnered an Emmy Award and the first Directors Guild of America Lifetime Achievement Award for Sports Television (1991).
Don Ohlmeyer began his career at ABC, working on Wide World of Sports, producing Monday Night Football, and producing and directing three Olympic Games TV packages before
moving to NBC, where he served as president of the West Coast division from 1993 to ’99.
Val Pinchbeck, as the NFL’s head of broadcasting for more than two decades, served as a
liaison on television and radio with the 30 NFL teams and with the various networks that
broadcast games.
Vin Scully, long-time voice of the Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodgers, has been with the
franchise on both coasts for 59 seasons; he has called 25 World Series and 14 National
League Championship series.
Bob Seiderman, a four-time Emmy Award winner for his technical wizardry, took the
sports audio experience from a secondary position behind video to an equal one.
Charlie Steinberg oversaw the development of some of the most important production tools for sportscasters, including instant-replay systems in the late 1960s and, three
decades later, HDTV.
Members
Adam Acone, NHL, VP, Broadcasting and
Programming
Glenn Adamo, NFL VP, Media Operations and
Broadcasting
Peter Angell, Infront Sports and Media, Production
& Programming Division Director
Chuck Blazer, FIFA Marketing and TV, Director
David Catzel, Industry Consultant
Joe Cohen, HTN, Chairman and CEO
Don Colantonio, ESPN, Senior Director, Original
Entertainment-Media Packaging
Preston Davis, ABC, President, Broadcast
Operations and Engineering
Jim DeFillipis, Fox Technology Group, SVP,
Television Engineering
Ed Delaney, YES, Network VP, Operations
Russell Gabay, Major League Baseball
International, VP and Executive Producer
Jerry Gepner, L5 Media Services, President
Steve Gorsuch, USTA Billie Jean King Tennis Center,
Director of Broadcast Operations
Steve Hellmuth, NBA, EVP Operations and
Technology
Ardell Hill, Media General, SVP Broadcast
Operations
Robert D. Jordan, New York Jets, VP Design &
Construction
John Kvatek, University of Central Florida Athletics
Association, Director of Video Services
John Leland, IMG Media, Senior Director, Video
Operations
Michael Meehan, NBC Sports, VP
André Mendes, Special Olympics Global
Information Officer
Ken Norris, UCLA, Director of Video Operations
Chuck Pagano, ESPN, CTO
Del Parks, Sinclair Broadcast Group, VP of
Engineering and Operations
Patty Power, CBS College Sports Network, SVP of
Operations
Paul Puccio, Industry Consultant
Russell Quy, IMG Media, VP and Executive Producer
Scott Rinehart, NASCAR Media Group, Director of
Internal Operations
Mike Rokosa, NBA, VP of Engineering
Bob Ross, CBS, SVP East Coast Operations
Rich Routman, Collegiate Images, Director of Sales
and Business Development
Tom Sahara, Turner Sports, Senior Director, IT and
Remote Operations
Chuck Scoggins, PGA Tour Productions, VP,
Operations
Bruce Shapiro, Speed, Coordinating Technical
Producer
Jack Simmons, Fox Sports, SVP, Production
Don Sperling, New York Giants Entertainment, VP,
Executive Producer
Jerry Steinberg, Fox Sports, SVP, Field Operations
Ernie Watts, Turner Studios, Senior Director,
Technical Ops, Live Events
Richard Wolf, ABC, SVP, Telecommunications &
Network Origination Services
Dave Zur, Altitude Sports & Entertainment, VP
Operations
sports technology journal / Fall 2008
1
fall 2008 Vol. 2, No. 2
TABLE OF CONTENTS
upfront
1 FROM THE CHAIRMAN The 2008 Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame
12
builds on the legacy of last year’s inaugural class
4 T he tip-off The sports industry is driven by collaboration, and SVG
is no different as it continues the White Space battle and launches a
safety initiative
6update What’s up with SVG? An overview of recent events, seminars, and new initiatives
COVER Photo:
AP Photo/Luca Bruno
SVG Special Report: Beijing Games in Review
Raising the Bar on Sports Broadcast & Production
The 2008 Summer Olympics will stand apart as a seminal event in sports broadcasting. The largest all-HD sports event ever also ushered in a new era in Internet
video and proved that TV and the Internet are complementary tools when it
page 10
comes to serving the needs of sports fans.
12 SVG@Olympics SVG Editorial Director Ken Kerschbaumer reported live from the Olympics. Here’s a
roundup of highlights from his Beijing Blog.
20 Romero’s Vision Makes Olympics An HD Success
Manolo Romero, BOB general manager, on the Olympics and what an all-HD games means
to the world at large.
24 New Workflows, New Success for NBC Olympics
Michael Phelps wasn’t the only person setting records
in Beijing. Dave Mazza and NBC Olympics’ technical
team pushed out record amounts of content in producing the first-ever all-HD Games.
58
26 NBC Olympics, Broadcasters Ride Venue
Network This past summer, China became an OB
lovers paradise as production trucks and flypacks
from around the globe were shipped to the nation
for the Summer Olympics. SVG goes behind the scenes
at the venues.
38 The Wide World of Olympic Coverage SVG catches
up with broadcasters from around the world to see how
they approached the challenge of delivering Olympics
coverage to viewers at home.
46 Tough Times
Mean Tough
Road Trip for
Stations TV stations from across
the country sent
crews and gear to Beijing to give added local flair to their
coverage of the Games.
38
54 Digital Downpour: NBC Takes Its Olympics
Content Across Platforms, Time Zones NBC Olympics was a multi-platform showcase, reaching fans
not only on TV but via the Internet. Perkins Miller, NBC
Olympics SVP of Digital Media, discusses the effort.
58 Audio, Too, Is High-Def Via Surround Sound Pretty
pictures need pretty sound. Dan Daley, SVG audio
editor, gets the inside scoop on Olympic sound design
and delivery of a compelling auditory experience.
60 The Future of Long-Range File Exchange A behindthe-scenes look at one of the key technologies that
make coverage of the Olympics better than ever: the
NBC Olympics highlights factory.
All Olympics photos by Ken Kerschbaumer unless otherwise indicated
The SVG SPORTS
TECHNOLOGY
JOURNAL is produced
and published by the
Sports Video Group.
SVG Sports Technology
Journal © 2008 Sports
Video Group.
Printed in the USA.
2
65 S
ports Video Fall Wrapup — New technology, news,
and innovations from SVG sponsor companies.
80 T
he Final Buzzer — Beijing Games: End of a
Broadcast Era? The Beijing Olympics could very well be
the end of a broadcast era as transmission technologies and
file-based workflows make it possible for more and more
productions to be completed by crews located thousands
of miles away.
20
Intelsat Globalizes HD Transmissions
Delivering Live Sports and Events
Intelsat is the leader of high definition global transmissions for large scale events
such as the Euro 2008 Football Championship and Beijing 2008. We are the only global satellite
operator to provide coverage of every Olympic Games since 1968. The Intelsat Network is
the most comprehensive distribution network in the world, using the latest integrated service
technologies to take your signal where you need it to be!
We offer broadcasters
• Nearly 80 HDTV channels globally
• 28 DTH global platforms
• Fully-managed solutions for rights and non-rights holders
• Access to some of the most prestigious satellite neighborhoods in the industry
Our fleet can respond to customers’ growing requirements for high definition programming. Our
special event broadcast experts specialize in delivering SD and HD transmissions worldwide. We
provide tape play-outs from remote locations, SNGs with full production and crew, and on-site
production and transmission build-out to meet and deliver your requirements.
Intelsat seamlessly encodes, transports and distributes Live Sports and Special Events in HD.
For more information contact
[email protected]
+1 212-839-1814
www.intelsat.com
The Tip-Off
The Power of
Sports-Technology
Teamwork
platinum sponsors
By Paul G. Gallo & Martin Porter,
Paul G. Gallo
Co-Executive Directors, Sports Video Group
A
mazing things happen when people pull together for a common goal. That’s the
Martin Porter
essential attraction of team sports: watching an ego-free, coordinated group of in-
dividuals pull together unleashes tremendous emotion and power among the players and
their audience. Having spent a recent weekend watching the solo sport of golf turned into
a team sport on NBC in the form of the Ryder Cup, one is again reminded of how a common goal can coalesce the spirits of even the fiercest competitors into a single, oversized,
impenetrable force.
Collaboration is the backbone of SVG. And if the collective strength of our membership
has ever been demonstrated, it has been in our representation of the sports-broadcast community in the White Spaces debate under the auspices of the Sports Technology Alliance.
Collectively, we have supported the efforts of Shure, which has spearheaded much of
the lobbying down in Washington; visited Congressional committees and the FCC; and, late
last summer, worked with the NFL and ESPN when the FCC Office of Engineering and Tech-
PREMIER SPONSORS
Alliance digital • calrec audio • dolby
• euphonix • glowpoint • ikegami • iner
tia • linear acoustic • newtek • omneon
• rc gear • ross video • salzbrenner
Stagetic mediagroup • ses americom •
show partners • soundcraft/studer
• wohler technologies
nology (OET) conducted a series of tests at FedEx Field in Landover, MD, during a preseason
telecast of a Washington Redskins game.
At press time, we were expecting news on the FCC’s next steps. Whether we were able
to stop or even stall the influence of the powerful, IT-backed White Spaces Coalition lobby
CORPORATE SPONSORS
Abekas • Akamai Technologies • Ascent
Media • Aspera • Audio-Technica • B&H
Photo Video • Chyron • Clear-Com •
Clyne Media • crawford
communications • Dale Pro Audio
• EVS Broadcast Equipment •
EUTELSAT AMERICA • Fischer
Connectors • Fletcher Chicago
• Genesis Networks • Gerling &
Associates • HTN • IBM
• Inlet Technologies • Joseph
Electronics/JFS • JVC • Markertek
Video supply • Miranda • Motorola •
MRC Broadcast • MultiDyne • National
City Media Finance • Nesbit Systems Inc.
• NeuLion • Neutrik USA • New Pro Video
Systems • Nvision • Orad • Pixel Power
Inc. • Polar Media • Quantel • RayV •
Riedel • Samma Systems • Screen
Subtitling • Sennheiser • SGI • Shure
• Solid State Logic • SOS Global •
Tandberg TV • Technicolor • Tekserve •
Telecast Fiber • VER • Vinten (Camera
Dynamics) • VISTA Satellite • Vividas •
WiseDV, Inc. • Yamaha Commercial
Audio Systems
is yet to be seen. But by bringing the industry together with a common voice we helped
affect the decision that is coming down. We have also proved something that is probably
more important in the long term: that sports-technology professionals can accomplish
great things when we set common goals, coordinate efforts, and work as a team.
SVG is in the process of launching another new industry-wide initiative that also will benefit all of our members. We are proud to announce that SVG is funding a Sports Video Safety
Initiative (SVSI), providing safety and health supervisors of sports TV networks and leagues
with a single place to share information on best practices. Supported by ABC, CBS, ESPN,
Fox, and NBC, we will be publishing a best-practices document designed to focus on the
various safety initiatives that each broadcaster has, until now, compiled on its own. Our first
installment, which will be posted on our own SVSI Web page later this month, focuses on
the subject of fall prevention.
Teamwork, again, works for the benefit of all. And, just as in the White Spaces initiative,
MOBILE CORPORATE
SPONSORS
A CREWING ALLIANCE • All Mobile Video •
Alliance Productions • Arctek
Satellite Productions • Corplex •
CP Communications • CSP Mobile •
Dome Productions • DTAGS •
Game Creek Video • MIRA Mobile • Mobile
TV Group • NCP • RTM • Token Creek •
Total RF • UpLit
it again proves that, when there is no competitive advantage, collaboration produces cost
savings and maximizes the quality of the end results for all involved.
SVG is proud to be the platform for such teamwork. Game on.
4
sports technology journal / FALL 2008
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updateupd
What’s Up With SVG?
The Wonderful World of Sports Video
THE NAB SEASON
Once again, April was a busy NAB
season for the Sports Video Group.
Topping the list was the secondannual SVG Chairman’s Retreat,
held at the Loew’s Hotel in Lake Las
Vegas. The two-day event began
on Friday April 11 with a welcome
reception as more than 80 sports TV
industry leaders came together to
network and learn about the newest technologies and trends in the
industry.
Saturday was highlighted by
closed-door meetings between
SVG members and platinum sponsors, giving both an opportunity
for frank discussions about product
introductions, current marketplace
challenges, and new business opportunities.
Following the conclusion of
meetings on Sunday, SVG once
again held its NAB Pre-Game Party
on the Las Vegas strip. More than
420 SVG members, sponsors, and
guests attended the party, which
lasted well into the night and was a
perfect opener to the NAB show.
Once the NAB convention
opened its doors, our staffers were
hard at work canvassing the show
for hot new toys, but we also had to
get ready for our own main event:
a one-day seminar taking a look at
how different broadcasters from
around the world were preparing
for the 2008 Summer Olympics
in Beijing. Effective presentations
from networks NBC, the BBC, and
the CBC were complemented by a
panel discussion of local TV stations,
chaired by Harry Jessell, editor of
TV Newsday, and a panel on mobile-production-service providers,
chaired by Phil Sandberg, editor and
publisher of Content+Technology.
APPEARANCE AT MSG
Mere weeks after NAB, the SVG
and its sponsors took over Madison Square Garden for the NYTV
Showcase, a technology exhibition
designed to give TV-network staffers and executives who couldn’t
make it to NAB a chance to learn
about technologies introduced at
the show. Featuring more than 35
tabletop exhibits, the event drew
more than 700 attendees during
the course of the day.
Concurrently, SVG held two
executive, invitation-only seminars.
The morning session — sponsored
by Intelsat, Motorola, Genesis Networks, Linear Acoustic, and Aspera
— focused on HD transmission.
Three hours of panel discussions
dove into the challenge of HD backhauls and domestic/international
transmission and featured leading
executives from across the industry.
The second annual SVG Chairman’s Retreat at Lake Las Vegas was a valuable pre-NAB event for SVG members and sponsors.
6
STUDENT TRAINING REVS UP
On Memorial Day weekend, IMS
Productions, Fox Sports, Speed,
Game Creek Video, and SVG offered
college broadcasting and engineering students the opportunity to go
behind the scenes at two of the
year’s biggest sporting events: the
Indianapolis 500 and the Coca-Cola
600 in Concord, NC.
On Thursday, more than 50 students participated in the two tours,
which took place concurrently at
the two tracks. The goal was to give
students interested in broadcasting
and TV production a better understanding of the sports-broadcast
community and a potential career in
sports production and engineering.
In Indianapolis, students from
Indiana University, Ball State University, Butler University, and University
of Indianapolis visited the new IMS
Productions trucks as well as the
NCP truck used for the Indy 500
world feed and the Sportvision
production area; they also had a
chance to operate remote cameras
and in-car cameras on cars practicing for the big race.
In Charlotte, students from University of North Carolina Charlotte
and Carolina School of Broadcasting
were given the grand tour of the
Fox Sports, Speed, and ESPN as well
as camera locations and the Hollywood Hotel studio.
Directors of Athletics annual convention in Dallas in June to educate
athletic directors and their staffs
on the current college-sports distribution landscape and how they
can enhance the relationship with
online and TV networks. Although
the focus wasn’t on video, it was
part of the conversation during the
meeting.
Moderated by ESPN’s Bonnie
Bernstein, the panel focused on
how the college-sports industry is
approaching distribution and production. “We’ve dropped the moniker new media,” said Burke Magnus,
ESPN SVP, College Sports Programming. “Today, it is just digital media.
When the college generation today
grew up, it was less and less about
old vs. new media. To them, it’s just
content.”
Tim Pernetti, CBS College Sports
Network EVP, opined, “We’re blurring
the line, and everything is content.
More fans expect the online experience to be closer to being a TV
experience, and it will get there.
And the beauty of the Internet is, it
doesn’t discriminate: you can put
content up and reach everyone.”
The goal of the panel was to lay
out the different approaches being
taken to meet the needs of fans.
The Big Ten Network finds itself
nine months into its launch as an
HD network. Leon Schweir, Big Ten
Network EVP, says the outlet allows
schools to make sure games that
weren’t highlighted or carried by
national network partners had exposure. But it took a lot of cooperation from the member universities.
“We will all succeed because of
the passion of the fans,” said Magnus. “College sports is about as individualized as any category in sports,
and, as everything progresses, it will
only get easier [to deliver quality
content].”
SVG Educates NACDA
Attendees
SVG hosted a panel during the National Association of the Collegiate
SVG Assists PGA
at U.S. Open
Year in and year out, the U.S.
Open golf championship is an RF
The afternoon session — sponsored by Thomson Grass Valley,
Harris, Adobe, and Quantel — took
a look at 1080p production, postproduction, and distribution. The
topic of 1080p is a hot one as the
industry looks to next-generation
technology, but another hot topic,
3D HD, managed to become part of
the discussion because the 1080p
infrastructure can be a backbone for
3D HD delivery.
dateupdate
challenge, with hundreds of wireless microphones and devices jamming the airwaves and requiring
coordination and oversight. This
year, the SVG assisted the PGA by
finding more that 30 student volunteers from colleges in the San Diego
area to make sure that all wireless
microphones and cameras were accounted for and authorized for use.
Undergraduate students majoring in electrical engineering and
broadcasting had an opportunity to
go behind the scenes at the event,
working with Louis Libin and the
Broadcomm team responsible for
ensuring that wireless frequencies
are managed properly.
During the week, volunteers
worked multiple eight-hour shifts
and, when not working, had a
chance to observe the TV production and, yes, follow Tiger Woods,
Rocco Mediate, and other golfers
around the course.
Students Hoop It Up
at NBA Finals
SVG also helped the National Basketball Association enable graduate
electrical-engineering students
from the University of Southern
California to visit behind the scenes
at an NBA Finals TV production
prior to game five in Los Angeles on
June 13.
Students were given an overview
of the various technologies and a
tour of the Staples Center and production compound. Mike Rokosa,
VP of engineering for NBA Entertainment, and Peter Skrodelis, VP of
Broadcasting for NBA Entertainment,
led the tour.
“I consider myself lucky to have
been able to see the spectacular
world of behind-the-scene action,”
says USC grad student Rohan Agarwal. “I was really mesmerized by
how everything is put together and
how everything functions.”
USC student Xiaojia Lui appreciated the opportunity to know more
about HD broadcast equipment
and cutting-edge technologies..
The event, organized by SVG and
hosted by the NBA, was designed
to expose next-generation engineering talent to a career in sports
broadcasting.
SVG, HBO Open Doors
— and eyes — in Vegas
SVG also assisted HBO in allowing
students to go behind the scenes at
a big-time boxing match on July 26.
Twenty students from the University
of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV) joined
Jason Cohen, HBO Sports director of
East Coast production, for a tour of
the broadcast compound and NEP
production truck, something many of
the engineering students had never
before had access to. “For a group
of students who are now focused
on IT and engineering, who had
never once thought that their abilities
would play a role in TV, they walked
away with an eye-opening experience,” Cohen says. “I think that the
students had the ability to see different aspects of television production
that they never knew even existed.”
The graduate students descended on the compound in two groups
before HBO’s pay-per-view production of the July 26 Miguel Coto vs.
Antonio Margarito fight at the MGM
NASCAR Media Group in Charlotte, NC, opened its doors to the industry for
a tour of its asset-management system in July.
Grand in Las Vegas.
For each hour-long tour, Cohen
explained all the facets of the NEP
mobile production truck, detailing
the basic workflow and demonstrating the graphics devices, tape, and
engineering; introducing EVS operators; and explaining how the truck
is routed and patched. The students
also went inside the arena to see the
ringside layout, lighting, and camera
positions and were able to connect
the truck operations to the in-arena
production.
Students from San Diego-area colleges gained real-world experience as RF
coordinators during the U.S. Open at Torrey Pines golf course.
“This is a program that needs
to continue,” says Christine
Wallace, communications and
special events coordinator for
the Howard R. Hughes College
of Engineering at UNLV, who
also attended the tour. “The
professors also thought it was a
beneficial tool in illustrating how
students will be able to apply
their degree.”
Says Cohen, “It was really
gratifying to be able to open
the door to another generation
of possible TV technicians and
engineers. If just one student
from that group gives our industry another thought that they
might not have had, then it’s
worth it.”
NASCAR Hosts AssetManagement Event
On July 22-23, more than
100 sports professionals from
across the country gathered in
Charlotte to share ideas, challenges, and success stories in
asset management. Sponsored
by Avid, Sony, Thomson, Grass
Valley, Panasonic, Ascent Media,
Aspera, Quantel, and Bexel,
SVG’s second-annual Sports
Asset Management event was
hosted by NASCAR Media
Group and included an exclu-
7
updateupd
What’s Up With SVG?
The Wonderful World of Sports Video
SVG’s Sports Asset Management conference included a presentation in the
NASCAR Studios for 75 attendees.
sive behind-the-scenes tour of the
company’s expansive Charlotte
facility, giving attendees a closer
look at NASCAR Media Group’s new
workflow. The tour included demonstrations by NASCAR technology
partners Videobank, Front Porch
Digital, Pillar Data, and Quantel.
“Giving our members and sponsors a chance to see a world-class
organization’s asset management
and production workflow in person
goes to the heart of SVG’s mission
of advancing content-creation and
-distribution techniques,” says Martin Porter, SVG executive director.
“We thank NASCAR Media Group
COO Jay Abraham, director of
internal operations Scott Rinehart,
and their entire team for allowing
our members to get under the
hood of NASCAR’s operations.”
Following the tour, three conference panels focused on top industry concerns, such as metadata and
logging, choosing the best codec
for one’s needs, and weighing
archive media and technology options. The interactive panel discussions brought together top executives from technology providers,
broadcasters, and sports leagues
to share their experiences, answer
questions, and raise some new ones
regarding best practices in the field
of asset management.
8
OUTREACH TO NEW ORLEANS
PROFESSIONALS
In cooperation with the Arena
Football League, the Louisiana
Technology Council, and the New
Orleans Downtown Development
District, SVG held a panel discussion
in New Orleans on July 26 as part
of a new outreach program by the
league. Dubbed the AFL Tech-N.O.Bowl Sports Technology and Media
Conference, the event allowed local
business entrepreneurs and media
professionals to go behind the
scenes at the production of the AFL
Championship Game by ESPN and
to also take part in a panel discussion of leading industry executives.
Damon Philips, VP of ESPN360.
com; Eric Schmidt, Fox Cable director, affiliate sales and marketing,
advanced services; Philip Nelson,
NewTek SVP; Sarah Jeon, Sling Media VP, content strategy and acquisition; and Chris Stelly, Louisiana
Economic Development, director
of film industry development, participated in the panel moderated
by SVG editorial director Ken
Kerschbaumer.
Honors to BOB at IBC
Beijing Olympic Broadcasting (BOB)
received the SVG’s Sport Technology Excellence award at IBC,
presented during the third-annual
Fall 2008
sports technology journal / fall
Sport Technology reception on
Sept. 13 during the convention.
Sponsored by Chyron, Linear
Acoustic, SES Americom, and SOS
Global, the party drew more than
200 SVG vendors and members,
gathering to catch up on the latest
news and gossip and also to honor
BOB and all of the vendors that
made the Summer Games a smashing hit around the world.
“I would like to thank SVG for
the honor of this award,” said
Sotiris Salamouris, head of engineering for BOB, at the presentation. “I consider this award as a
recognition of the collective work
of the engineering team of Beijing
Olympic Broadcasting, a diverse
and vibrant group of people
from more than 15 countries that
worked together for months and
years with that same goal in mind:
the best broadcast possible for
the Beijing Games. It has been a
challenging work with many firsts:
first Olympics in full HDTV, full
5.1 surround-sound audio, virtual
enhancement in HDTV by the
host broadcaster, central HDTV
server in the IBC, HD RF coverage
in all outside races with no helis,
high-motion cameras in multiple
sports, etc.
“It would be impossible to
achieve any of these objectives
without the strong support from
the international broadcast industry, vendors, and service providers
from all over the world that contributed with their expertise, resources, and hard work,” he continued. “Our many thanks to all these
significant partners. But above all,
I would like to thank the Chinese
people in Beijing and the other
Olympic cities that embraced the
Olympics as their own cause and
provided us with all the necessary
support, needed and appreciated
in all the phases of this big and
exciting project.”
Manolo Romero, GM of BOB and
the veritable godfather of Olympic
broadcasts, said, “On behalf of BOB
and Olympic Broadcasting Services, I wanted to thank all of the
equipment suppliers, vendors, and
personnel who worked tirelessly
for months to help make the 2008
Beijing Olympics a truly outstanding
technical achievement. The 2008
Summer Games will be remembered
as a technical landmark for delivering countless hours of content to
viewers around the world via HDTV
and the Internet. Without the hard
work of our vendors, this would not
have been possible, and we look
forward to working with you again
in Vancouver in a little more than 15
months.”
SVG editorial director Ken Kerschbaumer (at podium) accepted the SVG
Sport Technology Excellence Award on behalf of Beijing Olympic Broadcasting at IBC.
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sports technology journal / Fall 2008 9
Beijing Games
in Review
Raising the Bar
on
Sports
Broadcast
& Production
10
11
SVG@Olympics!
Photo: Carrie Bowden
I
by
Ken Kerschbaumer
SVG Editorial
Director
t was only three days, but, for SVG Editorial Director Ken Kerschbaumer, it was invaluable, offering him a chance to go behind the scenes at
the Beijing Olympics. Tours of the International
Broadcast Center and production facilities at the venues capped off an exciting visit, providing insight into
what it takes to make the world’s biggest sporting
event the biggest TV event.
Here are some excerpts from Kerschbaumer’s
blog.
Arrived!
Aug. 18
Fourteen-hour flight? Well that wasn’t too bad after
all...energy at the airport was a little odd...kinda felt
like arriving at Newark at 2:45 in the morning. Very
few people around, only two or three international
flights arriving, and of course the gold-glove service
for Olympics-credentialed folks. Took about 20 minutes to get through customs and pick up bags.
I read in the past few days how the energy has
been pretty calm and sedate (a little too sedate for
some of the reporters in the U.S. papers the past
couple of days). Of course, that’s a given, considering
we’re in Beijing.
It’s now 4:30 here. Off to eat some scorpion on a
stick...
Shop, Stop, & Watch
Aug. 18
Did I mention that the Olympics are everywhere?
Not only the slogan “One World, One Dream,” massive Beijing 2008 banners on seemingly every wall,
car, bus, and train but also via massive screens that
dwarf the massive screens seen in Times Square. This
smaller video board is located in a pedestrian shopping mall on Wangfujian Street and had a crowd of
about 100 people in front of it watching the women’s
individual gymnastics competition.
Day Two: Inside the IBC
Aug. 19
Today, I finally had a chance to check out the International Broadcast Center, and it doesn’t take long
to understand why the folks at BOB and the international broadcasting community are having an easier
Above: Ken Kerschbaumer,
arriving in Beijing.
Previous page: An overall view of the
stadium and Olympic flame during
the opening ceremony for the 2008
Olympics Games in Beijing, Friday, 8
August, 2008.
(AP Photo/Luca Bruno)
12
The heart of the International Broadcast Center
Beijing Games in Review – Live in Beijing
“I would give [the
current technical
success] an 8 or 9,
especially in light of
doing full HD in
all areas, surround
sound, and what is
to date the largest
video server in the
industry.”
—Manolo Romero
14
time of things than usual.
First, it’s big. Really big,
as in 150,000 sq. ft. big,
with 1,200 rooms for 85
rightsholders. Six levels
in the facility house everyone from NBC to BBC,
CCTV, ZDF, and more, with
the literal heart of the facility being the BOB technical area. That is where
the BOB keeps track of
40 incoming feeds from
venues (each feed is available in three versions: HD,
SD, and SD widescreen),
distribution of those 40
feeds throughout the facility to broadcasters for editing, and a transmission
area that gets the live signals and more out to transmission partners of the 85 rightsholders. There is also
an IPTV area providing four versions of IPTV signals
for telcos and other providers.
At the end of the day, it only happens with BOB
having control over variables. “Broadcasters are not
allowed to do any cabling, to avoid having installation problems,” says Sotiris Salamouris, BOB head of
Engineering & Technical Operations.
It’s in the BOB tech area where a mix of nearly 150
HD plasma, SD plasma, and HD LCD displays allow
BOB engineering to keep track of problems and issues. For example, LDC panels can display a connectivity map to verify where there are any issues along
the uncompressed HD transmission paths from venues and cameras. On the morning of Aug. 19, such
an issue arose as a beauty-camera fiber transmission
cable was cut (the mystery was still being solved at
the end of the day), and the diagram reflected the
problem with a red instead of green line. Meanwhile,
staffers were quickly on-site to get the camera back
up and running.
Leaving aside the technical side of the facility for
a minute, there is the customer-service side, with a
steady stream of buses to the IBC every 10-15 minutes from seemingly every corner of Beijing. In fact,
Manolo Romero of BOB says that this year’s games
have the best transportation and traffic situations of
any games he can remember (of course, he notes,
the Chinese government has a freedom to handle
traffic flow in a manner that most other host nations
would never be able to get away with). The ease of
transportation and the literal door-to-door service
can go a long way towards making long days seem
a little easier. “Usually, by this time, we’ve had complaints from both broadcasters and athletes about
the bad transportation, but this year, we haven’t had
Long hours meant short nights for
NBC staffers.
a single complaint,” says Romero.
As for NBC’s facility, it may look similar to the setup
in Torino, but inside beats a server and editing farm
based on EVS, Omneon, Isilon, and Avid that is making it possible for Dave Mazza, Chip Adams, Bob
Dixon, and the rest of the crew to crank out nearly
3,600 hours of content to various platforms. So far,
the products are working as advertised.
Got Sleep?
Aug. 19
If there is ever an image that captures the Olympic
spirit on the production side of the industry, this is it!
Located on the wall inside the main production area
outside the Bird’s Nest stadium, the collage of NBC
Olympic freelancers and staff personnel catching
some valuable sleep anywhere they can shows just
how they give their all prior to and during the games.
No doubt a few more shots will be added by the end
of the games...
No Perfect 10s at Olympics, Not
Even for Romero
Aug. 19
We managed to snag a few minutes with the very
busy Manolo Romero as he oversees Beijing Olympic
Broadcasting, and even Romero, who says he is very
hard on himself, is enjoying the current technical
success. “I would give it an 8 or 9, especially in light of
doing full HD in all areas, surround sound, and what
is to date the largest video server in the industry,” he
says. Topping the list of technical accomplishments?
Proving that marathons can be covered via terrestrial
transmission and a cablecam that runs for 1 km over
the Olympic Green, grabbing dramatic shots of the
venues and visitors. “That’s one of my favorites,” he
says of the cablecam.
So how does he get to a 10? “We have to bring
this concept to the Winter Games,” he says. “And London, in 2012, is still too far away to say how we can
improve.” But don’t worry, planning is already under
way.
Surround Sound Shaping Into
Form for NBC
Tim Carroll of Linear Acoustic (facing
camera) and Bob Dixon of NBC Olympics keep an ear on Olympic audio.
Aug. 19
Bob Dixon, NBC Olympics director of sound design, and Tim Carroll, Linear Acoustic president, are
spending a lot of time in Dixon’s listening room,
ensuring not only that 5.1 surround mixes sound
great but also that the stereo mix
and the upmixed stereo-to-surround mixes are up to snuff. Dixon
has been on-site since June 6 and
says that, after the first couple of
days, the venues and personnel
began to get a feel for making audio sound great. “The Bird’s Nest
holds 100,000 people, and the
sound you can get from 100,000
people can be really dramatic,” he
says. “And we’re using Audio-Technica 4050s, which are big, fat, studio condensers to pick up our crowd, and the BOB
uses the same. They’re very clear, and they have a
really pretty frequency response.”
Now That’s a Cable Tray!
Aug. 20
Okay, okay, okay....occasionally, I hear the gripe that
SVG can get a little too techy, but that’s just because
Without doubt, the architectural
wonder that is the Bird’s Nest will
remain a highlight for all who visited
the Games.
16
This cable tray made it easy to remove and add cables.
we love toys. Not as much as most of our members
do, but we love them. And then, of course, there
are things like cable trays. Lord knows, a cable tray
shouldn’t be interesting, but we really like the way the
team at BOB approached laying down its 200-plus
miles of cable. Located 112-115 feet off the ground
are four trays stacked on top of each other, with each
tray holding cables for a different purpose. The BOB
video cable tray is on the bottom, audio above that,
data and fiber above that, and finally, BOCOG service
cables on top of that. Nice and clean and something
the engineering staff really finds useful...we like!
Beijing’s Nest is Best...Simply
Stunning
Aug 20, 2008
As a wee child, my favorite book was My Nest Is Best,”
one of those lesser-known Dr. Seuss tales. Well, my
nest is no longer best. Last night, I had a chance to
head out to the Bird’s Nest and catch some of the
sports technology journal / spring 2008 / story Name
17
competition but, more important, see the venue up
close (although I will take a second, more in-depth
look today). Yowza...it definitely looks great in photos
and on TV, but it is stunning in person. First, the thing
is flipping HUGE. But second, look at the photo on
page 16. As you pass through the Nest, the different layers become apparent, and the stadium has a
complexity and depth in design you won’t find anywhere.
So the folks in London, once again, have their work
cut out for them. But one area they can surpass the
Bird’s Nest? Install one of those massive bazillion-dollar (er, -pound) and super-huge scoreboards.
New Workflow for World Feeds
Is this the future of Olympics
production?
Aug 20, 2008
So this is one of the coolest things we’ve seen in terms
of a hint at future workflows. This is NBC’s enhanced
version of world-feed coverage. Typically, world-feed
coverage involves taking the world feed and layering
NBC announcers over the top.
There is a fresh approach to handling pure world feeds for events like
wrestling.
But this system takes it to another
level, adding in a camera feed from the
venue. It’s come in handy for wrestling
coverage and gives the network sharper and more focused programming for
U.S. viewers hungry for coverage with
an angle. This simple system at the IBC
is connected to the venue via Ethernet
and allows the producer to bring the world feed, announcers, and additional camera feed together. The
system is not being used for every world feed, but it
has already been deemed a success, so odds are, it
will have an expanded role in Vancouver in 2010.
Bexel Hercules Shows Strengths
Aug. 21
My Olympic adventure is almost over (closing
thoughts tomorrow!), but the last day, while filled
with lots of rain, was also filled with some cool new
discoveries. Craig Schiller, VP/GM of Bexel Broadcast
Services, gave us a tour of the diving/swimming
compound during the seeming typhoon and pointed out some neat features that could apply to future
Bexel integrated systems.
First is removing the need for a bunch of small LCD
panels usually used in EVS operation. Bexel figured
out how to pump EVS clip information to the 40-inch
NEC monitors via an Evertz multi-viewer. It allows EVS
operators to watch video clips on the same monitor
as the EVS rundown.
EVS can now be interfaced via an LCD panel.
18
Bexel’s Craig Schiller oversees the massive number of cables
that tie Hercules together.
Yes, the move saves money by cutting back on
monitors, but it also has gotten positive feedback
from the operators, who like not having to look away
from game action.
Schiller also showed off a new military-grade wirerope isolator that is placed between the shipping
case and the rack rail frame “These isolators have
been a great addition for us because we needed the
increased stability for our dual-rack configurations,”
he says. “In some of our older flight cases, the foam
did not provide enough strength for the rack rail
frame, and that causes the racks and the contents to
shift during shipping.
Inside BBC’s Beijing Effort
Aug. 21
One of the challenges for U.S. viewers was simply
navigating the wealth of Olympics content available
across the different networks. The BBC faced a similar
problem but made use of its BBC Interactive technology to deliver a channel that featured one large video window plus four small windows stacked on the
right side of the screen that showed viewers what
was on other channels. Charlie Cope, BBC technical
consultant and editor, says the channel is available
to 80 percent of BBC viewers via either the Freeview
DTV service or BSkyB.
Cope also says the BBC will be looking to do
things differently when it comes to the 2010 Games
in Vancouver. The goal will be to leave the majority
of staffers home in the UK and operate most of the
operations out of London. Expect staff in Vancouver
to be focused on building original feature stories
and other content while the live feeds are passed
directly back to the UK.
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Romero’s Vision Makes
Olympics an HD Success
T
Manolo Romero at the BOB office
in Beijing
20
here was little doubt that the Chinese
would pull out all the stops for the
2008 Summer Games so it’s only fitting that Beijing Olympic Broadcasting (BOB) did the same thing as the 2008 Games
made the move to all-HD.
More than 4,000 BOB personnel were on hand
for the 3,800 hours of HD-content creation. More
than 12,000 broadcasters from around the world,
representing 140 different broadcast organizations, occupied the IBC.
“We like to be in the background,” says BOB CEO
Manolo Romero. “We don’t need to be known, just
provide a standard of excellence that has been
achieved through the years.”
The 150,000-sq.-ft. IBC facility was home to more
than 140 broadcasters during the Games.
“We made the extra effort to get everything in
native HD,” says Romero. “Our goal after Athens
was to go all-HD, and we’ve been able to accomplish that not only with HD cameras but also other
technology like servers, LCD monitors, and super
high-speed cameras.”
And it required a lot of cameras, servers, and
monitors. For example, coverage of track and field
in the Bird’s Nest stadium used more than 70 cameras and seven mobile units (more than 70 mobile
units were in Beijing, the majority of them transported from Europe). The International Television
and Radio (ITVR) signal or the world feed from the
Bird’s Nest gave broadcasters with fewer resources
a chance to deliver a high-quality production.
Despite the emphasis on HD, Romero says, the
BOB team was cognizant that the majority of the
world’s viewers would watch the Games in standard-definition 4:3.
BOB provided three versions of the HD-produced content: an HD version, a 4:3 SD version,
and also a 16:9 SD feed. BOB also provided both a
stereo and a 5.1 surround-sound version of coverage, an Olympic first. “For us, that means we have
all parallel systems,” says Sotiris Salamouris, head of
engineering and technical operations for BOB.
All the live signals from the venues were carried
back to the IBC, where Salamouris and his team
checked for quality and proper synchronization of
audio and video signals. Then the signals moved
out to distribution, where the individual broadcasters made their own editorial decisions. An EVS
system with access stations that could be booked
by broadcasters was also on hand.
“That was in addition to any service or systems
they may have brought in for their own use,” adds
Salamouris.
BOB’s 55 OB vans and flypacks included a mix
of state-of-the-art Chinese OB HD vans and others
from such providers as SFP and Alfacam shipping
multiple units overseas. Seven independent audio
trucks and 16 audio flypacks were also deployed,
and more than 750 HD circuits were used to get
signals from those production trucks to the IBC
during the Games, nearly double the number of
circuits used in Athens four years ago.
“The ITVR signal contained graphics, replays, and
natural sound from the venues but not commentators, interviews, or advertising,” says Romero. “Rightsholding broadcasters then supplemented the ITVR
signals with their own specific production elements,
using their own play-by-play commentary, on-camera interviews, and sometimes their own cameras.”
The hard work by BOB has not gone unnoticed
by Romero’s peers. “Manolo has established the
gold standard for world-feed coverage, and he
pressed for the games this year to be done in HD,”
says David Neal, NBC Olympics SVP. “And the Chinese, to their credit, stepped up to the challenge.”
Romero sat down with SVG editorial director
Ken Kerschbaumer to discuss the move hi-def and
the future of Olympic broadcasts:
This year’s Olympics marked the biggest challenge ever: going all HD. Romero discussed the
move to all HD and the future of Olympic broadcasts
with SVG Editorial Director Ken Kerschbaumer.
Q: Everyone around the world tends to view Olympics production through their nation’s national network, but BOB tends to be invisible. Can you shed a
little light onto BOB and its role in the Beijing Games
for those unfamiliar with BOB?
A: Our role is to produce an international signal
that is used by the broadcasters in different coun-
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Beijing Games in Review – Interview
An inside look at BOB transmission area at the
Beijing Games International Broadcast Center.
tries. We don’t need to be known to viewers, and
we like to be in the background. I want to believe
that our broadcast partners support us and discuss
with us the innovations we want to bring. We’ve
been focused on achieving a standard of excellence through the years and building the trust of
our broadcast partners.
Q: Can you explain that relationship with broadcast networks?
A: On one hand they are our “customers,” and we
need to make sure the facilities in the venues and
the IBC help them do what they need to do to
have the level of coverage they want. But the final
decision for that level is in our hands, and I believe
our level of coverage for many sports sets the standard for excellence.
We want to provide consistent coverage of the
28 sports. While some sports, like swimming or
track and field, have a level of coverage at the World
Championships that is very high, we’ve set the standard for many of the other Olympic sports.
Q: Do your relationships differ with different
broadcasters?
A: There are many possibilities for what we can provide, and we want to make sure each broadcaster
does what they want. For the international signal,
we’ll deploy more equipment, with the exception
of some of the traditional venues like the Bird’s Nest
or the Aquatic Center. We’ll have 70 of our own cameras and seven OB vehicles at the Bird’s Nest that will
create an integrated feed and six feeds with the different track-and-field events so the broadcaster can
compose what they want. We’ll also have 44 camera
positions available for broadcasters for live interviews
in the Bird’s Nest, and they can integrate their coverage with our coverage at the IBC.
22
Q: The transition to HD at the Olympics has been
a fairly smooth one over the past six years. Why did
you decide to make the move to all HD, and how
has that impacted the engineering process?
A: The goal after Athens was to go all-HD, and
we’ve been able to accomplish that, thanks to not
only HD cameras but also servers, LCD displays, super-high-speed cameras, and other new developments. We’ve gone to extra lengths to get everything in native HD. There might be a couple of POV
cameras that aren’t HD, but, if we aren’t 100% HD,
we will be very close. We’re experimenting with
things even as we speak.
It feels like 100 years ago. We aren’t thinking
in SD anymore, and we remind the producers to
make sure they are careful for framing of 4:3. But
otherwise, we’ve been organizing seminars on HD.
In surround-sound production, for example, there
are high-quality operators that have different ideas
of what to do for different sports. So we want to
make sure we have the technology and also know
how to properly use it.
Q: What event is the most technically challenging
to go all HD?
A: The marathon is one not only because it is in HD
but we wanted to do more and improve the coverage versus the use of traditional motorbikes and
helicopters. Low-latency microwave HD systems
will be used, and we’re not relying on helicopters
for transmission.
Q: I’m sure you don’t like to play favorites, but how
does Beijing compare with other host cities?
A: Every Olympics is a different culture and a different way of looking at things. We try very hard to
work with the organizing committee. In the case of
Beijing, Western broadcasters will find it more difficult to communicate so we have to make sure we
have enough interpreters. We’re also training our
Chinese staff on the technology we’ll be using.
Q: Looking ahead to the Winter Games in Vancouver, what should we expect in terms of changes from
2006? Will the alpine events make the leap to HD?
A: Vancouver will be fully HD, and we’ll have many
of the same bells and whistles we’ll have in Beijing.
Q: Is 1080p something on the horizon? How about
3D HD for special events?
A: NHK has been doing some 3D at the Olympics since the 1990s, but it’s far from becoming a
standard service. We want to provide a standard
of excellence and also meet the minimum requirements of broadcasters. And the production investment is so huge that we can’t serve a niche service
like 3D HD
Tech-N.O.-BOwl
During the ArenaBowl XXII Weekend, the AFL and a series of partners
hosted 2 events focused on the technology component of professional
sports, an evolving set of tools and best practices that can be applied to
most any business.
“The Downtown Development District (DDD) is focused on digital media as
one of our growth sectors, so it was great to work with partners who have
done such an excellent job of employing new technology to enhance both
team performance and fan experience,” said DDD President Kurt Weigle.
“It was a fantastic opportunity for local technology-based businesses to
get up close and personal with leaders in the industry.”
The Tech-N.O.-BOwl ThaNks iTs parTNers!
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New Workflows, New
Success for NBC Olympics
by
Ken Kerschbaumer
SVG Editorial
Director
24
W
hile Michael Phelps smashed records in the pool and NBC Olympics smashed viewership records,
behind the scenes, the technical team produced record amounts of material
through massive EVS, Omneon, and Isilon storage
systems in Beijing and New York.
“We arrived knowing how ambitious the undertaking was, and it would have been ambitious
even if we never left 30 Rock and the U.S.,” says
Dave Mazza, NBC Olympics SVP, engineering. “All
in all, it was the hardest thing we’ve ever done, but
that was only until Opening Ceremonies. Once we
got to that point, things went quite smoothly.”
The weeks prior to the Games, he says, were an
exhausting run, as the team dealt with putting in
new workflows to deliver the first all-HD games. “In
Torino, we chased interoperability problems between the HD gear. Here, we chased a lot of compression issues that smoothed out two days before
we went to air.”
The effort was made much easier by having the
support of nearly the entire NBC Universal family.
“Every part of the company was mobilized, whether it was streaming video from 30 Rock, bloggers in
Stamford, CT, and even using 11 announce booths
in 30 Rock or a Korean channel in Soho,” explains
Mazza. “It really energized the whole company,
and there were highly skilled people who just
did their job, despite what appeared would be a
perfect storm of hype, bad weather, and political
issues.”
With more than 3,500 hours of HD material being sent out to viewers via TV and the Internet,
coordinating the vast amount of traffic between
Beijing and New York required new workflows.
For example, instead of having one-to-one redundancy for the 16 HD production circuits between Beijing and New York, essentially doubling
the required number, EVS servers in Beijing recorded the feeds. In the event of a transmission error,
the recording on the server would be used.
Also, a wealth of low-resolution proxy video
was sent to New York to lower the need to send
all high-resolution material to editors in New York.
The editing process began with the use of proxy
video, and, with the help of a light-touch editing
system within the Blue Order asset-management
system, the desired clips could be selected. ProCast technology from Omneon Video Networks
then transferred the high-resolution clips from
Omneon Media Grids in Beijing to an Omneon
Media Grid at 30 Rock. Avid editing systems were
then used to assemble the high-resolution clips.
Anystream technology then pumped out the clips
in dozens of formats for delivery via online, mobile
devices, or VOD.
“Four years ago in Athens, there was no hope of
moving HD files,” says Mazza. “Just 18 months ago,
there were a lot of file-based workflows that we
still didn’t have the confidence would get there.
But they did.”
While Omneon moved material for the highlights factory, rewind, and graphics, Cisco WAAS
(Wide Area Application Services) were used to
push Avid files to New York. A Cisco 12004/4 router combined three 150-Mbps OC03 connections
into one virtual pipe with 450 Mbps of throughput. The pipe allowed a one-hour DV25 file to be
transferred in three minutes. Other Cisco gear
used included a Catalyst 6509-E-switch with 10-GB
modules and connections and Cisco D9034 and
D9054 MPEG-4 SD and HD encoders. Throughput
was 140 Mbps on the editing stations as opposed
to 35 Mbps pre-WAAS.
“The servers were pushing through about 200
clips a day and an untold number of live streams,
plus the Rewind service when the live stream is
finished and encore versions of the content shown
on the various networks,” says Mazza. “The amount
of raw processing power is amazing.”
Even the graphics artists, who never think in
terms of file sizes, were amazed at the transfer
speeds, Mazza says. When they placed an item
into the cue for delivery, it was sent almost instantaneously, leaving those on the receive side
dumbstruck that it had arrived so quickly.
When it came to live production, one of the
trickiest Olympic events was the cycling road races. NBC had a “flash unit” on hand that delivered
live camera feeds to the broadcast center. Those
feeds needed to be synched with host-broadcaster feeds that were sent back via fiber connection and arrived about four seconds ahead of the
satellite feeds. An Evertz profanity delay box was
dropped into the workflow and delayed the fiber
feeds before they were pumped through the router and then cut for broadcast.
“As for the big events, aquatics was the smoothest to produce because there is a more consistent
flow of competitions,” Mazza adds. “At gymnastics
or athletics, there are cameras all over the place,
and then it requires a massive editing process to
get even time-delayed content on-air. Orchestrating everything was a challenge.”
The use of new Sony XDCAM decks was another
success, according to Mazza. The decks were used
for recording archival material. The PDW-HD1500,
introduced at NAB, is a half-rack recording deck
that supports HD-SDI, SD-SDI, i.LINK (IEEE-1394),
and Ethernet. It delivers high-quality eight-channel, 24-bit audio recording and has a dual optical
pickup for higher-speed file transfer.
“The XDCAM decks were quite a success story
as we had more than 180 decks here and had only
two failures, one that was operator-related,” explains Mazza. “That sort of reliability never would
have happened with a tape machine, let alone a
new product that was first delivered on June 1.”
All in all, NBC Olympics introduced three workflows in Beijing: an Omneon workflow, enhanced
EVS workflow, and the new XDCAM workflow.
Mazza is now looking at solving the next challenge: bringing different workflows together.
“The three workflows grew up independent of
each other, so now we need to make them more
efficient,” he says. “Right now, content is recorded to
three places — an EVS drive, Omneon server, and
XDCAM — and we would like to get that back to
two.”
Mazza and his team don’t have too long to figure
out that consolidation: the 2010 Winter Olympics
in Vancouver are a little more than a year away. For
now, though, NBC Olympics will spend some time
reveling in a successful event that redefined Olympics broadcasting in the U.S. forever.
“I’ll remember the Opening Ceremonies as much
as the great competition,”says Mazza. “The staggering
Closing Ceremonies were similar to the organization
and coordination we do as a broadcaster.”
NBC’s Olympic tape area played a key
role in delivering 3,000 hours of HD
content to viewers in the U.S.
25
NBC Olympics, Broadcasters
Ride Venue Network for
Contribution Delivery
An overall view of the stadium as seen during the
Opening Ceremonies for the
Beijing 2008 Olympics Friday Aug. 8
(AP Photo/Julie Jacobsen)
by Ken
Kerschbaumer,
SVG Editorial
Director
26
C
hina became an OB lover’s paradise as
more than 65 production trucks and a
variety of flypack units descended on
the country for the Summer Olympics.
And, although “Made in China” has become the
manufacturing norm, it wasn’t the case for sports
coverage in Beijing.
“About 75% of the OB vans actually come from
overseas,” says Jan Eveleens, Thomson Grass Valley
VP. “And actually, most of them come from Europe.
So that’s already a first part of the challenge, because all these trucks have to go from Europe to
Beijing.”
One of the companies taking up that challenge
was Euro Media Group. CTO Luc Geoffroy says
his company provided support for the Opening
and Closing Ceremonies, swimming and diving
events, beach volleyball, cycling, the marathon
and triathlon, and race-walking. And those trucks
made the long, 50-day journey by ship. “That is the
biggest difference between Athens and Beijing,”
he explains.
“We provided seven HD OB trucks outfitted with
Thomson Grass Valley Kalypso and Kayak switchers, 62 Thomson HD cameras, 12 POV cameras, 10
RF cameras, and 24 EVS systems,” says Geoffroy.
With 10 technicians for each truck, that meant the
company had about 110 people in Beijing.
More ways
to consume.
One network with the
power to connect them all.
More ways
to create.
©2008 Level 3 Communications, LLC. All rights reserved.
Visit Level3.com / SVG
Beijing Games in Review – The Venues
HD cameras located along the bottom
of the pool allowed viewers at home to
watch Michael Phelps snag eight gold
medals from a completely new angle.
(AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill)
28
Euro Media may have been rolling trucks into
place, but the most challenging production for
the company left the trucks aside and involved a
flypack. The company needed to keep pace with
a 118-km cycling race that began in Tiananmen
Square and ended at the Great Wall. Digital HD
receive sites were spread around the course, pulling in signals from the RF cameras mounted on a
motorcycle, two cars, and a helicopter.
Alfacam, with a fleet of 19 HD trucks ranging across Beijing’s Olympic venues, handled the
Opening Ceremonies as well. “Things ran to absolute perfection,” says Alfacam CEO Gabriel Fehervari. “Things were much better and easier than
they were in Athens [for the 2004 Olympics.]”
For example, sunshades had
already been installed at the venues so trucks had to simply roll
into place. In Athens, the sunshades were assembled after the
trucks were on location, requiring some tricky maneuvering.
The Olympics concluded a
busy period of construction that
began more than two years ago
with assembly work on 12 new
HD production trailers. For the
previous 18 months, Alfacam had
a team of 20 engineers building
out units with massive amounts
of Thomson Grass Valley equipment as well as JVC monitors,
Lawo audio consoles, EVS replay
devices, and Canon lenses.
Thomson Kayak production
switchers and 200 Thomson
cameras, including 24 new LDK8300 super-slo-mo systems and
128 LDK-800 cameras, played a
key role in covering not only the
track and field events but also
gymnastics, swimming, diving,
badminton, archery, football,
hockey, fencing, handball, wrestling, and boxing.
“The 8300 cameras were absolutely perfect,” says Fehervari.
“And the 566 JVC monitors, for
example, have a built-in power
supply, which prevents having
power supplies hanging around
the truck.”
Seventy EVS XT HD instantreplay servers were also built
into the Alfacam trucks. “Our
team and BOB [Beijing Olympics
Broadcasting] worked together,”
says Fehervari, “and there was a great amount of
knowledge transfer.”
The biggest change since the Athens games
was moving to a single 16:9 HD workflow, a move
that has made things easier with respect to video
signals. The major difficulty this year compared
with Athens was dealing with surround-sound
issues, but 17 Lawo consoles helped get the job
done. “With HD, you just change the cameras, but
5.1-channel recording changes everything, especially if you are recording multiple channels for super slo-mo and isolate records,” says Fehervari. “It’s
very, very hard and a big challenge.”
Once the Olympics ended, the trucks began
Curious?
See you in Beijing.
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Track and field events
at the Bird’s Nest were
covered by more than 60
cameras that fed signals
back to new production
units from Alfacam.
their return voyage to Europe, where they will
have an impact on the HD transition in Europe
by giving content producers and networks more
HD options. “We do around 2,400 HD productions
a year, of which 800 are football and another 800
are other sports,” explains Fehervari. “We’ve been
waiting seven years for this moment when the industry transitions to HD in Europe as we were an
active promoter in the early days.”
The units are also all 1080p-capable, thanks to
3-Gbps routing and cabling (even the JVC monitors are 1080p-capable). “It’s still a bit too early for
1080p, but 1080p/50 is perfect for big events, in
particular operas and high-end concerts,” adds Fehervari.
BOB did much of the work, but broadcasters
also had their own complement of trucks and
flight packs. NBC Olympics, for example, had 50
broadcast cabins across 11 venues that served as
temporary facilities. In addition, an OB van, serving
as a “flash” vehicle, was on hand for cycling, time
trials, road racing, and triathlon events.
For most broadcasters, the challenge of dealing with one venue is enough to fill a day. For NBC
Olympics VP of venue engineering Chip Adams
and his team of 25 technical managers, dealing
with 44 distinct venues this summer was a test of
patience, planning, and fortitude. First and foremost, they needed to wade through 870 pages of
30
plans and diagrams that outlined the venues and
BOB plans for those venues.
“Because the games are in HD and the time of
year, we really felt it was not economically feasible
to take a truck out of the North American market
for 3 1/2 months,” says Adams. “So we decided to
put all our facilities into a flypack operation, and
when you do that, it affects just about every aspect of the way we operate inside a venue.”
Adams says the 45 days prior to the games were
scary because the cabins that housed the gymnastic, aquatic, and track-and-field production
crews needed to be assembled so that equipment
could roll in.
“With a flypack, we’re going to be in there about
a week before just to get the facilities installed, the
cables run, to get it to the level of a truck we had
in past games,” says Adams. “The real challenge for
us is to coordinate the equipment coming in, the
install schedules at the venues, working with the
host broadcaster to provide the cabins for the venues, and working with the host broadcaster to get
power for some of the smaller venues.”
In fact, the most difficult events weren’t the
big ones but rather the smaller ones that resembled a one-day set-and-shoot. “For example,
at the triathlon, we rolled two satellite trucks in
that fed five signals and had three cameras,” he
says. “We didn’t have a huge crew and relied on
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The Bird’s Nest was home to production gear from Alfacam, Euro Media,
and NEP Visions during the 2008
Summer Olympics.
32
an AD to decide which camera signals are sent
back to the IBC.”
The backbone for NBC Olympics and BOB was
a contribution network built by Chinese National
Communications (CNC) to connect all the venues with the International Broadcast Center (IBC).
“BOB provided the equipment to transmit and receive the HDI signals in an uncompressed format
to and from the IBC,” says Adams. “The venues
outside of Beijing were encoded with MPEG-2
DVB at the various profile levels for SD and HD,
and those came back to the IBC on satellite feeds
or, if the circuits were available, the SDH network
that CNC ran within the country.”
NBC Olympics concentrated its facilities on
the A-level venues: the National Stadium (or
Bird’s Nest), site of the Opening and Closing
Ceremonies and the track-and-field events; the
National Indoor Stadium, for gymnastics events;
and the National Aquatics Center, for swimming
and diving.
“They are all pretty stunning venues,” says Adams. “In six months, that six square mile area became a small city for about 50,000 people.”
Adams says camera setup was easier compared
with past games, although some swing-seats
needed to be installed near the VIP area in the
Bird’s Nest. The Opening Ceremonies also featured
a camera on the roof that required the installation
of a lighting truss. “A remote-controlled camera
was used to get the wide beauty shot without
putting people in danger,” he says.
There was only one B-level venue this year,
beach volleyball, and NBC deployed a flypack
comprising six Sony cameras, six Sony HD XDCAM
recorders, and three EVS XT-2 systems. Editing facilities included an EVS XT and Apple Final Cut Pro
system to give the up-and-coming sport its due.
This year, NBC Olympics took a new approach
to the C-level venue. “We have upgraded our Cworld production kits to handle HD video and be
able to deliver a surround-sound program,” says
Adams. “On the video side, we kept the core unit
and added additional patching and terminal gear
to accept a variety of switchers.”
NBC Olympics used two Sony MFS-200 switchers in the C2 kits and a Sony MSF-8000ASF for C+
venues. “The C+ kit can handle more record devices and graphics systems for a venue that needs
a little more equipment, while still relying on the
host feeds,” Adams explains.
The C-world flypacks could be up and running
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The NBC Olympics Bird’s Nest compound, assembled by NEP
Visions, was a high-tech compound
that rivaled the facilities found in
the world’s top production trucks.
34
in little more than a day, and each had a technical
director, an engineer-in-charge, a cameraperson,
an audio mixer, and a tape operator.
With discrete audio available at the venues and
with some C-level venues broadcast live on some
of NBC’s networks, all the kits were HD and had
an audio console capable of 5.1 surround-sound
productions. Notes Adams, “That’s a big addition
to our C-world kits.”
Although Euro Media’s trucks spent 50 days at
sea, UK-based provider Visions took the flypack
approach to serve NBC’s needs for A-level events.
Visions provided OB vehicles to NBC Olympics in
2004 and 2006, but the nature of contracts with
other clients made it impossible to send vehicles
by ship.
“At the end of the day, we have other clients that
we have to service,” says Visions CEO Martin Anderson. “Most of the equipment going to Beijing was
used at Wimbledon, and we had about six days
to get all of the equipment out of Wimbledon, repacked, relabeled, into flight cases, and onto airplanes.”
Flypacks also made sense in meeting NBC’s
monitoring needs that called for 125 monitors, a
number that pushed the limit of OB trucks in Europe. “We cannot build them as large as they can
in the U.S.,” Anderson adds, “and the average U.S.
director expects to have as many monitors in front
of him as he would expect to get back in the U.S.”
The flat-screen monitors made the trip by sea
because of weight and, once in Beijing, were
matched up with Sony HDC-1500 cameras, Grass
Valley Kalypso HD production switchers, and a Calrec Omega BlueFin desk with 70 faders and 100
inputs. Trinix routers offered 256x256 inputs and
outputs.
Visions wasn’t alone in the flypack game. Bexel,
which has been involved with the Olympics going
back to 1984 in Los Angeles, supported BOB, NBC
Olympics, NBC News, and others.
“We supported them with a couple of small
flypacks, a couple of Sony 3300 Super Mos, and a
number of long lenses,” says Craig Schiller, Visions
VP/GM of Live Event and Field Production. “We
also supported the remote-camera vendors with
a number of wide-angle lenses.”
The new offering from Bexel was the Hercules
flypack, which NBC Olympics used for the aquatic
events. The unit is designed for the comfort of operators, who have complained about having to
work out of shipping cases. “We took that into account and came up with something that we feel
is quite unique,” explains Schiller. “We combined a
number of racks into what we’re calling dual racks.
And we did a lot of internal wiring and including
some operating positions in what we’re calling
modules.”
Among Hercules’ key components is the Sony
MVS-8000G HD Switcher with individual keyer resizers and internal format converters so it is futureproofed to support 1080-line progressive-scan HD
production in the future.
“It lives at the heart of the new flypack system,”
says Schiller. “And with the new interface with EVS,
this gave users access to the flagship EVS XT[2],
one of the fastest, most flexible, and reliable HD
video servers in the world.”
Other components include the Pesa Cheetah
multi-format 128x256 video router, Pesa DRS DA
routing 256x256 AES, 256x256 analog audio, and
Evertz MVP multi-viewers. For audio demands,
Hercules has a Calrec Alpha Bluefin HD audio-mix-
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innovations in system performance, efficiency, compactness and scalability.
Alfacam’s new HD production trucks
covered track and field events at
the Olympics and are now helping
European broadcasters continue
their HD transmission.
More than 65 outside broadcast trucks
were used to produce the Summer
Olympics in HD.
36
ing console at its core, providing ease in 5.1 surround-sound mixing and routing.
“We take pride in the fact that it is a lightweight system, about 175 boxes, and weighs
about 22,000 lbs., Schiller explains. “That sounds
like a lot, but we have very few CRT monitors in
the system.”
Instead, 24 NEC 40-in. bezel monitors were at
the core of the multi-viewer system. “They actually
ship in the modules,” Schiller says, “and when they
get to location, the LCDs flip up, and everything’s
already wired.”
While running fiber-optic cable is in fashion, Adams says, NBC used
traditional coax cables to get the feeds
to flypack facilities.
“We took in around
200 video splits from
the host broadcaster,
and the cost of the
terminal gear can
get pretty expensive
compared to the cost
of cable,” explains Adams. “But to use coax,
we have to be very
careful about where
our facilities are locat-
ed as we needed to be within about 100 meters of
the host-broadcaster technical-operations center
at a venue.”
That said, Adams notes that NBC Olympics
had to install a lot of fiber into the venues for
HD monitor feeds, Ethernet distribution, audio
transmission, and getting RF camera feeds to the
compound.
NBC Olympics also made use of the “Pure
World Feeds,” with announcers in a commentary
booth at the venue. Ethernet circuits then sent
the audio back to the IBC, where a producer
could take the announcer feed and marry it to
the host feed.
“Depending on the programming requirements, the producer could record the event directly to tape and take it in through an edit room
or, if it was being fed live, through one of the NBC
control rooms,” says Adams.
A perfect example was the wrestling coverage.
Because up to three matches were going at the
same time, a small routing switcher at the venue
was controlled from the IBC. It had the three feeds
from the matches, as well as a venue beauty cameras and an ENG camera feed.
“The beauty camera was used as a background
for graphic results pages,” explains Adams, “and the
ENG camera was used for on-camera coverage of
the announcers.”
The Wide World of
Broadcasters around the globe take different
approaches to covering local, international heroes
UK
Charlie Cope, BBC technical consultant
and editor, looks over the EVS servers at
the heart of the BBC’s Olympic opera-
-based Olympic fans had
their share of coverage,
thanks to the BBC’s decision to pump 2,800 hours
of coverage through its various distribution channels with the help of 44 feeds supplied by Beijing
Olympics Broadcasting (BOB). It also made use of
a new technology that enabled HD transport over
SD paths, an important broadcasting milestone.
Many of BBC’s 437 personnel in Beijing worked
in 18 edit suites that were part of the network’s
section of the International Broadcasting Centre (IBC), as well as in production and ENG teams
around the venues. To deal with the output from
China, 16 logging stations at Television Centre
(TVC) in west London were operated by personnel
who must have wondered what they did wrong to
not be considered for overseas travel.
Much is made of this being the first fully highdefinition Olympics, and the BBC now has a dedicated outlet for the technology. But because its HD
Channel was not given the official go-ahead until
tions in Beijing.
38
last November, the broadcaster could not confirm
to BOB that it would need suitably equipped connections for a number of its feeds.
This meant that, although the BBC intended to
have a large amount of material in HD, only SD circuits were allocated. To get around this not inconsiderable obstacle, the broadcaster used Dirac Pro
compression technology to carry HD footage over
uncompressed SD connections. BBC Research
& Development developed the system, with the
codecs for contribution work designed and marketed by Numedia.
The Dirac image-compression algorithm encoded footage using a motion-compensation
method and was implemented using Numedia’s
Chameleon platform. Numedia was established
in 2004 by former Snell & Wilcox engineer Stuart
Sommerville; its range of Dirac products includes
units for 1080p-to-1080i compression, HD SDI
multiplexing, and HD SDI-to-SD SDI compression.
HD is usually promoted alongside 5.1 surround
sound, and the BBC did that for this Olympics. This,
however, was perhaps even more of a challenge
for the BBC, and for other broadcasters, than the
high-definition video. Andy Quested, principal
technologist in charge of HD for the BBC, says
the broadcaster offered surround sound where it
could but could not guarantee it for all events.
“Some coverage was too heavy on the effects or
too wide or had too much commentary,” he says.
“In those instances, we had to go back to stereo
because we had to have a balance between our
own added audio and the raw feed.”
BOB distributed discrete 5.1 surround audio, plus
stereo, embedded in the HD SDI signal with no
Dolby-encoded formats involved. Charlie Cope, a
video editor with BBC Post Production, regards this
as beneficial because there was no expenditure
on encoding and decoding, but the disadvantage
was that much of the equipment used had only
eight audio tracks. When six of those were used for
Olympic Coverage
5.1, there was not much leeway for accommodating a stereo mix, which was necessary for editing
and feeds taken by BBC News.
Besides 300 hours split between BBC1 and BBC2
television, there were 2,450 hours through the interactive BBCi service. BBC Online, Radio, News,
Nations, and Regions, as well as children’s service
CBBC, also took footage from the Games.
New-technology platforms played a critical role
in dealing with the seven-hour time difference between China and the UK. Interactive, streamed video on broadband services and mobile platforms
offered on-demand access to the Olympics, supporting the live primetime broadcasts. Footage for
all this was prepared at the IBC on Olympic Green
in Beijing using a tapeless production system, mir-
roring the one that has been implemented within
the BBC in recent years.
BBC Sport’s facility at the IBC was planned
with BBC Resources and project-managed by the
broadcaster’s technology partner Siemens IT Solutions and Services, which contracted Gearhouse
Broadcast as systems integrator. The approximately 5,000-square-foot area housed a control room
for HD production and one for interactive Internet
and mobile-phone services. These were supported by 18 edit rooms, production offices, and two
big servers, all connected to the venues and the
BOB EVS server.
This storage system and accompanying logging software were linked to the BBC’s EVS network, which in turn fed an Avid ISIS server. With
The International Broadcast Center
was home to more than 140 broadcasters from around the world during
the Beijing Games.
39
Beijing Games in Review – International Coverage
The BBC Control Room in the Beijing
Olympics IBC helped deliver more
than 300 hours of content to BBC1
and BBC2.
40
everything in data form, incoming material could
be edited and prepared as it arrived, making for a
quick turnaround. BOB included simple metadata
in the video and audio feeds, which BBC staff were
able to expand on using the EVS IP Director media-management program.
This capability assisted the logging operation,
which was carried out on 16 workstations in an
area at TVC in London. All editing and storage
took place in Beijing, and once feeds were logged
in London, information was sent back to Beijing
over IPTV circuits to update the local database.
The BBCi and BBC Online crews were also able to
use this data, with the London logging operation
working through the night so that there was no
lapse caused by the time difference.
The BBC’s IBC facility and its studio in the futuristic glass Ling Long Pagoda were led by staffers
from BBC Post Production and BBC Studios, with
crew and equipment also provided by SIS Outside Broadcasts (formerly BBC OBs). SIS OBs, the
BBC provider of production trucks, sent two HD
trucks to China that were subcontracted to BOB
to provide host facilities for coverage of sailing
and rowing. Flypacks were used at venues for the
broadcaster’s unilateral coverage and presenta-
tion, supplementing the host feeds.
There was particular focus on events in which
British competitors had a strong presence or a
good chance of medals, including track and field,
swimming, gymnastics, hockey, and cycling. The
biggest unilateral venue—for most broadcasters, not just the BBC—was the National Stadium,
where the Opening and Closing Ceremonies and
track and field events were held.
This was a full HD outside-broadcast installation,
running with its own server for post-production.
The BBC also had the ability to broadcast live from
another 13 venues, as needed. BBC Post Production ran editing facilities at Qingdao for the sailing; at Shunyi, where the rowing took place; and
in Hong Kong, which hosted the equestrian competition. These venues also featured presentation
areas and cameras for interviews.
Alongside the track within the Bird’s Nest and at
other sporting areas, “mix zones” offered three outputs for roving camera crews to plug into and connect to the main feeds. These were designed to be
used mostly by teams working for BBC’s Regions,
Nations, and News departments. The broadcaster
also worked with Team GB, the umbrella name for
British competitors at the Games and the body
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Germany’s ZDF and ARD networks
shared broadcast facilities at the
Beijing Olympics IBC.
42
representing them, to create a remotely controlled
broadcast point. This allowed athletes to walk into
the centre, put on an earpiece, and communicate
with the IBC, where an operator ran the camera
heads and microphones.
Eight ENG crews worked around Beijing and
venues in other cities, using Panasonic P2 camcorders. The BBC tried out the solid-state format
during 2006 at the Winter Olympics in Torino and
the World Cup in Germany and has made it part of
an overall move to tapeless production and postproduction. For getting signals back to the IBC,
BBC News SNG vans were located around the Chinese capital and at Team GB’s camp in Macau.
Satellite also played a part in sending signals to
TVC in London for transmission on BBC1, BBC2,
and BBC HD, but this was to provide a secure backup to the main digital fiber circuits. The European
Broadcast Union provided more than 200 Mbps of
redundant international circuits to the BBC for its
transmissions. Arranged in several routes around
the world between Beijing and the UK, they also
accommodated voice and data links and the 16
channels of IP streaming for logging purposes.
The BBC endeavored to exploit all the technology
available to it and as many of its platforms as possible. Besides BBC1, BBC2, BBC HD, Radio Five Live,
interactive channels, and the Internet, the broadcaster called on a rather unlikely outlet to provide
as much coverage as possible: The BBC Parliament
channel on digital terrestrial platform Freeview was
used to “enhance” other transmissions. But even the
most die-hard government watcher couldn’t complain, since the House of Commons was in recess
while the Games were on.
T
he Canadian Broadcasting Corp. (CBC)
blazed a trail that other networks may
follow for future Olympic Games. To
minimize staffing, equipment, and production costs while maximizing quality, the bulk
of the CBC’s coverage was edited at CBC Headquarters in Toronto.
“It allowed us to have all of our best equipment,
which we wouldn’t have otherwise been able to
take abroad, available to us with all the bells and
whistles in an integrated HD environment,” says
Trevor Pilling, CBC executive producer for the CBC’s
English-language coverage of the 2008 Summer
Olympics. “That is hard to simulate on the road.”
In terms of personnel, CBC sent only 125 people to Beijing, a fraction of the number that NBC
Olympics sent. CBC’s crew used 25 Sony XDCAM
cameras to capture action and interviews; it was
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tion, we do that in the Avid suites,” says Pilling.
“Preparation and pre-work is always a key to success,” he adds. “I think that is part of the Olympics.
Whether you are an athlete who is giving their all
or a TV production person who is committed to
broadcasting the Olympic Games, it is an endurance test, and you have to bring the best of what
you have.”
G
The Beijing Olympic Broadcasting
Transmission facility ensured signals
were properly sent to broadcasters
around the world.
44
the first time CBC had used the Sony XDCAM systems in a live production.
A total of 32 transmission paths, 22 HD and 10
SD, were provided by T-Systems STM4 network
to transport signals from Beijing. CBC then used
13 edit suites—four Avid and nine EVS IPEdit—to
prepare tape-delayed coverage
to be stored on EVS servers. The
broadcaster also had two Avid
systems and two EVS IPEdit stations in Beijing.
“One of the biggest challenges is how you deal with
HD media when it requires so
much more bandwidth. Many
technologies would eat up a lot
of time in rendering and transferring,” says Pilling. The EVS system, he says, enables the broadcaster to provide the very quick turnaround necessary in covering live events like the Olympics.
Canadians received more than 2,500 hours of
HD coverage of the Games, including 1,500 hours
of content streamed live on CBCsports.ca. Programming was featured on CBC Television, CBC
bold, CBC Newsworld, and TSN.
“This workflow is built on a foundation of knowledge,” says Pilling. “Our engineers and technicians
conceived and worked on this project for well
over two years.”
While the IPEdit systems allowed quick timeline
editing without requiring rendering time, Pilling
says, the Avid editing suites were a necessity to
complete the programming. CBC also used Harris
Inscriber G7 to incorporate 3D real-time graphics
into its broadcast for the first time. “When we do
our fancy openings or we want to add coloriza-
ermany had a strong television presence, with public broadcasters ZDF
and ARD sending out a total of 320
staff (variously, technicians, producers
and editors). Gearhouse Broadcast keyed much of
their technical infrastructure, relying on vendors
like Avid, EVS, and Sony to help get the German
Olympic story out to German viewers.
ZDF and ARD had facilities at the National
Sports Stadium (NST) for athletics, the National
Aquatics Centre (NAC), the Rowing area (SRF), and
the Equestrian Centre (HKS) in Hong Kong. These
technical areas were designed and installed for
the broadcasters by systems integrator Gearhouse
Broadcast, with two big studios at the German
House, the main focus for the country’s competitors and media representatives during the Games.
The German House included a number of Avid
editing rooms and two production-control rooms.
Elsewhere, there was a presentation studio at
the NST, with unilateral cameras to concentrate
on German athletes both there and at the other
venues. Equipment provided by Gearhouse included a Sony MFS 2000 vision mixer, two EVS
LSM XT HD servers, two Sony PDW F75 XDCAM
VTRs, four RDRG X210S DVD recorders, one Sony
Grade 1 BVM D14H5E Grade 1 monitor, 11 Vurtix
23-inch and 17-inch TFT monitors, 20 CRT monitors (a mixture of Sony and JVC), a Pro Bel Halo
32x32 HD router, a Yamaha MC7 audio mixer, and
a Clearcom communications system. Gearhouse
had seven engineers out in China to provide cover
for the facilities, although ARD used its own production crew.
ZDF had to reduce the amount of space it was
to occupy within the IBC but still had 6,000 square
feet on one floor, with ADR Radio taking 1,200
square feet. ZDF and ARD alternated 17 hours of
daily coverage.
ZDF used 32 commentary lines, with 44 world
picture circuits and 12 multilateral feeds provided
by the EBU, which also supplied a total of 125 fourwire circuits for communications. Material was
carried from Beijing to Mainz over a STM1 glassfibre connection, which also carried telephony
and data.
—Reporting by Kevin Hilton,
Ken Kerschbaumer, and Andrew Lippe
WARP Technology
The Future of Video on the Internet
Instant On - Full Screen - Picture Perfect - Cost Effective
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45
Tough Times Mean Tough
Road Trip for Stations
by Carolyn Braff
The Main Press Center was home to local TV stations during the games
and provided a great place for interviews with athletes as well as
keeping up to date on all the action.
46
E
very two years, TV stations have a unique
opportunity to send their reporters
around the world, increase viewership,
and bring in some extra revenue by covering the Olympic Games in person, on-site. How
much coverage a station devotes to the Games
depends on a multitude of factors, and, this year,
the stakes were higher than ever.
With the current economy making a trip to
China a bigger than normal strain on the station budget, SVG gathered representatives from
four stations around the country to discuss how
they met the challenges involved in covering the
Games, which became the most viewed event in
American television history.
The Numbers Game
Greg Thies, news technology and operations
manager for KING-TV Seattle, is the coordinating
manager for the entire BELO group, which has four
NBC affiliates among its 27 TV stations. For Thies,
with trips to Athens, Lillehammer, Nagano, Salt
Lake City, and Torino under his belt, this summer
was something of a repeat performance.
“The Olympics have been part of my blood for
a while,” he explains. “BELO has carried on a pretty
rich tradition of supporting their local affiliates in
getting to the Olympics. Typically, we have reporter and photographer crews from our NBC stations
go. We set up an infrastructure, working underneath the NBC News Channel umbrella.”
The costs involved in producing this edition of
the Games, however, meant that some stations
bowed out of coverage altogether, while others,
including Thies’s, sent fewer staff members.
“The affiliate meeting had about half the number of people I was used to seeing,” Thies says.
“There are certainly less stations traveling.”
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Beijing Games in Review – Local Coverage
Hearst-Argyle Television reporter Kate
Amara and photographer Jaime Brassard attracted a crowd of on-lookers
but encountered no access issues,
while shooting promos in Tiananmen
Square.
(Photo: Hearst-Argyle Television)
Although KING’s Olympic coverage units typically entail eight to 12 people, just five were scheduled to travel to Beijing.
Hearst-Argyle, which counts 10 NBC affiliates among
its 27 TV stations, generally sends nine to 12 people to
the Games and sent a crew of nine to Beijing.
“The cost per head to go over there is much
greater than we’ve had at other Olympics,” says Brian Bracco, VP of news for Hearst-Argyle Television.
“Not so much the travel and meals and things, but
it has to do with the infrastructure and the cost of
the infrastructure. That, of course, we have to get
passed along to us by NBC.”
WOOD-TV Grand Rapids, MI, part of the LIN Television group that counts five NBC affiliates among
its 26 stations, broke the mold by planning to send
an expanded coverage crew to Beijing, but illness
derailed its plans.
“We sent a contingent of six this time, and that’s
just because we felt so short-staffed [in Torino],” explains Patti McGettigan, news director for WOOD.
“It’s logistically very challenging for five people to
work 20 days straight of 15-, 18-, 20-hour days.”
However, when her field producer fell ill after a few
days in Beijing, the LIN contingent had to manage
the logistical challenges that McGettigan feared.
“We ended up doing a lot of the coordinating
efforts for the team from here in Grand Rapids,” she
explains. “We ended up becoming the booking
agent for all of the LIN stations. The stations called
in each day; we communicated what the crews
were producing and booked all the live shots. We
then communicated that to Beijing, so we did
some of the field producing work from here. We
became their check-in point.”
All five staff members worked nearly around
the clock in Beijing, as did the crew back home
in Grand Rapids, which, in the Eastern Time
Zone, was working 12 hours behind their Beijing
counterparts.
The Price of Glory
For some stations, Beijing proved prohibitively
expensive: McGettigan, for example, puts car-anddriver fees alone at $15,000. Adding in a rough
economic forecast that made this Olympics a
Hearst-Argyle reporter Aixa Diaz pre- tougher sell than previous Games, purse strings
pares for a live shot outside the Bird’s everywhere were tightened before anyone boardNest.
ed a plane.
“When we decide as a group to go,” McGettigan
says, “we take the exorbitant costs that we’ve been
describing and spread them out across all of our
NBC affiliates, the thought being that we’re going
to have Olympic money coming in.”
To ease some of that exorbitant cost, stations
spent a great deal of time prior to the Games col-
48
lecting footage of athletes in competitions not
embargoed by NBC. The United States Olympic
Committee Media Summit was an opportunity for
all affiliates, NBC or otherwise, to do some advance
interviewing of athletes and go over some logistics
and editorial updates in advance of the Games.
“The ability to generate content and do extensive live coverage over there is limited by your
staff,” Thies explains. “China is by far the most expensive Olympics that we’ve ever encountered,
so there’s quite a bit of work that is done ahead
of time in preparation — meeting athletes, doing
profiles, setting things up ahead of time.”
Other opportunities included sending crews to
open Olympic venues to get footage of the athletes
training. While a station might not have been able to
show video of Michael Phelps winning his eighth gold
medal live from Beijing, it could run video of him in a
different race or in practice prior to the race while teasing NBC’s evening broadcast of Phelps’s win.
“We often would use some of the stories that we
did or the sound that we had gathered from the athletes in the different markets, either prior to the event
or even sometimes the night of the event,”McGettigan
says. “That was really important supportive material.”
Especially when it came to the Michael Phelps
saga, some stations were more prepared to handle
the increasing demand for coverage of the world’s
greatest swimmer than others.
“He trained in Ann Arbor, so we were treating
him like he was one of our hometown athletes,”
McGettigan says. “We had a lot of advance material on him, and I think we were well prepared.”
NBC and the IOC helped stations that were less
prepared by ensuring that the star athletes made
tours of the media venues.
“We also made contacts with parents and athletes off-site, where we were able to chat with
them,” Bracco says. “Most of the major players —
Shawn Johnson, Michael Phelps — we did have
access to, and I think that was through NBC’s good
graces. Some of that footage was limited to NBC
stations rather than all the stations, but we did the
best we could.”
Outside the Bubble
Posting that facility outside of the “Olympic
Bubble” certainly had some upside for the broadcasters — especially when it came to reporting
non-sports news — but the location also provided
plenty of uncertainty.
Said Bracco before the start of the Games, “I
think we might be naïve to think that it’s just going
to be like shooting here in the United States.”
However, at the end of the Games, few stations
registered complaints. McGettigan says her con-
tingent ran into some complications at the Great
Wall, but she cites no other access issues.
For NBC Affiliates, Plenty of
Help From Their Friends
Hearst-Argyle Television’s Beijing
workspace
50
Once on-site, NBC assisted its affiliates by providing a syndicated access program called Ozone,
which was piloted during the Torino Games, to
great success. Individual stations that chose to use
the feed preempted the base NBC content with
customized local inserts, but the parent company
provided a backbone of content for each affiliate.
All of Hearst-Argyle’s stations used the Ozone
show, customizing it for each market.
“It worked out terrific,” Bracco says. “We had a
producer for Ozone, and all of our correspondents
contributed to it. We localized it for our 10 NBC stations, and we had local content every day that was
produced for Ozone in addition to using material
provided by NBC.”
LIN’s KXAN Austin, Texas, chose to use Ozone
and was rewarded with high ratings.
“The two people from Austin who really worked
on that show and also did live shots in all of the
early newscasts for all the LIN stations, I’m sure,
worked harder than anybody,” McGettigan says. “I
know the show was very successful; they got nice
ratings on it.”
In order to add their own content to the Ozone
show, the stations had to carefully navigate NBC’s
complex guidelines mandating access to the athletes.
“If you get the athlete off-campus, so to speak,
out of a venue, walking down the street, or you
make arrangements by talking to them on cellphones, you are more than welcome to use any
of that video you want,” Bracco explains. “If you can
get the athlete to come onto your air live, that’s
great, and you can do that. They also give B passes
where they send one local group into a venue,
and they can shoot footage after the fact.”
NBC affiliates had a definitive advantage over
other stations, because their local news aired just
after NBC programming. Other affiliates often
aired their news earlier in the evening.
“An NBC station usually gets first use of that
video after the NBC broadcast has gone off the air,”
Bracco explains.
For groups providing content to both NBC and nonNBC affiliates, the logistics were a bit complicated.
“It was a daunting operation with a lot of moving parts, making sure everything went where it
was supposed to,” says Bracco, whose feed went
out to ABC, CBS, and NBC stations. “We brought
the feed into [the NBC NewsChannel center in
Charlotte, N.C.], and then we turned it around in
Orlando, where we have a hub and our own satel-
lite. Then we fed it back to our stations through
our own Hearst-Argyle satellite system so all our
ABC and CBS affiliates could take it down and then
have it recorded. There was a lot of coordination to
make sure everything got on the air just right.”
Timing Is Everything
The time difference in Beijing caused plenty of
headaches for U.S. stations. A select few events
— notably swimming and gymnastics — were
broadcast live in primetime on the East Coast, but
most results were 15 hours old by the time West
Coast stations’ news programs aired.
“Even if you got the reaction of your local athlete,” Bracco says, “you had to hold it until after that
night’s broadcast of the event.”
Most events were scheduled for primetime in Beijing, or 6-9 a.m. ET (3-6 a.m. PT), so the results were
available long before the coverage aired that evening.
“This speaks back to the Web and how important the Web’s becoming,” Thies explains. “So why
do we travel? Because we’re giving our local audience something they wouldn’t get by watching
straight NBC coverage. We’re trying to give them
local reaction, insight, local stories about local athletes, things of that sort, and to get some of that to
them on the Web without waiting 12 or 15 hours
for the television broadcast.”
McGettigan’s group produced a great deal of content for her Websites, and, although Grand Rapids is
the nation’s 39th media market, its Olympic Zone site
spent at least one day in the nation’s top 10 for traffic.
“We obviously have a strong commitment to
developing material for the Web, and the crew
was doing that daily,” McGettigan says.
Each affiliate chose how it would handle the
news distribution, but all shared results as soon as
they became available, using stock footage or AP
photos to report until the NBC embargo was lifted
on the fresh video content.
“You can’t hold news in this day and age,” notes
McGettigan. Her LIN crew provided live coverage
three times daily — late night, early morning, and
early evening ET — so one of her staffers worked
from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Beijing time, 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. ET.
“That was pretty functional except if he did live
shots in the late news, which sometimes went
on as late as 1:45 in the morning,” McGettigan
explains. “On those days, he was locked down to
the facility, and it was challenging for him to go
out and gather news, especially because then he
would do live shots for the morning show, too. Logistically, finding the time to stay live, stay relevant,
and provide news stories was a big challenge.”
Says Bracco, “We provided live shots in the early
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LIN TV reporter Brian Sterling interviews
silver medalist Dara Torres with the
Bird’s Nest in the background.
morning, generally, because of time differences.
We assigned one person to do that live shot for
four hours or five hours at a time while the other
two or three reporters were out covering stories.”
If the news stations were lucky enough to get
footage with the athlete outside the venue directly following an event, they were free to use that
video immediately, so every station played a game
against the clock to try to get its content out first.
Mix and Match
(Photos: LIN TV)
For NBC affiliates, communication and cooperation were required, especially because only one NBC
camera was allowed in each of the mixed zones — be
it a sports camera or an NBC Nightly News camera.
“We all talk with the producers and say, ‘Hey, Joe,
if you’re there, can you please, when our athlete
comes by, ask him this question?’” Bracco explains.
“These mixed zones are like a Q&A area, where the
athletes come down and stop and talk, so it’s a lot
of sharing. If it’s an event where we have a judo
person and nobody else has a judo person, we
may be the NBC News crew covering.”
Non-NBC affiliates could access some of that local-generated content, depending on the rights
LIN TV’s Jack Doles and Brian Sterling granted by NBC.
Still, rather than spend time in each of the ventogether at the end of the Olympics
ues, from which they were guaranteed footage —
eventually — courtesy of NBC, these stations would
spend their working hours looking for stories away
from the mixed zones, trying to find new angles.
“The payoff comes from doing all that pre-work,”
McGettigan says. “If you can send the people that
are actually going to the Olympics to interview
and meet the athletes before you get to Beijing,
then you’re going to have much more success
getting them on your air once the Games begin.
Live athlete interviews are key to the success of
the color of the Games on a local level.”
Making the reporters and photographers recLIN TV’s Jack Doles puts the local spin
ognizable to an athlete ahead of time was crucial
on gold medalist Nastia Liukin
for stations, which were fighting for face time with
broadcasters from around the globe.
Mobilizing the Station
While plane-ticket prices escalated for the crew
members, getting the equipment over to Beijing
was a whole different challenge, involving customs, itemizations, and endless declaration forms.
“All the gear that’s hand-carried over goes
through customs, essentially,” Thies explains, noting
that he had to go to his local consulate and fill out
an equipment-declaration form for every piece of
gear that he planned to transport to China.
“We provide our own editing equipment,” Thies
52
says. “I have a small SDI switching unit that I can
record and see feeds on, but that larger workspace
gear is going ahead of time.”
As for providing a path for transmitting content,
some groups got a 24/7 open line back home, depending on the number of stations they serviced,
while others had to share circuits, which could get
messy when breaking news arrived.
“Everyone’s fighting over who’s got the top of the
hour,” Thies explains. “We’re not the top-of-the-Ablock story every night; there are other local stories
happening back home. It really allows the producers flexibility when we have the whole half-hour.”
A Plethora of Formats
Although NBC produced the entirety of the Beijing Games in HD, not all stations followed suit.
“There are so many different stations on so many
different formats that we’re at a kind of crossroads,”
Thies says. “From an infrastructure standpoint, for
a news channel, it’s an interesting thing, because
most of our stations are 16:9, what we consider hybrid HD; we’re HD in the studio, graphics, weather,
and all those things. We shot 16:9 SD material back
to them from Beijing, though.”
Thies’s workflow included an XD HD cam for
each of his crews in China, but McGettigan’s stations received 4:3 SD feeds.
Bracco’s stations proved a bit more complex.
“We had one daily feed we sent out in 16:9, one in
4:3, one for NBC stations only, one for everybody,
one that was embargoed, one for Web-only for
NBC stations, one for Web-only for everybody, and
an Ozone feed just for Ozone,” he says. “We were
juggling all that at the same time.”
Proper labeling was crucial for the Hearst-Argyle
team on the ground in Beijing, who had to have
more patience for this Olympics than ever before.
“Lag time for feeds in Torino and Athens that
took an hour, this time, took two to three hours,”
McManamon says. “You had to feed everything
once in 16:9 and then feed everything again in 4:3;
then you had to label everything. The big element
this time was the 16:9 versus 4:3.”
Wrapping It Up
Although the Beijing Games may mark the final
time the Olympics are covered by massive production teams converging on the host city, they may
also represent the beginning of an era of increased
U.S. interest in the international competition.
“With the strength of the numbers that we saw
out of Beijing and the interest in the Games,” McGettigan says, “I left with a stronger commitment
to return.”
the Advisory Board
CHAIRMAN
Ken Aagaard, CBS Sports, EVP Operations and
Production Services
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Digital Downpour: NBC
Takes Its Olympic Content
Across Platforms, Time Zones
by Carolyn Braff
Perkins Miller, SVP of digital media for
NBC Universal Sports & Olympic
54
F
or this summer’s Olympic Games,
NBC made an unprecedented commitment to keeping the world up to
speed on the events in Beijing at all
hours, in all formats, on all platforms. Perkins
Miller, SVP of digital media for NBC Universal
Sports & Olympics, had the daunting task of
not only keeping tabs on all 3,500 hours of
digital video produced at the games but also
making sure it got to viewers when,
where, and in the format in which
they wanted to consume it.
“We would use the phrase ambitious,” Miller explained, steering clear
of the term crazy to describe the Beijing undertaking. “When you look at
the scale and size of this, it’s a fairly
daunting number, but every NBC
Games you see goes from one level to
the next. It went from SD to HD, from
one channel to five channels, and this
year from two hours of test video in
Torino to 2,100 hours streamed live. It’s
a big step up, but that’s the business
we’re in, so we all take a deep breath
and dive in.”
Where this edition of the Olympics
strayed from past coverage of the
Games was in the mass of digital content NBC produced, all of which Miller oversaw for
the duration of the broadcast.
“I think what you’ll see this year, more than any
other year, by a large magnitude, is the amount of
work we’re doing on our digital platforms,” Miller
said prior to the start of the Games. “We’re going to
be streaming 25 sports live and more than 2,100
hours of live streaming in total.”
When all was said and done, during the Olympics, NBC racked more than 3,500 hours of video,
distributed on mobile, VOD, broadband, and just
about any other platform Miller could wrap his
head around.
“It’s a really robust experience, and that’s what
was most important to us,” Miller said. “With the
technology we have today, how do we connect
with the fans of the Olympics and our viewers in
ways that we couldn’t have done just two years
ago in Torino?”
The answer to that question was an intricate
web of content-delivery partners and services that
ensured that every Olympic fan could access the
content of their choice, on the platform of their
choice, at a convenient time.
Fielding the Olympic
Broadcasting Team
“I won’t deny that it’s a very complex endeavor,”
Miller said of his distribution protocol. “We’ve got
more than 70 different partners working on the
digital side, from encoding in China to production
in the U.S. to development in Italy. There are a lot
of people in a lot of organizations working very
hard to get it done.”
In addition to preparing the infrastructure required to push all of the Olympic footage out to
viewers around the world, NBC built its own video
content highlighting the U.S. teams in various
sports, as well as creating gaming platforms for
each of the competitive sports, so fans could play
“We’re about reaching and
entertaining and delighting
our audience, and in order to
do that, we want to make sure
it’s accessible.”
—Perkins Miller
Join the sports broadcasting industry on Dec. 16, 2008
at the New York Hilton Hotel…
... to honor the second class of Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame inductees! Hosted by Jim Nantz,
CBS Sports lead play-by-play announcer, the
ceremony once again promises to be an emotional
affair as we recognize industry legends who have
transformed the sports broadcasting industry.
Host Jim Nantz
The 2008 class of the
Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame:
Marvin Bader Bader was responsible for all the production services during
ABC’s three-decade string of Olympics coverage (1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s). As VP, ABC
Sports Olympic Operations, he oversaw the host-broadcast feed of the 1984 Los Angeles
Olympics.
Chet Forte Forte was the first director of ABC’s Monday Night Football in 1970, redefining NFL coverage in the process. He worked with executive producer Roone Arledge to display the game as entertainment as well as
a sporting event and making it a must-watch for NFL fans.
Curt Gowdy During his 34-year career, Gowdy did it all — covering 13 World Series, 16 MLB All-Star games, nine Super Bowls, 14 Rose
Bowls, eight Olympic Games, and 24 NCAA Final Fours, not to mention
co-creating and producing Wide World of Sports with Roone Arledge and
working on American Sportsman.
Teddy Nathanson Nathanson oversaw some of the greatest TV
moments in sports history during his career as a director at NBC. For his
work, he garnered an Emmy Award and the first Directors Guild of America
Lifetime Achievement Award for Sports Television (1991).
Don Ohlmeyer Ohlmeyer began his career at ABC, where he worked
on Wide World of Sports, produced Monday Night Football, and produced and
directed three Olympic Games TV packages before moving to NBC, where he
served as president of the West Coast division from 1993 to ‘99.
Val Pinchbeck Pinchbeck was a long-time NFL executive and one
of NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle’s chief advisors. As the NFL’s head of broadcasting for more than two decades, he served as a liaison on television and radio
with the 30 NFL teams and with the various networks that broadcast games.
Vin Scully The long-time voice of the Brooklyn and Los Angeles
Dodgers, Scully has been with the franchise on both coasts for 59 seasons;
he has called six World Series and 25 National League Championship
series.
Bob Seiderman A four-time Emmy Award winner, Seiderman’s
technical wizardry took the sports audio experience from a secondary position
behind video to an equal one. While at CBS Sports and Fox Sports, Seiderman
defined the aural landscape of everything from NASCAR to the NFL.
Charlie Steinberg Steinberg oversaw the development of
some of the most important production tools for sportscasters, including
instant-replay systems in the late 1960s and, three decades later, HDTV.
For transforming sports coverage through technology developments, Steinberg won three Emmys.
A Legacy of
Excellence
Dec. 16, 2008
New York Hilton
Industry Reception
begins at 5:30 p.m.
Induction Ceremony
begins at 6:30 p.m.
Business attire recommended.
Please note the ceremony does not
include dinner and will end at
approximately 8:15 p.m.
Seating for this exciting event is
extremely limited.
For more information on attending
please contact Carrie Bowden at
917-446-4412 or
[email protected].
For sponsorship information please
contact Rob Payne at
212-481-8131
or [email protected].
ATED
CO-LOC
WITH
Beijing Games in Review – Streaming
along at home.
“There’s lots of work being done in advance to
establish the platforms for the sports as they go
live,” Miller said, “but ultimately, the test comes the
day the Games begin.”
Breaking New Digital Ground
Brian Goldfarb, product manager
in Microsoft’s developer division for
development platform
During the build-up stage two months before
the Opening Ceremonies, Miller professed himself
pleased with the progress his team was making,
both within the NBC family and in working with
outside partners.
“When you’re doing something so large,
so quickly, for such a short period of time, it
always means that you have to have a lot of
coordination and communication,” Miller explained. “At this point, we feel good about it,
but there are always challenges and risks. Any
time you’re dealing with technology on the Internet or mobile phones, there’s always a lot of
unknown.”
He touched on the difficulties involved in putting such massive distribution on two platforms
— Internet and mobile phones — that had not
yet been tested to this degree. “It’s all new ground,
and we’re breaking a lot of it this year, but I think we
Highlights Factory Keys NBC Olympics
Multiplatform Efforts
N
BC’s ability to ship thousands of hours of digital footage in
nearly a dozen formats relied on a complex file-based workflow overseen by 40 NBC employees working around the clock on
the eighth floor of 30 Rock.
The challenge was to help staffers readying clips for NBCOlympics.com find the material they needed easily and quickly.
“The signals from Beijing entered through [asset-management
technology] from Blue Order that creates low-res proxies of a hi-res
signal so that editors can clip out highlights,” explains Perkins Miller,
SVP of digital media for NBC Sports and NBC Olympics. Operators
chose start and end points within the file, marked and clipped
them, and then strung clips together to make highlight segments.
Those highlights then went through a workflow engine powered
by AnyStream Velocity.
“That essentially determined where the highlight was going,”
Miller said. “In many cases, it was going out to Limelight, which is
where our content was hosted for video consumption. From there,
it was ingested and transcoded so that you could consume it in our
Windows Media/Silverlight player online.”
While NBC Sports routinely encodes video for online and mobile,
content from the Games had to be encoded in 10 different ways.
“The number of outlets we had to encode for was really dramatic,”
Miller said. “We were distributing a lot more video to a lot more
disparate places.”
Among those disparate places, Olympics content was encoded
56
have some very smart engineering groups and very
smart partners who are helping us get through it.
“We streamed softball live beforehand,” he
continued, “with live commentary and live results, so we tested our video player and our
system then, and it worked well. But when we
enter the Olympics, when you’ve got so much
going on at so many venues at so many times,
there’s a lot of complexity, and you can’t ever
test for that. There’s nothing as big in scope as
the Olympics.”
Adding to the technological uncertainty is the
very nature of sports as an inexact science. “When
it comes to results, that’s another aspect of the
business that’s challenging to test,” Miller said.
“With so many sports going on live with live results, penalties may occur, delays may occur, and
that’s something you can’t prepare for in advance
of the Olympics.”
Lighting the Silverlight Torch
For their broadband coverage, Miller and his
NBC team chose Microsoft Silverlight to power
NBC’s enhanced video player on the NBCOlympics.com portal.
“The benefit and the power of Silverlight is, it
for mobile carriers, MMS video-alert delivery, EST (electronic sellthrough), NBC Direct (HD desktop downloads), TV Tonic (Internet
TV), and public networks like taxicabs and retail stores.
With so much content available, it was critical for NBC to have
a detailed search option, so each clip received multiple metadata
tags.
“Every file had both a title and metadata tagging on it,” Miller explains. “When you searched, you searched the metadata that was
defined in the file as well as the title of the file.”
Different types of video called for different metadata strategies.
Light-touch highlights, or packages comprising specific moments
from an event — all the shots on goal in a soccer game, for example — incorporated the official name of the event and whatever
details the editor added into the file archetype.
Rewind files — events streamed live online, rewound, and made
available on-demand — were inundated with metadata, including
all the timeline information delivered over the course of the event.
“While you were watching that game live, you would see data
coming in — who took a shot, what were the up-to-date shots per
minute — and all the data that came collectively with that file in
live format was available on-demand,” Miller said.
With 75.5 million total streams going out to 51.9 million unique
viewers Aug. 8-24, the highlights factory found a winning formula.
“We felt very positive in the end that we were able to do so
much,” Miller said. “It was a very ambitious project going in, but as
the data suggests, I think we had a lot of happy fans who were
able to find the Olympics in just about every digital place that they
could imagine.”
Beijing Games in Review – Streaming
delivers great-quality video with interactivity and
complementary data,” Miller explained. “As you’re
watching a video, unlike a television experience
where it’s really lean-back-and-be-entertained,
the Silverlight experience allows you to lean forward and interact.”
Silverlight enabled fans to navigate between
content offerings, receive alerts, go to a picture-inpicture view, or enter a control-room environment
to choose among four simultaneous live streams
— enhancements that came in handy in navigating the 2,100 hours of live streaming coverage available on the site.
“It gives us a lot of flexibility in how we present
the video, but also it gives the user a lot of flexibility
in terms of how they interact with it,” Miller said.
To support the financial end of this content
push, NBC relied on an advertising model, rather
than charging for subscription-based access to
the content.
“We’re about reaching and entertaining and delighting our audience, and in order to do that, we
want to make sure it’s accessible,” Miller said. “We
rely on the support of our partners and clients to
deliver this content to as many people as possible.”
Standing firmly behind NBC’s pledge to deliver
more than 2,200 hours of streaming content from
the Beijing Olympics was Microsoft’s Web-based
media player through which sports fans will be
watching all of that content.
Brian Goldfarb, product manager in Microsoft’s
developer division for development platforms,
says the effort involved a lot of stress but it was
well worth it. “I look at the capacity and everything
we’ve been able to do with the infrastructure, and
I feel very good about it,” he says.
Anticipating up to 600,000 live streams for peakinterest events during the Games, Microsoft enlisted the help of additional bandwidth from Limelight, a CDN based in Phoenix, AZ, to help cushion
some of the expected demand for the largest online event in the history of the Internet.
“We have a great relationship with our major
CDN partners, Akamai, Limelight and others, so
this is not a first step; this is just one of many that
we’ve had in the past,” Goldfarb explains.
Silverlight’s Control Room feature helped viewers break out of that box by offering five simultaneous feeds side by side, putting the viewer in the
producer’s chair.
Putting the Games in Your Pocket
With the explosion in popularity of content
for mobile devices, Miller found it increasingly
important to include the mobile platform in discussions of how and where to distribute NBC’s
thousands of hours of Olympic
coverage. But finding the right
mode of distribution for the content, he found, was just as important as choosing the best format
in which to send it.
“The mobile component is very
important because it’s a platform
that everybody’s got in their pocket,” Miller said. “It’s distinct from
what you’ve got on your desktop
or in your office at home, and we
program it that way. We program
it in bite-sized pieces so that you
can watch video clips and consume
short-form content.”
Some of the content also included
interactive elements, but the priority
remained getting the scores, results,
and stories to mobile devices as
quickly and accurately as possible.
“If you’re on the go and you want
to pull your phone out of your
pocket,” Miller said, “it’s very important, given the volume of handsets
throughout this country, that we
take it very seriously.”
Complementing,
Not Competing
Delivering content to fans who
want it was one thing, but pushing
that content over multiple platforms
for any-time access created the potential for cannibalization of NBC’s
television coverage. But Miller found
a way to use his digital offerings to
enhance the television broadcast
and bring even more viewers to the
tube, or flat-screen.
“What we’ve found in a lot of
testing and research is, the digital platforms really complement
the television broadcast,” he explained. “Given the choice, you’d
love to sit down behind a 52-inch HD flatscreen television and watch sports, but if you
happen to be away from that beautiful 52-inch
TV and you still want to be able to consume
sports, you expect to be able to connect to
that event through another platform. Enabling
people to do that through a laptop or a mobile
phone has meant that they care more about
the event and they’ll actually go watch more
television.”
The NBCOlympics.com home page was
designed to help viewers easily
navigate more than 3,600 hours of
Olympics content online.
57
Audio, Too, Is High-Def
Via Surround Sound
by Dan Daley
Calrec Sigma console
58
T
he audio for this year’s Olympics on
NBC didn’t gild the lily: The sound crew
was after gritty reality. And that was
enhanced by even more comprehensive surround audio than was used four years ago.
Bob Dixon, NBC Olympics’ director of sound
design and communications, said during the runup to the Games that this was the first Olympics
broadcast to be produced totally in high-definition with 5.1 audio, with some discrete multichannel audio from events broadcast live and with upmixed 5.1 from other venues. It was an ambitious
goal, considering that the vast majority of stereo
viewers had to be addressed, as well.
“We are still in a period of transition in the United States, so most of our audience still watch the
Games on standard-definition television receivers
with two channels of audio,” he explained. “This
means that everything we do in China must serve
both [modes of broadcast resolution].”
But when it comes to 5.1, Dixon said, the 5.1 experience needs to be consistent and seamless, and thus the
need to interlace discrete with
upmixed 5.1 audio. “The quality
of 5.1 sound brings television
viewing to a whole new
level of enjoyment,
adding another dimension that engages
viewers in programming.
If we were to shift between
5.1 and stereo audio during
our broadcasts, our digital viewers
would experience quite a shock as
sound collapsed to the front wall.”
To prevent that, NBC used the Linear
Acoustic UPMAX:neo upmixer, which allowed the
network to incorporate prerecorded or edited
stereo content into its broadcasts without interrupting the continuity of the viewing experience.
More than 30 UPMAX units were deployed in the
NBC Olympics Broadcast Center in audio-control
and edit rooms and in the quality-control area as a
monitoring and troubleshooting tool.
Although the system can also be used to create the downmixed audio from the 5.1 feeds to
stereo, Dixon emphasized that downmixes would
be done manually. “Since crowd reaction is such a
dynamic thing, I don’t want this done by a static
formula that leads to announcers’ getting buried
as the crowd explodes,” he explained. “I want this
done dynamically in a real mix.”
As complex as the sound stage for the Olympics was, the production’s audio was not sweetened. “We currently are not using sampling or
Foley techniques for post-production,” Dixon said.
“The [UPMAX:neo] system creates the upmix, but
we create signals going into the device that help
[guide] that process as much as possible. For example, we will not use coincident miking for stereo pickups because of the tendency for any matrix decoder to place coincident signals appearing
in both left and right to the center. The end result
is a disturbing mono build-up, so we try to keep
separation at a maximum.”
Also using metadata, the mix can respond to
dynamic changes. “If the surround mix gets hotter
in the rear channels, we can [program] it to attenuate those in the stereo mix so they don’t interfere
with the announcers,” Dixon explained.
Microphones
The network miked more people—participants,
coaches, and even family members—than in previous years as the narrative evolved, using both
Sennheiser wireless body packs and Audio-Technica BP-4027 shotguns attached to cameras.
“They are terrific for giving a nice soundstage
when they get up close to a coach interacting
with an athlete,” Dixon said. Even with a built-in delay, these audio tracks weren’t used live but were
mixed into replays and recorded segments.
Audio-Technica AT4050 condenser microphones
were in use for surround ambience applications as
well as in the announce booths at the Broadcast
Center, according to Dixon. Three 4050s were positioned rather high in the stadium, spread across the
field of view from the wide shot of the venue—left
front, center, right front—but pointing back toward
the crowd; two others provided left and right surround from the other side of the stadium.
“Of course, they could just as easily be on very
tall stands at ground level, pointing up to the
crowd,” he pointed out. “Everything depends on
the sound of the venue, the cable runs, and where
we have wires planned to go.”
NBC used various systems for monitoring audio.
Some flypacks were paired with Genelec 1031 5.1
systems while NBC-supplied systems at the venues and the Broadcast Center used NHT Pro 5.1
monitors. Dixon said the systems were chosen
based on their ability to translate well between
them to keep consistency to the audio.
Signal Processing
Again in keeping with the notion that the narrative has plenty of drama and texture of its own,
even the signal processing of the surround audio wasn’t there for enhancement so much as for
clarification of reality. “For NBC Olympic audio, our
processing is based on problem-solving, not necessarily on creative enhancements,” Dixon explained.
“Our consoles are so rich with built-in tools for signal processing that they come equipped to do a lot
of the daily chores like limiting, compression, and
gating, but certainly we have an assortment of outboard gear at the ready,” including the Cedar DNS
1000, Eventide Eclipse, and Yamaha SPX 2000.
Consoles and Mixers
Five 56-fader Calrec Sigma (with Bluefin) provided
audio mixing in the Broadcast Center and at a number of events across several venues. The desks had
160 channel-processing paths packaged as 48 stereo
and 64 mono channels, allowing up to 24 times full
5.1 surround channels. Two consoles provided audio
coverage for both the Opening and Closing Ceremonies. Two other consoles were used for gymnastics
and trampoline; a fifth, for beach volleyball.
At three of the smaller venues, NBC Olympics
shed its analog mixers in favor of DiGiCo DS-00
digital consoles, which Dixon said provide a 5.1capable mixing solution in a compact footprint:
“The DiGiCo is a size that fills the gap between our Linear Acoustic Upmax Neo
large-format desks and the smaller digital formats
that were really not suited to 5.1 for television.”
(Two 64-fader Calrec Sigma with Bluefin consoles,
each with 320 channel-processing paths, were installed at the International Broadcast Center (IBC) in
Beijing. In addition, BBC TV operated one stationary
160-channel 56f Omega with Bluefin console, and
SIS OBs (formerly, the BBC OB operation) used a pair
of Calrec 48f Sigma with Bluefin consoles, each with
320 channel-processing paths: one in Unit 10 covering the rowing events, the other in Unit 12 covering sailing events.)
NBC Olympics sent six discrete channels of audio
with HD pictures to the U.S. from each venue but also
sent a simultaneous two-channel program downmix, as well as a stereo downmix of the sound effects
used in promos and post-produced pieces. “We will
also be paying the greatest attention to the downmix of those channels for our stereo-listening audience,” Dixon said prior to the start of the Games.
A Miranda Technologies XVP 811 cross-converter
card that converts the HD signal to standard-def did
the downmix. That two-mix was sent to 30 Rock, and
the Broadcast Center audio mixers could confidencemonitor that from a network feed from WNBC.
Intercom
The intercom system was, by supplier Riedel’s
estimate, probably the world’s biggest and most
complex temporary intercom installation ever,
and the gear numbers climbed to staggering
amounts. For the Opening and Closing Ceremonies alone, the system comprised eight Artist
digital matrix intercom systems linked via fiber,
80 intercom control panels, 24 system interfaces
for the integration of digital partylines, 210 digitalpartyline beltpacks, 44 RiFace radio repeaters/interfaces, 650 Motorola radios, six FM transmitters,
and 12,000 radio receivers for mass monitoring of
the on-field participants.
For the 37 individual venues, there were 51 Artist
64 intercom matrices, partially linked via fiber; 185
Artist 1000 control panels; 123 C44 system interfaces for the integration of digital partylines in the
matrix environment; 1,370 Performer C3 digitalpartyline beltpacks; 42 PMX Panel Multiplexers to
distribute panels via fiber; and more than 320 pro
mobile radios integrated with the wired comms via
more than 30 RiFace radio interfaces.
59
WHITEPAPER
Omneon ProCast Hints at Future of
Long-Range File Exchange
Omneon and several partners developed a cutting-edge
“highlights factory” for NBC Olympics that enabled a significant
portion of NBC’s broadcast crew to stay home during the Beijing
Games yet have economical and efficient access to every frame
of content. Simply put, it was inevitable that, sooner or later,
bandwidth would become cheaper than travel expenses.
By Matt Adams,
Omneon,
VP of Broadcast Solutions
Matt Adams is the VP
of Broadcast Solutions for
Omneon, Inc. and with his
team provides large broadcast
customers with workflow definition, topology, and architecture design.
As an internationally known technology
architect, Adams has worked in various
positions for several broadcasting and
manufacturing companies. Prior to joining
Omneon in 2007, Adams served 10 years at
NBC working on special projects including
the role of director of technology for NBC
Olympics.
Adams has been involved in innovative
projects including the hub facilities proposal
for the first playout-based facility, DirectTV;
the video/data network for the Atlanta
Olympics; and the modular International
Broadcast Center used for the Sydney, Salt
Lake City, and Athens Olympics. He continues his Olympic involvement by managing
the Beijing Olympics contract for Omneon.
Adams has received six Emmy awards for
his technical contributions in his Olympics
work.
60
C
entral to today’s concept is Omneon’s ProCast WAN acceleration, which fused three
STM-1 data circuits between China and the U.S. In China, venue feeds were directed
to 40 Omneon MediaDecks, which simultaneously encoded the content at both air
resolution (SD or HD) and proxy resolution. Both files were then transferred to an Omneon MediaGrid storage system as they were recorded. ProCast also dynamically synchronized
the proxy files on the China MediaGrid with a second MediaGrid in the U.S. Again, files were copied as they were received; there was no need for the event to end first.
On the U.S. side, Omneon, Blue Order, MOG Systems, and Avid assembled the production workflow required for NBC Olympics. Blue Order media-asset management enabled producers to use
a rich set of desktop search tools to browse the MediaGrid proxies and make an edit sequence.
When it is completed, the user submitted the edit-decision list. The air-resolution material, which
was resident only in China, was auto-conformed by MOG and then transferred to the U.S.
For more-sophisticated edit sessions, the air-res material (with handles) was opened and finished on an Avid Media Composer. “This gives us a lot of flexibility,” says NBC Olympics SVP of
engineering David Mazza. “It’s efficient, too: we don’t need to tie up edit suites doing simple cuts,
and we had to size the transmission pipes only for the preselected high-res material.”
The system allowed NBC’s Digital Media Group to save global bandwidth resources by storing more than 3,000 hours on servers located in Beijing and allowing personnel in New York to
request only the high-resolution material they needed.
The underlying enabling technology was the Omneon ProCast CDN content-distribution platform, which provides managed and secure content distribution across multiple sites. It is an overlay infrastructure platform installed on top of any IP network, with a software CDN-Node installed
at every site where file-based content movement takes place. Together, these nodes combine to
optimize the network for movement and management of large content files.
This optimization takes several forms. First, ProCast CDN is able to make content files move
faster through the network, some 100 times faster than via FTP. ProCast CDN generates this speed
through the use of three transport protocols (WANTCP, UDPT, and SUP), plus a unique technique
called parity-on-demand, which accelerates transfer
speeds by sending Forward Error Correction (FEC) Omneon MediaDecks in Beijing and New
information only when it is needed. Other vendors York City played a key rolein NBC Olympics’s coverage of the games.
utilize FEC continuously, which slows the data
transfer.
ProCast CDN also speeds
media workflow by supporting partial-file restore
and active transfers. Partialfile restore means that the
sports technology journal / fall 2008
editor in the U.S. selecting the proxy of a single clip can receive the high-res version of just that Olympic content passed through a variety
clip — not the whole file. With active transfers, file transfers can begin even if the file is still being of systems for NBC Olympics.
written, as happens routinely in live-event coverage.
Finally, ProCast CDN can actually govern which files are transmitted when. Users may select a
priority for each job. When an urgent job is received, it claims as much bandwidth as needed, even
if other files are already being transmitted. These lower-priority jobs trickle along until the important transfer is complete; then they reclaim the bandwidth they need. A sophisticated management interface enables users to establish priorities and rules and monitor network operations.
A look at the Omneon ProCast screen inter“We’ve got dozens of customers who move thousands of hours of media files every week,” says face that allowed NBC Olympics to monitor
traffic and data flow from Beijing to the U.S.
Jorg Nonnenmacher, Omneon’s VP of content delivery network sales. “We’re new to broadcasting so this
industry is less familiar with us.”
ProCast was developed by Castify Networks, a company that focused on industrial training and hotel
VOD markets. Omneon acquired the firm in 2007.
NBC used the technology to present coverage of
virtually every Olympic sport to Web and video-ondemand mobile users in the United States. Many
events were available in their entirety; others were
“telescoped” into highlight clips. Event statistical
metadata was integrated into the Web presentation,
for example, to display the current standings, timing,
and scoring data.
“This is really the first time our viewers managed access to all of those venue feeds in the U.S.,” says Mazza.
“The Digital Media Group put together some really
groundbreaking coverage.”
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Bob McAlpine
PHONE
516-671-7278 x 308
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sports technology journal / Fall 2008 Sponsor Index
COMPANY
MultiDyne
National City Media
Finance
NCP - New Century
Productions
NEP
Nesbit Systems Inc.
NeuLion
Neutrik
New Pro Video
NewTek
NMT
NVision
Omneon Video Networks
Orad Hi-Tec Systems
Panasonic
Pixel Power
Polar Mobile
Quantel
QuStream
RayV
RC Gear
63
Advertiser Index
COMPANY
PAGE CONTACT
AFL
23
Michael McNeil
Avid
9
Carter Holland
Bexel
13, 15, 17 Jim Richardson
Canon
43
Rich Eilers
Dolby
31
Sales Department
Fujinon
19
Thom Calabro
Harris
Cover 3 Peter Douglas
Intelsat
3
Ronald Rosenthal
Level 3
27
Jennifer Whiting
Communications
NEP
21
Gerry Delon
NMT
51
Frank Coll
Panasonic
Cover 2 Frank Giannuzzi
QuStream
35
Randy Lloyd
Michael
Riedel
29
Descoteau
Ross Video
49
Jeff Moore
Shure
33
Kevin Daniels
Sony
Cover 4 Steve Stubelt
SOS Global
37
Fernando Soler
Thomson Grass
5
John Giove
Valley
Vinten
41
Ali Ahmadi
VIZRT
47
Isaac Hersly
Vusion
45
Joe Gomes
PHONE
212-252-7555
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615-696-0967
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64
s
sportsvideo
SportsVideoFall Wrapup
New Technology, News, & Innovations
A Crewing Alliance
he Crewing Alliance is quickly gaining
in popularity, providing a comprehensive list of every major crewer in
the country in one place with all phone
numbers and e-mail addresses. Every
part of the country is represented by a
dedicated crewer, capable of handling the
manpower needs of any size remote production. With more than 10,000 unique
page views since its inception just a few
months ago, www.CrewingAlliance.com is
being accessed daily by network crewers,
regional sport network crewers, mobileunit companies, and a wide variety of
sports, news, and entertainment-program
producers. With college football, NHL, and
NBA broadcasts this fall, the members of
the Crewing Alliance is very busy crewing
more than 2,000 mobile-television events
this season. Visit www.CrewingAlliance.
com for easy access to a nationwide network of the best local television crewers.
And, with affordable filebased camera formats
like P2 and XDCAM EX,
more professionals are
now free to create their
projects in HD.’
T
Abekas
bekas could not ensure a clean
fight on the field of competition in
Beijing, but the company did its part to
ensure a clean broadcast of the event.
Abekas delivered more than 20 AirCleaner
HD/SD digital video/audio profanity delay
systems to China for use by major broadcasters Hebei-TV and Jiangsu-TV during
the Olympic Games. These broadcasting companies used AirCleaner in their
production studios during live broadcasts
of the Summer Games.
At the push of a button, AirCleaner
screens offensive visual content with a
gradual real-time defocus operation using
a built-in visual-effects engine. At the
first sign of a visual offense, the operator
presses a trigger that defocuses the video,
which wraps back into focus when the
screening button is released.
‘The video-defocus-effects engine is
unique to our product,’ explains Douglas
Johnson, chief product manager for Abekas. ‘It simulates that the camera shooting
the shot goes out of focus momentarily.
In competing delay systems, the trigger
button switches to another camera
feed, so there’s a continuity change in
the program. This will produce a visual
A
Abekas AirCleaner
change as well, but it does not rely upon a
secondary feed, so you can use the main
line feed and defocus it as you need to
mask things.’
For audio offenses, the AirCleaner offers
a real-time audio-jumble feature.
Adobe
dobe’s newly released Premiere
Pro CS3 provides a true tapeless
high-definition workflow from capture to
output for its native support for the Sony
XDCAM EX and HD and Panasonic P2
camera formats. ‘We natively import and
edit Panasonic P2/MXF files; there is no
transcoding or rewrapping,’ says Dennis
Radeke, business development manager
for Adobe. ‘We learned what our customers wanted and how we can learn from
the mistakes of other implementations of
P2 workflows.’
Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 does not
transcode or rewrap XDCAM or P2
formats into another file format, so editors
can deliver higher-quality footage and
accelerate the video-production process
by editing the camera source files directly.
Besides the convenience of editing video
natively, retaining valuable metadata
information makes it faster and easier
to search through content. Editors can
mix other file formats within the Adobe
Premiere Pro timeline, combining content
from multiple sources. The end result is
that broadcasters and other professionals
can shorten the time it takes to edit and
air content.
‘Due to the speed, capacity, and efficiency of file-based camera formats, tape
workflows are rapidly being replaced by
high-capacity data cards, hard drives, and
compact storage devices,’ says Simon Hayhurst, Adobe senior director for dynamic
media. ‘Adobe is committed to bringing
video, film, and broadcast professionals
highly integrated, tapeless production
workflows from capture to output that
help enable them to deliver projects faster.
A
Akamai
kamai cached and delivered all of the
static content for NBCOlympics.com,
and its technology was used by NBC for
dynamic site acceleration, event planning,
and support and syndication services.
Akamai also worked with the European
Broadcast Union (EBU) to deliver Olympic
video to the sites it supported, including
Eurosport, TF1, Canal+, Y.L.E. (Finland), and
France Television. Among other international clients of the Web-services supplier:
Chinese portal Sohu, MySpace China,
Tudou.com, PPLive.
A
All Mobile Video
MV recently completed a high-definition upgrade of its Crossroads mobile
production unit. Crossroads has been
equipped with a Sony MVS 8000 switcher,
Sony HDC 1000/1500 cameras, Fujinon
lenses, and Studer Vista 8 digital audio
console. The company also acquired the
Westar Teleport facility in Dallas this year.
The facility consists of 30 satellite dishes
and seven strategically located microwave
towers as well as a fiber network with
co-locations in New York, Chicago, Los
Angeles, Dallas, and Washington. AMV
continues to expand its services through
an aggressive program of equipment
purchases, including from both Harris and
Tandberg.
A
Alliance Digital
lliance Digital, via strategic partner
Bexel, provided Avid HD edit gear,
including the Avid Unity v5.0 Storage Area
Network, for the Olympic Games.
‘We were so thrilled to be working on
this project with our partners at Bexel,’
says Tim Okon, general manager of Alliance Digital’s remote operations division,
shortly before the Opening Ceremonies.
‘It’s really exciting to take part in providing
the very latest in cutting-edge technology solutions for a high-profile broadcast
A
➤ For an index of
company contacts,
go to page 62-63.
New
Technology,
News,
& Innovations
event like the Olympic Games.’
This came on the heels of a very
successful co-endeavor to provide collaborative non-linear, file-based workflow
environments in both cities of the NBA
Finals, for ‘turn-and-burn’ broadcast of the
Games.
Apple
or its coverage of the 2008 Beijing
Summer Games, Mexico-based Televisa — the major distributor of Olympic
content for Mexico and
the largest media company in the Spanish-speaking world — sent a team
of more than 200 people
to China. To support the
team and to enable 12
hours of daily broadcasts,
much of it live, Televisa
created its own end-toend television station
inside the International
Broadcast Center (IBC), including two live
studios, using Apple’s Final Cut Studio and
Xsan technology.
In Beijing, for the first time, Televisa used
a Mac-based, 100-percent-digital, tapeless
workflow to deliver high-definition and
standard-definition content simultaneously. Using Xsan, Televisa had more than
200 TB of storage connecting more than
100 Mac Pro, iMac, and Xserve systems.
Gallery Sienna automation controlled
complete production process, from ingest
to playout, integrating seamlessly with
Final Cut Studio 2.
Televisa used an integrated Xsan infrastructure of nine Fibre Channel online clients and 14 Gigabit Ethernet-connected
offline clients to edit and package content
coming from 22 simultaneous ingest stations. The entire system was controlled by
Sienna’s OriginOne gateway server, which
manages the updating of clips from
ingest through editorial to playout.
F
Televisa’s
Olympic setup
Arctek Satellite
rctek used FOR-A FRC-7000 HD
frame-rate converters for the live
broadcast of the World Championship of
the International Ice Hockey Federation.
The three-week tournament was played
in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Quebec City,
Quebec. An SD signal was also supplied,
after being downconverted to PAL.
Arctek had been contracted to provide
a 1080/50i HD signal to Europe during the
A
➤ For an index of
company contacts,
go to page 62-63.
66
World Championships and was looking
for frame-rate–conversion solutions.
Ascent Media
scent Media completed the comprehensive upgrade and pre-shipment testing of the prefabricated studio
and control facilities used by the NBC
Olympics production team to support
the production of the Beijing Games, the
first Olympics to be produced entirely in
high-definition. The facilities were shipped
to Beijing in March, where they were
assembled.
Dubbed RIBs (Racks in Boxes), the
seven prefabricated units were preconfigured in Ascent Media’s San Jose,
CA, location to accommodate camera
equipment, graphics insertion, recording
and playback, transmission, and a variety
of other production functions. More than
4,000 pieces of equipment and more than
40 miles of cable were procured, integrated, and tested during the 12-month
process.
A
Aspera
spera Console is Aspera’s networkwide transfer-management software
system. Administrators have centralized
control and visibility over global networks
running high-speed transfers between
multiple Aspera endpoints, such as Aspera
point-to-point, Aspera enterprise server,
and Aspera connect server. Administrators
have high-level and drilldown visibility
into all transfer jobs and transferring endpoints, including job progress, expected
finish times, and bandwidth performance.
Aspera Console offers centralized control
over the absolute speed and bandwidth
priority of individual transfers and groups
in aggregate.
Aspera’s breakthrough transport
technology, ‘fasp,’ offers high-speed data
transfer in media and entertainment
and is deployed throughout a variety of
industries, as well as government and
defense markets.
A
Audio-Technica
udio-Technica provided microphones
for NBC’s coverage of the Beijing
Olympics. The network used several Audio-Technica microphones, headphones,
and related products.
The AT4050 Multi-pattern Condenser
Microphone provided the discrete
5.1-channel audio bed from the venues
for surround-sound broadcast, and the
A
BP4027 Stereo Shotgun Microphone set
to the XY mode was a primary camera
mic. Other models supplied include the
AT825 OnePoint X/Y Stereo Field Recording Microphone and the AT892 MicroSet
Omnidirectional Condenser Headworn
Microphone.
Bob Dixon, director of sound design,
NBC Olympics, says NBC met the needs of
both surround sound and stereo viewers
and Audio-Technica microphones provide
versatile solutions.
Avid Technology
or the fifth consecutive Olympic
games, Avid Technology had a presence with NBC, providing 224 TB of Avid
Unity ISIS shared storage to be dispersed
across four systems, including an Avid
Interplay system. NBC also deployed
approximately 34 Avid systems for
editing, ingest, capture, and playout and
used Avid DNxHD codec to significantly
reduce storage and bandwidth requirements, while providing mastering-quality
HD media. ‘With these games, we have
installed the largest and most integrated
Avid environment to date for NBC Olympics, particularly with the addition of the
Avid Unity ISIS and Interplay systems,’
says Dave Mazza, NBC Olympics SVP,
engineering. ‘Being able to integrate all
of the Avid solutions, on a combination
of shared-storage networks over Gigabit
Ethernet, plays an integral role in helping
NBC succeed in delivering the most
hours of Olympic programming ever.’
F
B&H
he Studio at B&H, a new division of
B&H Photo Video Pro Audio, is dedicated to providing solutions for broadcast
and digital cinema by offering a full range
of products and services for all of your
production and postproduction needs.
The Studio team consists of highly skilled
professionals, with real-world production
experience, who are available to assist
with pre- and post-sales support, consultation, and system design and integration.
With a showroom conveniently located in
midtown Manhattan, clients have the opportunity to test and compare equipment
as well as participate in product demonstrations and training opportunities.
T
Bexel
exel, which has been involved with
the Olympics going back to 1984 in
Los Angeles, supported Beijing Olympic
B
Broadcasting (BOB), NBC Olympics, NBC
News, and others with rental gear and
also its Hercules flypack. ‘We supported
them with a number of different items, a
couple of small flypacks, a couple of Sony
3300 Super Mos, and a number of long
lenses,’ says Craig Schiller, VP/GM of Live
Event and Field Production. ‘We also supported the remote camera vendors with a
number of wide-angle lenses.’
The Hercules flypack has many key
components including the Sony MVS8000G HD switcher with individual keyer
resizers and internal format converters so
it is future-proofed to support 1080-line
progressive-scan high-definition (HD)
production. ‘It lives at the heart of the new
flypack system,’ says Schiller, ‘And with the
new interface with EVS this will give users’
access to the flagship EVS XT [2], one of
the fastest, most flexible and reliable HD
video servers in the world.’
Calrec
n Beijing, both NBC Olympics and the
BBC faced a brand-new challenge. For
the first time, the Games were produced
in surround sound, and the implications
for audio were significant.
Calrec had 11 digital consoles in
Beijing, of which NBC Olympics was using
eight: an Alpha with Bluefin console was
installed at Beijing’s National Aquatics
Center to provide audio mixing for swimming and diving, two Sigma with Bluefin
consoles were at the IBC, and five Omega
with Bluefin consoles were located at various locations in the city.
Two of these consoles provided coverage for both the Opening and Closing
Ceremonies and track and field; two
others were used for the gymnastics and
trampoline; the fifth, for beach volleyball.
Calrec had another Omega with
Bluefin console used in Beijing by the BBC
to broadcast to its viewers and two additional consoles with the UK’s SIS Outside
Broadcasts. These two Sigma with Bluefin
consoles covered rowing and sailing
events for the host broadcaster in China.
‘Each Olympic Games brings with it
new demands for better technology,
increased flexibility, and greater efficiency,’
says Bob Dixon, NBC’s Project Manager
for Sound Design at the Olympics. ‘Since
1996, we have gone from an analog-only
two-channel contribution and distribution audio platform to a fully digital,
discrete 5.1-channel platform.
I
last-minute modifications simply by a
click of a button.
CALREC
Bluefin
Canon Broadcast
anon Broadcast was the exclusive
provider of HD lenses to NBC Olympics for its coverage of the Games. NBC
also used the Canobeam DT-150 HD Free
Space Optics video-transceiver system for
transmitting ‘beauty shots’ of Beijing back
to NBC’s Olympic broadcast facility.
‘This was the seventh consecutive
Olympics that NBC has entrusted Canon
to be our exclusive lens provider,’ says
Dave Mazza, SVP, engineering, NBC Olympics. ‘This is not something we take lightly.
We only get one shot at capturing each
moment of competition and emotion at
the Olympic Games.’
Mazza says the latest features of the
DIGISUPER 100AF long-field auto-focus
HD zoom lens and the economics of the
DIGISUPER 22xs compact studio ‘box’ lens
fit right into NBC’s production requirements.
The Canon DIGISUPER 100AF and
DIGISUPER 86AF lenses (model numbers
XJ100x9.3B AF and XJ86x9.3B AF, respectively) create an operator-controllable window in the HD camera’s viewfinder that
targets the scene subject that operators
select for sharpest focus. Camera operators can change the window’s position
and size by means of a miniature joystick
on the camera handle’s focus servo
control.
C
Chyron
BC Olympics and Televisa used
Chyron equipment for the
Olympics, and 12 of Chyron HyperX2
graphics engines were used by broadcasters in Beijing. The turnkey system
combines the award-winning Lyric PRO
motion-graphics software powered by
a video graphics processor that delivers
more than twice the performance of its
predecessor.
The HyperX2 graphics engine can
simultaneously manipulate 3D layers
of objects and scenes imported via
Autodesk’s FBX format while compositing
real-time data streams enriched by Adobe
XMP metadata. The Lyric PRO software
platform provides precise control over
every transition and effect with a broad
array of adjustments for quick and easy
N
Cisco
isco’s IP video infrastructure enabled
NBC personnel in New York and Los
Angeles to edit video as it was captured
in Beijing before delivering it to three
screens: TV, PC, and smartphone.
‘With the Cisco network solution, we’ve
achieved the Holy Grail of digital video,
which is the ability to perform shot selections on low-resolution files and extract
high-resolution material from those files
even as they are being recorded. That
is a huge accomplishment,’ says Craig
Lau, VP for information technology, NBC
Olympics. ‘Cisco is a trusted partner, and
in the demanding IT environment of the
Olympic Games, we depend on trusted
relationships. We have absolute deadlines
for when Olympics coverage begins and
ends. Cisco technologies help us exceed
expectations and meet our timetables in
an unforgiving environment.’
The trans-ocean network powered by
Cisco enabled the transfer of gigabytesized files between Beijing, New York, and
Los Angeles. In previous Olympics, NBC
staff had to work from videotapes to add
graphics and captions to event shots.
C
Clear-Com
lear-Com provided a communication
network that linked the International Broadcasting Center, the hub of all
broadcasting activities for the Olympics,
and China Central Television’s (CCTV) new
Television Culture Centre (TVCC) and its
existing headquarters.
The buildings are more than 10
miles apart and were networked using
Clear-Com’s fiber-link technology with
a redundant E1 and VoIP connection as
an automatic failover backup to ensure
continuous connectivity between IBC,
the TVCC, and the existing CCTV building.
The deal with CCTV will form the basis
of a major reimplementation of CCTV’s
intercom architecture.
‘CCTV has really invested a lot of money
in modernizing their infrastructure and
becoming a much more powerful force in
terms of technology and the overall infrastructure,’ says Matt Danilowicz, managing
director of Clear-Com. ‘CCTV was very
rigorous in the selection process for the
Olympics because this had implications
beyond Olympics coverage.’
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New
Technology,
News,
& Innovations
Clyne Media
lyne Media is one of the premier specialized marketing communications/
public relations agencies in the U.S., serving the needs of leaders in the broadcast/
high-technology entertainment market
sectors and related industries. With a solid
background and thorough understanding
of contemporary/interactive marketing
and public relations, Clyne Media has the
tools to support its clients with services
both broad and creative.
for the entire Linear Acoustic product
range, which includes the AERO suite of
audio-processing tools, StreamStacker
HD codecs, and MetaMAX series LA-5180
audio metadata frame synchronizer and
generator.
‘We’re very pleased to offer our broadcast and production clients state-of-theart surround and loudness products from
Linear Acoustic,’ says Joe Prout of Dale Pro
Audio. ‘In the transition to DTV broadcasting, many of our clients are looking for the
best possible solutions for surround sound
and the measurement and control of
loudness in their digital-audio chain. The
addition of the fine, comprehensive line
of Linear Acoustic digital-audio-processing products to our portfolio allows us to
provide such solutions.’
Corplex
orplex recently purchased a selection
of HD lenses from the Broadcast and
Communications division of Canon U.S.A.
Inc. Among the equipment purchased
were two DIGISUPER100xs and five DIGISUPER 86xs long-zoom HD field lenses,
all with Canon’s proprietary Optical Shift
Image Stabilizer (Shift-IS) technology for
rock-solid HD images, even at telephoto
distances. Also supplied were several
orders of two Canon HD portable-lens
models for EFP-style coverage on the playing field: the HJ11ex4.7B IRSE wide-angle
zoom and the HJ22ex7.6B IRSE long-focallength zoom.
Dolby
roadcasts of the 2008 Beijing Olympic
Games in HD and Dolby Digital 5.1
increased dramatically worldwide. Dolby
provided both products and personnel to assist broadcasters in delivering a
premium experience to viewers.
For the first time, the host broadcaster,
BOB, made available both high-definition
video and 5.1-channel discrete audio
from every venue embedded within
HD-SDI streams. China Central TV (CCTV)
delivered the 29th Summer Games to the
host country with exhilarating high-definition picture and Dolby Digital 5.1 from
its new Beijing headquarters to its new
CCTV purchased two Eclipse Omega
systems with 144 ports in total, which
formed the heart of the network at the
IBC and TVCC. Clear-Com’s 12- and 24-key
Eclipse V-Series user panels was also
installed in various production rooms.
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C
CSP Mobile Productions
SP Mobile Productions recently
worked with Cary Glotzer at TupeloHoney Productions to produce the broadcast and cable coverage of the Major
League Soccer teams in Salt Lake City,
Houston, and Chicago. Of the 57 games
on the schedule, CSP’s Digital Unit 3 is
handling 33 of the prime shows, and Unit
5 is doing the splits on the East Coast. The
trucks have been traveling from Maine to
Texas, from Utah to Illinois. CSP also supplied, via freighter, ESPN with Unit 5 for an
international soccer game between the
USA and Barbados.
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C
Dale Pro Audio
ale Pro Audio will serve as a master
distributor of Linear Acoustic’s range
of products for managing multichannel
surround-sound audio and loudness
issues in digital broadcasting. Dale Pro
Audio will represent and provide support
D
➤ For an index of
company contacts,
go to page 62-63.
68
free HD channel, which CCTV went
launched at the begin- 5.1 with
Dolby
ning of 2008.
NBC broadcast the
games in HD with Dolby
Digital 5.1 on its NBC HD channels in the
U.S. NBC also employed Dolby LM100
Broadcast Loudness Meters and successfully used them to consistently mix to a
dialogue reference level of –23, matching
its other network content.
EBU multilateral and unilateral HD
contribution feeds were used by most
of the European broadcasters to receive
the signals from Beijing. For the multilateral feeds, the 5.1 audio was encoded in
Dolby E. Broadcasters that transmitted the
Games in Dolby Digital 5.1 included the
BBC on Sky HD and FreeSat HD, Spain’s
TVE HD channel via Sogecable, RTP
Portugal HD channel on the ZON cable
TV, Sweden’s SVT, Austria’s ORF, HD Suisse
(Switzerland), and TVP (Poland). Slovenian
broadcaster RTS’s HD test transmitter
broadcast MPEG-4 (H.264) video with
Dolby Digital 5.1 audio.
Dome Productions
ith support from Dome Productions’ Horizon HD and Trillium HD
mobile units, ABC/ESPN provided instant
replay for all 32 games of the Little League
World Series, giving both broadcasters
and baseball officials a viable testing
ground for the technology. The telecast
relied on nearly 20 cameras, 13 to cover
on-field action and additional units for
the host set and broadcast booth. As has
become standard, each manager, umpire,
and first- and/or third-base coach was
wired for sound during the games, with
their comments subject to a five-second
delay. Trillium HD was assigned to one
of the two fields of competition while
Horizon HD covered the other with more
than 150 production personnel on site. ‘It’s
quite a big integration,’ explains Michael
Johnson, director of engineering for
Dome Productions. ‘The venues are not
cabled, so there’s quite a deployment of
cabling to pull that show together. We’ve
also linked the two trucks together with
a trunking system that allows us to make
the intercom look a little bit bigger and
gives us better programming capabilities.’
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DTAGS
TAGS specializes in turnkey transmission solutions for live sports, news,
and special events with fully managed
HD encoding and decoding systems to
allow customers to transmit HD and/or
SD signals over both satellite and fiber
infrastructures. They offer reduced transmission costs with multichannel encoding
as well as audio and transport-stream
monitoring and analysis.
‘The common goal in the broadcast
industry today is to deliver a complete
high-definition experience,’ says Mike Burk,
president of DTAGS. ‘As broadcast content
migrates to various HDTV formats, it will
be essential for media-content owners
D
to choose encoding services featuring
maximum flexibility and the highest quality of service.’
Euphonix
even Chinese broadcasters used 17
Euphonix digital audio broadcast
consoles for complete high-definition
coverage of the Olympic Games. CCTV,
the country’s largest broadcaster, had four
Euphonix consoles, two Max Airs, and a
System 5-B in its state-of-the-art broadcast
facility and another System 5-B in its OB
truck. Shandong TV had two Euphonixequipped OB trucks as well as a Max
Air-equipped-studio.
Chongqing TV equipped two large OB
trucks with Euphonix Max Air consoles for
broadcasting directly from the Olympic
Village, while TVCC had two Euphonix
System 5-B broadcast studios, and Jiansu
S
EUPHONIX had an Olympic
presence
TV’s OB truck featured a Max Air. Liaoning
TV used a Max Air on its OB truck and a
System 5 for postproduction. Yunnan TV
had a Max Air-equipped OB truck and a
System 5-MC console in its postproduction studio.
Three Euphonix clients — CCTV, Liaoning TV, and Shandong TV — also used the
new Euphonix high-density-fiber Stagebox for their OB applications. The modular
remote audio interface solution for
broadcast applications features redundant
fiber audio connectivity and control. The
Stagebox connects multiple high-density stage boxes into the Euphonix DSP
SuperCore via MADI and can handle up to
56 mic preamps.
Eutelsat
ello HD, Hungary’s first high-definition television platform, is gearing up
for launch on May 1 from the EUROBIRD
9 satellite operated by Eutelsat Communications. Using two transponders
H
leased on a long-term basis on EUROBIRD
9, Hello HD’s new TV platform will feature
industry-leading HDTV services including
Eurosport HD, National Geographic HD,
Filmbox HD, and HBO HD, complemented
by high-quality Hungarian channels
broadcasting in standard digital.
Hello HD will be available to viewers on
a subscription basis using CONAX encryption. Subscribers will procure a high-definition set-top box provided by the Swiss
company Advanced Digital Broadcast
(ADB), which enables high-definition and
standard-definition reception based on
the DVB-S2 standard and is also equipped
with PVR (personal video recorder) and
VOD (video-on-demand) features. In
fourth quarter 2008, Hello HD plans to
launch video-on-demand and a range of
value-added interactive services.
Hello HD’s choice of EUROBIRD 9 will
also enable satellite homes in Hungary to
receive digital channels broadcasting from
Eutelsat’s HOT BIRD video neighborhood.
Using off-the-shelf double-feed antennas,
Hello HD subscribers will be able to use
the same dish to pick up content available
free-to-air at the HOT BIRD position.
EVS
VS was heavily involved in the
production of the 2008 Beijing
Olympic Games, more than 600 EVS XT[2]
servers and related software applications
— including IPDirector, MulticamLSM,
and CleanEdit — deployed worldwide.
Host broadcaster BOB assigned EVS to
install the first-ever fully HD central media
server in the IBC. For this purpose, a cluster
of EVS HD XT[2] servers associated with
a series of network and software control
solutions designed by EVS were set for
recording up to 40 live HD feeds and two
additional ENG feeds originating from
different venues. All content recorded on
the media server was logged with associated metadata on 42 IPDirector logging
stations. These logs made it possible to
instantly retrieve media on the server
for further selection and transfer to local
production and postproduction facilities.
About 2 million logs were created and
stored on the central database.
All OB trucks covering the different
venues during the Games were outfitted
with EVS XT[2] production servers and related software applications for managing
all live replays, instant highlights, and live
slow-motion replays. In total, 60 OB trucks
E
equipped with
XT[2] servers
were configured
to record hours
of HD footage
from multiple
camera angles
in loop mode
and play back
instantly to the PGM.
EVS equipment was also used in
many tapeless production workflows of
broadcasters covering the Games from
their main production bases, including
BBC, NBC, CBC, Televisa, France Televisions,
CCTV, NHK, RTR Sports, Channel 7, TVNZ,
MBC, Channel 13, TVE, TVB, RAI, YLE, and
many more.
Fischer Connectors
ifty percent lighter than typical metal connectors, compact, and offering
excellent strength-to-weight ratio,
the new Fischer AluLite range is
designed for mobile equipment,
portable systems, and handheld devices. The Fischer AluLite
connectors integrate with a variety
of product designs while also offering a flexible color-coding system. The
company says the rugged, 360-degree
EMC shielded, sealed up to IP68 (2 m/24
h) or hermetic, can withstand harsh
conditions. The plugs and receptacles
are also engineered to endure more
than 5,000 mating cycles within a
temperature range of -50C to +150C.
Additionally, the anodized finished connector housing is engineered with an
aluminum alloy chosen for its anticorrosion property.
More than 600
EVS servers were
in Beijing
F
FISCHER
CONNECTORS
AluLite connectors
Fletcher Chicago
letcher’s award-winning sports
department supplies specialty
cameras to the NBA, NHL, MLB, NFL, and
NASCAR. Most recently, Fletcher’s NAC
Hi-Motion super-slow-motion camera
system was used by NBC for coverage of
the U.S. Open. ‘One big thing that NBC
liked was that a normal cameraman can
use the camera without special training,’
explains Tom Fletcher, president. ‘Until the
Hi-Motion was released, you needed a
specialized camera and tape operator to
shoot greater than 180 frames per second.
This camera system drops right into
production and can be painted with a full
standard CCU to match all of the cameras
F
New
Technology,
News,
& Innovations
in the show.’
The camera gives replays up to 600
frames per second and features a standard
B4 lens mount, allowing the camera to accept the full range of standard SD and HD
video sports lenses without an adaptor
and light loss.
Fujinon
ore than 65 Fujinon lenses were
in Beijing as part of Burbank,
CA-based Bexel’s rental gear. Many of
the lenses were used to provide coverage of key venues for the host and U.S.
broadcast feeds and robotic announce
positions. Fujinon was able to meet
Bexel’s extensive lens requirements,
including full servo modules for many of
the lenses. The equipment-rental company purchased more than $1 million in
Fujinon lenses as part of a major upgrade
to HD field lens. Among the lenses used
were 24 Fujinon HA13X4.5 wide-angle
HD lenses with remote servos, 10 Fujinon
HAs18x7.6BMD HD zoom lenses with
remote servos, and four Fujinon HA25 x
11.5 HD lenses (25 mm to 287.5 mm with
2x) with full servo.
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Game Creek Video
ame Creek Video, based in Hudson,
NH, launched its latest HD mobile
unit in mid-August. The new unit,
called Liberty, features Sony HDC 1500
cameras, a Calrec Alpha Bluefin audio
console, a Grass Valley Kalypso production switcher, and a Qustream Pesa
audio and video routing. It travels with
an expanding B unit.
Liberty will be primarily assigned to
ESPN on ABC for Saturday-night college-football games and will also provide
mobile facilities for ESPN’s and ABC’s
coverage of the NBA. These assignments
led to a close collaboration with the ESPN
production teams for college football and
the NBA. Derek Mobley, Paul Krugman,
and Jack Coffey from college football’s
production team and Jimmy Moore, Scott
Pray, and Eddie Okuno from the NBA production team all played a major role in the
final layout and equipment decisions.
‘When you have an accomplished
group of television professionals using
your trucks, it makes sense to get their
ideas on how to make the workplace
more efficient,’ says Game Creek president
Pat Sullivan.
Liberty will be the company’s 12th
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➤ For an index of
company contacts,
go to page 62-63.
70
mobile unit and eighth high-definition
facility.
Genesis Networks
s part of a service offered to visiting
news teams by Global Vision, a leading provider of broadcasting and transmission services in the Asia/Pacific region,
the Genesis Networks fiber infrastructure
delivered broadcast news feeds to global
audiences from key Beijing landmarks
throughout the Olympic Games.
Global Vision provided transmission
services from two iconic locations in Beijing: a site overlooking the Olympic Green
with views of such venues as the Bird’s
Nest and Water Cube, and the Ancient
Observatory, built in 1442 and offering
sweeping views of downtown Beijing.
Global Vision also provided SNG-vehicle
broadcasting locations in and around the
city.
For occasional-use feeds, as well as
news teams broadcasting from a single
location for the duration of the Games,
Global Vision offered integrated live standup and playout services for the ‘first mile’
of video delivery out of Beijing. Genesis
Networks then picked up the feeds for
delivery over its terrestrial fiber network to
major media hubs on all other continents.
‘The Global Vision Beijing service offering was an excellent example of how
terrestrial fiber can complement satellite
transmissions for international delivery
of breaking news,’ says Doug Triblehorn,
Genesis Networks VP, Asia/Pacific.
A
Gerling Group
erling and Associates just completed
work on several large production
trailers that served the Olympic Games
from China for several Europe-based
clients. The work during the past year
included completing five double-expanding-side production trailers and two
single-expanding-side trailers, six based
in Europe and one based in Turkey. Each
project had unique requirements not only
for the Games but also to last well into the
next 20 years of service.
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Glowpoint
lowpoint’s two-way interactive
broadcasting solution was used
at the NFL Draft, where it delivered live
video feeds between 32 NFL team sites.
‘Maintaining cost-effective, ultra-clean,
and proactively maintained IP network
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connections for our clients is our mission
in this industry,’ says Dan Boland, VP, broadcast & digital media, Glowpoint.
Each NFL team has a Glowpoint HD
portable transmission system that can
be moved to the team’s pressroom and
training facility. The 32 sites are connected
to one of Glowpoint’s ‘Points of Presence’
located in major cities around the country
and around the world. Connections are
then made via peering relationships with
tier-one telco service providers and then
cross-connected with leased dark fiber. In
the NFL’s case signals are routed back to
the NFL Network in Culver City, CA.
Harris
arris Corp.’s Cincinnati Broadcast
Communications division supplied
a range of high-definition and standarddefinition equipment to broadcasters
covering the Olympic Games in Beijing.
Forty staff members at the company’s
Beijing research and service facility were
available to provide services, including
sales, rentals, and setup assistance; a
stocked warehouse was also located in
the city.
Among the companies that used Harris
equipment were Japan Consortium, a
group of Japanese broadcasters covering the games; China Central Television
(CCTV); Gearhouse Broadcast, an international broadcast-services firm; Alfacam,
a Belgium-based supplier; and CBC,
Canada’s public-broadcasting system.
H
HTN Communications
TN Communications is in the process
of completing the buildout of its
DTM-based national fiber-optic network
that connects each of the professional
sports venues in Major League Baseball,
the National Hockey League, and National
Basketball Association to authorized and
non-authorized sports rightsholders.
Currently, more than 40 venues and
end-user locations have been permanently equipped with high-definition
encoding and network-convergence
equipment. All venue locations will be
equipped prior to the start of the upcoming NHL/NBA seasons.
Each location is connected to the
network via a duplex OC3-level fiber-optic
local-access channel providing up to 155
Mbps of transport capacity to and from
the network. The OC3 high-level connection features improved signal quality
H
and reliability at the venue site,
which does not exist in any other
network design.
Network services are monitored at
the HTN Network Operations Center
located in New York. All feeds, in highdefinition or standard-definition, are
monitored and managed simultaneously and in real time by qualified HTN
operators.
IBM
ince 1990, IBM has worked with the
Wimbledon team to deliver innovations to the tournament. Wimbledon.org
visitors followed the progress of their favorite players and viewed video highlights
of the day’s action and scores and results
delivered in real time.
The editorial content of the official
Wimbledon Website was managed by
the All England Lawn Tennis Club using
IBM’s workplace Web-content-manager
software. The editorial team published
hundreds of pieces of content every
day, including articles, match reports,
photos, and homepage updates. Every
stroke on every court was recorded and
delivered to the Website within seconds
and displayed through IBM SlamTracker,
which combined real-time scores and
statistics with an interactive view of the
Wimbledon Championships draw. The
same content-management system
was implemented at Roland Garros with
support of French and English microsites
in the same tool.
S
Ikegami
EP Supershooters outfitted its SS17
mobile production truck with 10
Ikegami HDK-79EC HD native multiformat
CMOS-based camera systems featuring full 16:9 aspect ratio and support of
1080/60i, 1080/24p, and 720/60p HD
resolutions.
Each camera was outfitted with
Ikegami’s VFL-900HD, a 16:9 color LCD
viewfinder measuring 9 in. diagonally and
featuring very low lag characteristic and
very wide viewing angles.
‘When we were purchasing equipment
for the new SS17 truck, flexibility was at
the front of our minds,’ explains NEP chief
technology officer George Hoover. ‘The
HDK-79EC’s ability to operate from triax
or fiber and its ability to switch between
720 and 1080 were the major reasons we
chose to purchase these cameras.
N
IKEGAMI HDK-79EC HD native
multiformat CMOS-based camera
Inertia Unlimited
he latest version of Inertia Unlimited’s highly successful X-Mo HD
high-speed camera system was used at
the 2008 Olympics. The improvements
include greater light sensitivity; dedicated
live uninterrupted HD-SDI, as well as
replay-only HD-SDI outputs, and a much
greater top speed of 6,900 fps at full 720p
resolution (1280x720 native actual pixels).
The new X-Mo camera maintains its other
advantages, which include native B4 lens
mount, no rendering ever, and the ability
to be set up in handheld, robo, or studio
buildup configurations. The latest version
of X-Mo is based on Vision Research’s V12
camera, and replays originate directly from
32 GB of memory in the camera that can
be partitioned into 64 segments to allow
for multiple replays. Replays are controlled
from the OB unit.
This year marks the third Olympics
that NBC Sports has chosen to use X-Mo,
which it deployed at the gymnastics and
track-and-field venues.
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Inlet Technologies
nlet Technologies adds to its portfolio
of digital video innovation with the
availability of live, high-definition H.264
video streaming to Adobe Flash Media
Server to reach solutions built on Adobe
Flash technology and Adobe AIR.
Inlet’s Spinnaker 7000 real-time
streaming appliance works with Adobe
Flash Media Server 3. ‘Adobe Flash is
one of the truly ubiquitous formats for
delivering content over the Web,’ says
Inlet’s CEO Neal Page. ‘By delivering live,
high-definition, and industry-standard
H.264 video streaming to Flash Media
Server, Inlet is continuing to provide the
best infrastructure for content providers
to deliver optimized, high-quality media
and increase the reach of their content.’
I
Intelsat
he European Broadcasting Union
(EBU) relied on multiple transponders
from Intelsat for the video carriage of the
2008 Summer Games to Europe.
The EBU used C-/Ku-band cross-strap
capacity on the Intelsat 706 satellite,
located at 50.2 degrees east, to distribute
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the all-HD event to its members. The
EBU, which boasts a large proportion
of the major European broadcasters as
members, provides a full range of network
services, including but not limited to
HD transmissions to broadband video
carriage.
‘By using Intelsat to deliver the Summer
Games, our members benefited from
the reliable service Intelsat offers when it
comes to large-scale events,’ says Stefan
Kurten, director of the Eurovision Operations Department.
‘We were the only satellite operator
able to offer cross-strapped C-band uplink
and Ku-band downlink capacity from
Beijing, enabling direct Ku-band reception
into Europe for the EBU,’ says Jean-Philippe
Gillet, Intelsat’s regional VP, Europe &
Middle East. ‘The 2008 Summer Games
provided another milestone in Intelsat’s
unsurpassed track record in successfully
supporting live, global HD transmissions.’
Joseph Electronics
ive-Link is a solution distributed
exclusively by Joseph Fiber Solutions
built around the standard HD and POV
modules by Telecast Fiber Systems and
Multidyne and is widely used on sports
remotes in the U.S. The audio, intercom,
and IFB interfacing was done by Studio
Technologies, utilizing parts of their very
successful models 46, 41, and 72.
Most operators have no problem
plugging signals from their camera into
an input/output panel in the stadium for
transport/interfacing back to their SNG
truck or control room. Live-Link emulates
this environment by providing a rugged
box with a standard I/O front panel for the
operator to interface the camera. The unit
supports HD, SDI, and NTSC camcorders
and has all the signals needed to support
a talent and guest, complete with intercom, IFB, and return video.
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JVC
A
lfacam installed 566 JVC Professional
monitors in its HDTV production
vans for the Olympics. The Belgium-based
company provides television facilities and
services to broadcasters and production
houses. ‘As a company that uses the most
innovative technologies, we are honored
Alfacam chose JVC’s monitors as the
exclusive monitor for their production
vans,’ says Lon Mass, VP, marketing, JVC
Professional Products Co.
New
Technology,
News,
& Innovations
Alfacam’s OB32 unit exemplifies the
builds and will be equipped with a monitor wall comprising 32 JVC display monitors. All CRT and LCD production monitors
on this 18-meter production truck are
provided by JVC.
‘JVC Professional monitors provide
the best picture quality combined with
unmatched affordability and features,’
says Bruno Coudyzer, executive manager,
Alfacam EuroLinX.
Level 3
evel 3 has expanded its suite of
content-delivery services with
Content Delivery for Extended Libraries
(CDXL). The company created the service
in response to demand from customers
with large libraries of digital assets for an
economic solution to enable them to
monetize their entire libraries of audio
and video content.
The company says its customers, such
as content owners/aggregators, sports
leagues, broadcasters, and user-generated–content sites, will be able to monetize
a larger portion of their assets, including
long-tail, or less frequently requested,
video and audio content by storing and
delivering their entire library economically
and efficiently. The dynamic intelligence
built into Level 3’s CDXL solution automatically places content on the Level 3
infrastructure based on popularity and
removes the need for customer guesswork about which assets will be popular
in certain regions at any given time.
L
LINEAR
Linear Acoustic
ACOUSTIC’s
inear Acoustic provided its UPMAX:
UPMAX: Neo
neo upmixers featuring DTS technolkeyed NBC’s
ogy
to NBC during the Beijing Olympics.
Olympic coverage
L
When content isn’t broadcast live and
is recorded or edited through a system
without enough channels for 5.1 sound,
the UPMAX:neo provides the upmixing
capability critical to maintaining the 5.1
sound field.
The UPMAX:neo uses the UPMAX
algorithm along with a special broadcast
version of the DTS Neo:6 algorithm. DTS
Neo:6 expands the palate of upmixing
choices and allows the creation of a
natural surround-sound field with precise
localization of sound elements.
The Linear Acoustic UPMAX:neo sys-
72
tem was in use at virtually every Olympics
venue involved in live broadcasting and
at the NBC Olympics broadcast center in
audio-control rooms, edit rooms, and the
quality-control area as a monitoring and
troubleshooting tool. More than 30 units
were installed for the network’s coverage
of the Summer Games.
MIRA Mobile
IRA Mobile Television is set to roll
out a 53-foot HD expando. Designated M7HD, it has the most extensive
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Kaleido-Quad multi-viewers for master-control monitoring, and 25 Kaleido
multi-image processors were used across
the Olympic Stadiums for production
monitoring.
CCTV’s new Television Cultural Centre
also installed two Kaleido-X processors,
which can display up to 160 feeds across
eight plasma displays in the master-control room. These multi-image outputs
were also displayed across 32 monitors in
four studios.
Mobile TV Group
he Mobile TV Group has built four
HD mobile units this year to meet
the demand for all high-definition
regional sports production. Starting
in October 2008, MTVG will provide
mobile units for five more pro-sport
venues.
In July, MTVG launched the first Visitor
Mobile Unit (VMU), which is a dual feed
where the home and visitor productions
work in two different trailers but at the
same low rates. Another VMU will launch
in November.
T
Mira Mobile’s M7HD
53-foot expando
technical core of any HD truck in the company’s fleet. ‘M7HD is a very different build
for MIRA than our previous two HD trucks,’
points out general manager Frank Taylor.
‘The majority of our fleet was purposebuilt to fit a specific client contract. M7HD
is the first high-definition truck we have
designed to fit the broad spectrum of client needs in the national marketplace. We
are very excited about the opportunity to
serve this client base.’
At the heart of M7HD is a Pesa Cheetah
288x576 HD video router with a 256x256
AES and analog audio router. A Calrec
Sigma audio desk is configured with 104
mono channels and 104 stereo channels
with both Dolby and SRS processing.
Video monitoring throughout the truck
will be accomplished through Evertz VIP
multi-image flat-screen displays.
Miranda Technologies
hina Central Television installed 50
Kaleido multi-image–display processors, provided by Miranda, for monitoring
two channels dedicated to the Beijing
Olympics.
During the Games, CCTV-HD broadcast
as the ‘Olympic HD Channel’ and offered
live coverage of all the events. Currently, eight cities in China can receive
HD programs: Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai,
Shenyang, Qingdao, Qinhuangdao,
Guangzhou, and Shenzhen.
At IBC, CCTV had two Kaleido-X processors and 17 smaller Kaleido-Alto-HD and
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Motorola
otorola provided the Beijing Police
Bureau its 350-MHz Tetra digital
trunked radio communications system to
support the security needs of the Olympic
Games. Beijing is the first city in China to
implement such a system, the company
says.
The comprehensive Tetra system
included 30 base stations, switches, terminals, and additional products and services.
The Police Bureau’s plans to establish a
new wireless communication system
alongside its existing wireless network
were based on stringent assessment findings conducted to strengthen, safeguard,
and ensure the complete success of the
Olympic Games.
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MRC
M
RC’s Advanced Mobile Gateway
1000 provides secure VPN connectivity between remote ENG/OB vehicles
and the broadcast studio via a 3G cellular
or Wi-Fi connection. It integrates a fullfeatured Ethernet switch, TCP/IP router,
and internal cellular amplifier and works
seamlessly with MRC’s MTX5000 and
OB5000 transmitters. Morgan Kruk, president of MRC, says, ‘Our latest solutions set
a new standard in newsgathering by providing an unprecedented and powerful
MRC’s transmitter
combination of video encoding, modulation options, IP transport, remote control
and adaptive management.’
MultiDyne
ultiDyne Video & Fiber Optic
Systems supplied its DVM-1000
composite video and audio and DTV-130
SDI fiber transport links to provide video
coverage of the 2008 Beijing Torch Relay
in Hong Kong.
‘MultiDyne’s fiber transport link played
an important role in the coverage of the
event,’ says Jackey Cheng, CT Technology,
which integrated the system. ‘We appreciated the prompt delivery and strenuous
technical support for the interface of the
cameras to the fiber links, which resulted
in smooth shooting.’
The DVM-1000 series applications
include links from studio to transmitter,
studio to studio, studio to CATV headend,
common carrier, RBOC telco circuits, distance learning, Intelligent Transportation
Systems, and backhaul feeds from special
events. The series supports NTSC, PAL, and
SECAM video signals, with diplexed audio
carriers at 4.5 MHz, 5.8 MHz, and 6.4 MHz.
The design features differential video and
audio inputs that reduce hum and noise.
M
National City
ational City Commercial Capital is
a subsidiary of National City Corp.,
Cleveland. With more than $140 billion in
financial holdings and an extensive banking network, National City Corp. provides
the fuel that drives the equipment-leasing
engine at National City Commercial Capital, which uses the resources of its parent
to offer equipment leasing to thousands
of customers: manufacturers, distributors,
vendors, large corporations, small businesses, and other leasing organizations.
N
NCP
n broadcasting the 2008 Women’s
College World Series, ESPN took a cue
from the show’s steadily increasing ratings
over the past few years and took its event
coverage to the next level. The network
once again aired the entire event in HD on
ESPN, ESPN2, and ESPN360.com, relying
on New Century Productions for mobile
I
support and bringing in Vizrt graphics
systems to enhance the production.
New Century Productions’ NCP IV
HD expando truck was the main HD
mobile unit for the production; a 53-foot
B unit equipped with an Apple Final Cut
Pro system was used for onsite editing.
NCP’s A mobile unit houses a Grass Valley
HD Kalypso switcher, 14 Ikegami HDK
high-definition cameras, and three EVS
systems, but the star of the show was the
Vizrt graphics program.
‘We were using the Viz look last year
but in a more static platform,’ says John
Vassallo, senior coordinating producer
at ESPN. ‘We’re going full Viz this year,
which will give the animated graphics the
look you’re used to seeing on our Major
League Baseball, college football, and NFL
coverage.’
NEP Visions
EP Visions provided two major
flypack systems with all the associated sound, cameras, lenses, EVSs, and
routing infrastructure for NBC Olympics for
unilateral coverage of the Opening and
Closing Ceremonies, track and field, and
gymnastics.
Each site had four spacious, air-conditioned, and carpeted cabins for the
N
NEP Visions flypacks were
used by NBC in Beijing
production-control room complete with
audio-mixing area, EVS replay, and transmission area. Because of the additional
space, NEP Visions could build production monitor walls of more than 100 LCD
monitors exactly as the director wanted
them.
The walls were made up of Marshall
10.4-in. high-resolution LCD monitors with
built-in UMDs mounted in a rack designed
specifically to the director’s layout. These
can be tilted to improve the director viewing angle, which is important with such a
large wall. Both switchers were 72 input
Grass Valley Kalypso Duo HD switchers
with four mix/effects levels.
Each area has common manufactur-
ers and models for switchers, routers,
cameras, and lenses for ease of operation
and maintenance. The furniture and metalwork for the monitor walls were built in
the UK and shipped to Beijing.
Each audio room had two Calrec
Omega sound desks, one for the main
mix and the second for effects, with 56
fader frames with 160-channel processing paths. Both Omegas were brand new
for Beijing and, with Bluefin high-density
signal processing, spectacularly powerful.
The transmission areas were virtually
identical, each equipped with 256x256
Thomson Grass Valley Trinix video routers,
256x256 Concertos for AES and analog
audio, and 128x128 Telex communication
matrices.
Nesbit
esbit Systems is pleased to announce
the broadcasting industry is giving
high marks to MLS/Preview+, the new
media-asset-management (MAM) system
that combines digital-asset-management capabilities within the framework
of Nesbit’s Media Library System. World
Wrestling Entertainment is using Media
Library System/Preview+ integrated with
the Grass Valley Aurora Browse systems,
exchanging system metadata and accessing the low-res files created by AuroraBrowse ingest. The tight coupling of the
two systems delivers rich features and
a powerfully integrated MAM solution.
Preview+ is an extension to the Nesbit
Media Library System (MLS), providing
digital-asset-management capabilities
to the MLS core features. With MLS/Preview+, users can now manage analog
and digital assets within a single portal.
Preview+ gives additional rich functionality for ingest, browse, logging, and clip
selection — without the pain and without
the cost of other MAM solutions.
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Neulion
euLion, an end-to-end IPTV service
of live and on-demand programming over the Internet and through
set-top boxes, is merging with JumpTV
to create an enterprise-level IPTV
provider. Founded in 2004, NeuLion, a
private corporation based in Plainview,
NY, provides Web-based IPTV services
to leading sports customers such as
the National Hockey League and the
International Fight League. NeuLion also
delivers a set-top box IPTV solution to
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➤ For an index of
company contacts,
go to page 62-63.
New
Technology,
News,
& Innovations
premier international customers, such as
ABS-CBN (Philippines), KyLinTV (China),
and GlobeCast (France). The merger
brings together the largest online offering through partnerships with the
National Hockey League; NCAA Division
I schools and conferences; 2010 South
American, African and Asian World Cup
Qualifiers; World Championship Sports
Network; International Fight League; and
world-class pro-cycling events such as
the Giro d’Italia, Tirreno-Adriatico, MilanSan Remo, and the Vuelta a España. The
transaction is expected to be completed
by the end of the year.
Neutrik
s athletes from across the globe were
put to the test during the Beijing
Olympics, Neutrik was there to ensure that
its broadcast customers did not miss a
moment of the action. Broadcasters had
the option of stopping by the Neutrik
Service Center for all their last-minute
on-site connectivity needs, including
connectors, adapters, cable assembly, and
repair work.
The Neutrik Service Center was located
just a few feet from the International
Broadcast Center and was operational
throughout the Olympic Games.
‘Neutrik is proud to be a part of the
2008 Summer Olympic Games,’ said
Jim Cowan, president of Neutrik USA,
during the event. ‘Our presence at the
Olympics isn’t only about ensuring that
broadcasters have all the tools necessary to cover and air the events, but it
showcases our dedication to the global
marketplace.’
A
NewTek
ports fans were able to watch the USA
Wrestling Team Olympic Team Trials
from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas
live from anywhere in the world via the
Internet, with the help of USA Wrestling IT
director Meredith Wilson and NewTek TriCaster. TriCaster can be deployed in place
of, or in conjunction with, live TV trucks,
offering cost-savings and -efficiency.
TriCaster’s short learning curve allowed Wilson to produce and stream
the event with little hesitation after
sitting at the controls for the first time
earlier that day. Among the viewers
in attendance were servicemen and
-women from around the globe, including those in Iraq and Afghanistan, who
S
➤ For an index of
company contacts,
go to page 62-63.
74
watched two of their own compete for
a chance to head to Beijing.
NMT
MT ushered in 2008 with the announcement that it was paring its
staff, retiring mobile units, closing a field
shop, and placing itself on the sales block.
Fast-forward, and things are starting to
look up for mobile television’s oldest
player, which recently sold off assets to
NEP in an effort to focus on the regional
sports-production market.
NMT is now gearing up for plenty of
business for the remainder of 2008. NMT’s
HD transmission package once again
anchored the Summer X-Games for ESPN.
HD11 will provide 28 cameras and 10 EVS
LSMs for Dorna Sports’ 16x9 PAL coverage
of the US Moto GP.
N
NVISION
lfacam, the Belgian TV-facilities supplier, provided 16 OB trucks to BOB
for the Summer Games, and nearly all
are equipped with NVISION routers and
AXON’s Synapse modular signal-processing equipment. Four large OB trucks each
have the NV8288 video-truck router with
3-Gbps inputs and outputs. Six other
OB trucks have the NV5128 multiformat
router equipped with HD, RS-422, and
time-code routing. The OB trucks are
also equipped with Synapse modular
infrastructure and communications
system, including a mix of SD and HD
modules, and the Synapse 2HS10, a dualchannel high-end downconverter with
de-embedding function. NVISION routers
and master control and AXON Synapse
modules were used to support the Games
by Televisa and TV Azteca in Mexico; TV
Globo, TV Bandeirantes, and Globosat
in Brazil; and ESPN and Artear in Argentina.
A
Omneon
or coverage of the Beijing Olympics,
NBC chose Omneon MediaDeck
media servers, MediaGrid active storage
systems, and ProCast CDN transport
engines to create an innovative, efficient
workflow.
Twenty MediaDeck servers located in
China were used to digitize and ingest SD
and HD feeds. Each MediaDeck contained
both high-resolution and low-resolution
codecs to simultaneously create both
full-resolution IMX or XDCAM HD files and
low-resolution proxy files of all recordings.
The resulting files were actively transferred,
F
while still being recorded, to the Media
Grid. Then, using ProCast CDN, the proxies
were transferred over 6,000 miles from the
MediaGrid in Beijing to a second Media
Grid in the U.S., where using BlueOrder’s
MediaArchive DAM solution, producers
could search, browse, view, and edit the
files. The EDLs created using the proxy
files were then used to request only the
desired SD and HD high-resolution footage over the network for final production
editing. This intelligent use of proxy-based
EDLs ensured that only the actual highresolution footage needed for each new
content package was transferred from
Beijing to the U.S., thereby saving network
bandwidth and improving the efficiency
of the workflow.
The key to the collaborative workflow was the Omneon ProCast CDN, a
file-transport engine with performance
that is unaffected by distance, enabling
it to accomplish transfers at high speeds
even across the Pacific Ocean. File-transfer
speeds achieved with ProCast CDN are
orders of magnitude greater than FTP
transfers, especially over long distances
where FTP performance typically deteriorates. For example, a one-hour DV25
file sent from Beijing to the USA on a 400Mbps connection would take 30 hours
via FTP but takes only three minutes with
ProCast CDN.
The Omneon MediaGrid system that
served as the core storage platform for
both the Beijing and U.S.-based Olympic
operations is a highly scalable storage
system that provided unprecedented
access bandwidth to multiple clients. For
the systems being deployed by NBC, both
MediaGrid systems utilized Barracuda ES
hard drives from Seagate with all system
connectivity based on Gigabit and 10Gigabit network switches from Hewlett
Packard and Cisco Systems.
Orad
CTV’s 340 million viewers enjoyed
a more intense, compelling, and
memorable Olympics experience, thanks
to graphics solutions from Orad Hi-Tec
Systems. Products included the Maestro
and 3DPlay graphics systems, the Orad
Graphic Asset Management (GAM)
system; and Orad Proset virtual studios, as
well as Orad’s outdoor branding system
and touch screen in the CCTV theater.
‘We provided CCTV with two full virtual
studios on the Olympic site,’ explains
C
Shaun Dail, VP of sales and marketing for
Orad. ‘We created virtual-monitor walls
within those virtual studios that map
video and play video on virtual objects,
and that’s something that they’re looking at as a big cost savings because we
eliminated the huge expenses involved
with video walls.’
Integrated into CCTV’s Sobey newsroom system, Maestro provided fast news
graphics and highlights from Olympic
venues. Used for real-time Olympics on-air
applications, 3DPlay enables CCTV to air
distinctive on-air graphics via a dedicated
Olympics controller.
Panasonic Broadcast
anasonic, as a supplier of HD
recording equipment for the 2008
Olympic Games, provided broadcasting equipment to BOB, including P2 HD equipment such as the
AJ-HPC2000 P2 HD camcorder, the
AJ-HPM100 P2 mobile recorder, and
the P2 station AJ-HPS1500 P2 recorder.
Additionally, DVCPRO HD was the
official HD video recording format of
the Beijing Games with both DVCPRO
HD tape recording and P2 HD solidstate-memory recording playing a role.
‘This was the most technologically advanced Olympics in the history of the
Olympic Games,’ says Manolo Romero,
CEO of BOB. ‘BOB has been very happy
with the performance of Panasonic
digital products since we first used
them in the Barcelona Games in 1992,
and now the recently expanded HD
portfolio — particularly the broad
range of advanced HD products — is
quite impressive.’
Panasonic also provided RAMSA professional audio systems and ASTROVISION
large-screen display system to various
venues including National Stadium (also
known as the Bird’s Nest).
P
Pixel Power
nnovative programming often leads to
interesting new graphics challenges.
For example, extensive use of archival
footage as clips and for rebroadcast of
historic games has led broadcasters to
reexamine the graphic content of that
material. Pixel Power is helping such
networks as ESPN automate the process
of replacing original graphics with morecurrent looks that are more appealing to
today’s audience. Pixel Power’s products
and tools enable sportscasters to in-
I
novate and enhance their programming.
Pixel Power’s Clarity 3D puts real-time 3D
broadcast graphics within reach of the
vast majority of broadcasters. Clarity 3D
offers a system that is more cost-effective,
easier to use, and more fully automated
than complex early-generation products.
Clarity 3D automatically transforms 3D
graphics objects in real-time in response
to live external data sources, such as
sports scores and statistics.
Polar Mobile
olar Mobile, a leader in providing
end-to-end mobile solutions, is helping publishers and content providers go
mobile. In September, Polar Mobile will
launch a mobile application for the Sports
Video Group as part of a new sponsorship
agreement. The application allows users
to stay connected with all of SVG’s latest
news and updates anytime, anywhere
— even on an airplane.
Polar Mobile recently announced
the launch of a mobile application for
The Hockey News, the premier source
for updates and insights from the world
of hockey. The mobile application will
allow users to read the latest articles,
scores, blogs and view videos, all from the
smartphone.
Polar Mobile’s applications for handheld devices give brands a dedicated
icon on the reader’s mobile desktop
and extend their existing content to the
mobile platform with no significant time
or technology investments. 
P
Quantel
uantel’s Enterprise sQ integrated production systems are in constant use
with major sports publishers, broadcasters, and rightsholders in the U.S.
Quantel says the key advantage its
systems bring to sports production is
speed to air, and users report that the only
limiting factor is the speed with which the
editors and operators can make decisions.
Simply put, say executives, Quantel Enterprise sQ systems will produce results to air
as fast as they can be driven.
Quantel systems also offer Stereoscopic
3D, an explosive growth area, and an
established 1080p editing workflow and
the ability to handle HD and SD simultaneously entirely within the system. Other
features include AVC-Intra encoding;
complete system scalability; full integration of remote sites with the headquarters
installation, sharing media and workflows;
Q
and a desktop editor that is easy to learn
and very fast in use.
QuStream
uStream Cheetah routers provided
the central routing system to NBC
Olympics. The Cheetah 864XR series
provides for up to 864 HD inputs and
outputs in a single chassis and occupies
41 rack-units. It formed the backbone of a
complete system installed in the IBC. The
routers were equipped with fiber-optic
and coax I/O cards and included an interface allowing it to be controlled by Sony’s
S-BUS remote router controller.
‘The Cheetah 864XR gives us a
tremendous number of crosspoints in
only 41 rack-units,’ says David Mazza,
NBC’s SVP, engineering. ‘Other companies
can require more than four equipment
racks to provide the routing capacity that
QuStream provides in only one. With real
estate at an absolute premium in the IBC,
the QuStream Cheetah 864XR was the
right choice for us.’
Q
RayV
ayV, a provider of TV over the Internet,
enables media companies to create and broadcast live linear TV to an
unlimited number of global viewers at no
distribution cost. RayV, established by the
inventors of Voice-over-IP (VoIP), delivers
real TV-like viewing experience supporting
high-quality, full-screen, 24/7 scheduled
programming with seamless distribution
via Websites and video players, as well as
set-top boxes and mobile devices in the
near future. Since the peer-based platform
offers ‘frame-synchronous’ viewing by all
users anywhere in the world, there is the
first-ever possibility of creating collaborative-viewing opportunities for small
groups of users. RayV’s headquarters are in
Los Angeles, with R&D based in Tel Aviv.
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Riedel
wenty-five of the 55 official OB trucks
covering the Beijing Olympics utilized
Riedel Artist intercom systems, making
Riedel the most popular intercom provider at these Games.
Riedel’s Artist Digital Matrix intercoms
and Performer Digital Partyline intercoms
were also in use at all of the venues at the
Games. For the communication operations, 51 Artist 64 intercom matrices were
in place, along with 185 Artist 1000 control panels and 123 C44 system interfaces
to integrate the Digital Partylines. On top
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New
Technology,
News,
& Innovations
of that, 1,370 Performer C3 digital twochannel beltpacks were also in use, along
with 42 PMX Panel Multipleers to remote
panels via fiber and more than 320 professional mobile radios that sdfd integrated
with the wired communications systems
using 30 RiFace radio interfaces.
SAMMA Systems
AMMA Systems develops and manufactures complete systems designed
to cost-effectively digitize medium-size to
large videotape archives. SAMMA products facilitate the automated migration of
videotape-based content into the emerging digital file-based environments.
Its flagship product, SAMMA (System
for the Automated Migration of Media
Assets) Robot, includes robotic tape handling of multiple simultaneous migration
streams, with closed-loop process control
to allow tapes to be migrated in a totally
unattended fashion. The result is higher
quality and faster migration at lower cost
than any other method.
SAMMA also produces SAMMA Clean
metadata-generating, archive-quality
videotape cleaner and a low-cost Motion
JPEG 2000 lossless player.
S
➤ For an index of
company contacts,
go to page 62-63.
Screen Subtitling Systems
creen Subtitling Systems supplied HD
and SD captioning systems to The
Seven Network for Seven’s brand-new HD
Channel 7HD in Australia. Channel Seven
is owned by The Seven Media Group, a
long-time Olympic broadcast partner
of the IOC. Seven is updating its current
system of Screen SRU32 units, which
successfully provided subtitle services
to Seven’s five SD services across
Australia, with Screen’s Polistream
captioning system. The new Screen
equipment expands upon the
capability of the previous system and
enables Seven to provide DVB teletext
captions to support all of its HD broadcast services.
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SENNHEISER
Professional
wireless 3000
and 5000
76
Sennheiser
ennheiser partnered with NBC
Olympics to provide 30 channels
of wireless microphones and eight
in-ear monitor transmitters with 16
receivers for the 2008 Summer Olympics. The in-ear monitors are from
the Sennheiser Evolution Wireless
IEM series.
To take advantage of Senn-
S
heiser’s Professional 3000 and 5000 series
wireless, NBC used the SK250 bodypack
transmitter and the EK3241 cameramount receiver. The Sennheiser SK250
offers 250 mW of RF output power and
unrivaled frequency-tuning agility. The
EK3241 true-diversity camera-mount
receiver offers options for slot-in use or
standalone battery-powered operation.
games simultaneously, and accelerate
the digital-archiving process by quadrupling the amount of storage space
available. All 40,000 hours of NBA game
footage dating back to 1946 will now
be ingested at twice the speed, up to
60,000 hours of video content each year,
using SGI’s InfiniteStorage Data Migration Facility (DMF).
Shure
perating on the premium Shure
UHF-R Wireless, the new UR1M Micro-Bodypack Transmitter delivers superior
wireless audio in an ultra-compact and
lightweight form factor. Don’t let the size
mislead you: it’s big on performance.
The UR1M’s small design, durability,
and robust RF performance make it the
ideal solution when a comfortable, concealed wireless bodypack is desired, such
as broadcast, sporting events, and touring
performances.
At half the size of standard bodypacks,
the UR1M measures 1.9 in. high x 2.4 in.
wide x .66 in. deep, making it easy to
SGI
place anywhere. Weighing only 3 oz
igitizing every frame of footage
with two AAA batteries, you
ever filmed by the NBA is
may even forget you’re
no small task, but at NAB, datawearing it.
processing giant SGI proved
Constructed from
that it not only is up to the task
lightweight magnesium,
but has exceeded expectations.
the UR1M is durable
SGI has announced a multiyear
enough to withstand
extension of its relationship with
being dropped or
the NBA to expand the NBA Digital
stepped on. The carefully
SHURE
Media Management system (DMM),
UHF-F designed and specially treated
allowing the league to accelerate its Wireless circuit board makes the UR1M
digital-archiving process.
more resistant to sweat than any
‘The NBA obviously has an enormous
previous bodypack.
amount of content that goes back 60
Snell & Wilcox
years, but it’s an active environment,’
explains Floyd Christofferson, senior busiroadcasters relied heavily on Snell
ness development manager for SGI. ‘They
& Wilcox equipment, including a
needed a storage environment where
range of Kahuna SD/HD multiformat
they can enhance and grow their workproduction switchers and modular and
flow while ingesting the new content that SD/HD conversion systems, at the Sumcomes in and preserving the old content
mer Olympics. NBC Universal deployed
that’s still sitting there.’
Alchemist Ph.C-HD motion-compensated,
The newly extended relationship
frame-rate-standards converters for
will maintain the one-of-a-kind DMM,
transparent conversion of HDTV content
which enables the
during its coverage. Before NBC transmitNBA to ingest and
The NBA ted Olympic content to viewers in the U.S.,
archive footage
expanded its it converted the material to the 1080i/60
from up to 14 NBA
use of SGI broadcast standard for HDTV and/or the
technology 525/60 (NTSC) standard for SDTV. As a result, NBC converted virtually every SD and
HD feed from the Olympics through Snell
& Wilcox frame-rate converters prior to
SES AMERICOM
ES AMERICOM Broadcast Services’ SES
NEW SKIES provided occasional-use
services out of Beijing via its satellites
for AT&T/NBC in the U.S., the BBC in
the UK, TV Globo in Brazil, and the EBU
(European Broadcasting Union).
Paolo Pusterla, head of Strategy
& Business Development at Eurovision, says SES NEW SKIES has been a
longstanding supplier of quality satellite
capacity to Eurovision: ‘We value the
reliability of their service and their
responsiveness in covering our needs
even in the most remote locations.’
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O
D
B
Sony Broadcast
BC Olympics used the latest version of Sony XDCAM HD technology at the Olympics, using 30 PDW-700
cameras and 170 PDW-HD1500 decks,
as well as 42 Sony HDC-1400 studio
cameras, eight MVS-8000 switchers,
and two MFS-2000 switchers. Sony HD
studio cameras were put to use by NBC
in different venues, including the HDC3300 3x super-slow-motion cameras.
Venue material was acquired using
a mix of Sony PDW-700, HDC-1400,
and HDC-3300 cameras. NBC used the
XDCAM HD camcorder as its primary
ENG camcorder for the Games as crews
recorded athlete arrivals, interviews,
venue press conferences, and other
assignments.
The new XDCAM HD models included
the PDW-700 2/3-in. CCD camcorder and
the PDW-HD1500 recording deck, as well
as the dual-layer 50-GB version of Sony’s
optical Professional Disc media, model
PFD50DLA.
N
SNELL & WILCOX Kahuna
U.S. broadcast.
CCTV, Guangdong TV, and Qingdao TV
also relied on Snell & Wilcox to bring the
action of the Olympics to their viewers in
HD. All three companies used the Kahuna
production switcher to support HD operations, and CCTV and Guangdong TV have
invested in Kahuna-equipped HD OB
vans. Qingdao TV has begun live broadcasts from its studio, where a Kahuna
supported the countdown to the Games
and showcased past champions and 2008
medal hopefuls.
More than a dozen Kahunas and 50
Alchemist Ph.C-HD and SD standards converters were used to bring the year’s most
important content to viewers around the
world.
SOS Global Express
OS Global Express helped a substantial
amount of broadcast equipment get
in and out of Beijing. The company also
had experienced staff on-site in Beijing to
help coordinate shipments and to assist
with customs, emergency shipments, and
local agents.
SOS Global Express has provided transportation and logistics to broadcasters of
the Olympic Games since the 1988 Winter
Games in Calgary. It has provided shortterm warehousing, barcoding ID solutions,
customs services, documentation, and
ocean and airfreight services.
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Solid State Logic
he Solid State Logic C100 HD range
of dedicated live-to-air and live-totape digital audio consoles were used
worldwide in news and sports-production
coverage of the Olympic Games.
The C100 product range extends
from the largest C100 HD console, capable of global-audience sports productions in full surround for HD television,
to the compact C100 HD-L console,
designed for local-audience broadcast
Studer
productions.
he increased attention to HD broadWhere other systems
casting and surround at this year’s Olscale capacity and
ympics is one of the reasons
performance, the C100
numerous broadcasters
range is different in
chose Studer consoles
scaling only capacity to
for their coverage of
match requirements. This
the Games.
means that performance
The largest concan be relied on to deliver,
sumer of Studer consoles was
SOLID STATE China’s premier broadcaster,
whatever the scale of the
operation. In a world where to- LOGIC
CCTV. Its English-speaking
day’s local news story is tonight’s C100-HD-L International channel used a
global event, being able to rely console
Studer Vista 7 in its on-air studio,
on the ability to match perwhile the main studios were
formance and quality at all levels in the
equipped with four Vista 5s and five
broadcast organization is a key benefit of
OnAir 3000s. Quindao Radio purchased
the C100 range.
an OnAir 3000 for the games, and
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T
Hong Kong’s TVB acquired a total of
five Vista 5s, three for its studio and two
for OB vans.
Local broadcasters Guangdong TV,
Beijing TV, and Shanghai Media Group
all featured Vista 8s in their trucks.
CCTV’s HD OB van was equipped with
a Vista 8 and an OnAir 3000, and TJTV’s
HD truck was equipped with a Vista 8.
HLJTV’s HD van had both a Vista 5 and
an OnAir 3000; BTV’s HD truck was fitted with a Vista 8 and an OnAir 3000;
and Jinan TV and Dalian TV’s HD trucks
were fitted with Vista 5 consoles.
Tandberg TV
andberg Television was selected to
provide MPEG-4 AVC video processing during NBC’s coverage of the Beijing
Games, the first Olympics where the
compression standard was used for HD
content.
NBC deployed a variety of Tandberg
Television products at the IBC and in the
U.S., including HD encoders, professional receiver/decoders, multiplexers,
modulators, IP adapters, and other control
equipment.
“Preparing for this major event required
us to make very careful equipment,
vendor, and solution choices,” says Dave
Mazza, SVP, NBC Olympics engineering.
“Selecting Tandberg Television for this
project was easy. Their rock-solid contribution and distribution products and the
expertise of their team members allow us
to continually raise the bar and provide
our viewers with exceptional picture
quality.”
NBC’s HD coverage, sent to the U.S. via
NBC’s contribution network, was encoded
by Tandberg Television EN8090 HD MPEG4 AVC encoders, which then compressed
it into an MPEDG-4 AVC contribution feed
sent to NBC’s cable affiliates.
T
Technicolor
homson has completed a long-term
agreement for Technicolor to provide
international broadcast distribution and
media management to NBC Universal.
Additionally, Technicolor has acquired
NBCU’s broadcast-distribution center in
Denver.
Under the terms of the long-term
service agreement, Technicolor will
manage preparation and international distribution of a total of 31
NBCU channels, of which 19 will be
managed from the Denver facility and
T
New
Technology,
News,
& Innovations
the balance managed from existing
Technicolor facilities in London, Paris,
and Singapore.
Tekserve
rom its beginnings as a small Apple-repair shop in 1987, Tekserve
has grown to nearly 200 employees
and become the largest Apple specialist in the country. Besides selling the
latest Macs, iPods, and accessories,
Tekserve is a full-service Mac and iPod
repair center. Tekserve is fully authorized by Apple, so warranty repairs are
performed at no cost. The company
offers free seminars especially for professionals in the audio and video fields.
F
Telecast Fiber Systems
n order to bring all of the action
of the 2008 Olympic Games to
U.S. viewers, NBC used Telecast Fiber
Systems’ Rattlers. These miniature
fiber-optic serial digital video-transmission modules offer the broadest range
of digital rates in the industry, while
maintaining the signal quality that
broadcasters demand. Rattlers handle
HD-SDI as well as standard-definition signals and work on both
multimode and single-mode
fiber so that broadcasters are
always ready to go. Measuring just
3 in. long, these tiny modules can be
deployed almost anywhere. For its
coverage of the Beijing Olympics, NBC
purchased a large quantity of Rattlers
to provide ancillary video feeds.
I
telecast
fiber Rattler
Telex
o ensure optimal communications
during the Games, RTS hand-configured a huge rack-mount array for
NBC Olympics, allowing instant contact
between the customer’s Olympic
broadcast operations, headquarters,
and many remote locations. The communications system included 600 ports
distributed over three rock-solid ADAM
intercom frames, DBX-series dual-bus
expanders, KP-32 classic-series keypanels, RVON VoIP products, intelligent
trunking components with telephone
interfaces, and an RTS Two-Wire line.
T
➤ For an index of
company contacts,
go to page 62-63.
78
Thomson Grass Valley
homson’s new LDK 8300 HD 3X
Super SloMo camera was among
the hot technologies at the Summer
Olympics. China Central Television
T
(CCTV), China’s premiere national
broadcaster, used 15 Infinity Series
digital-media camcorders and EDIUS
nonlinear editing (NLE) software to
bring the Olympics into the homes of
viewers in the host country.
To provide expanded coverage of
the Games in HD and on mobile devices, Thomson was also involved with
the launch of both digital terrestrial
TV in standard- and high-definition
formats (SD and HD) — as well as for
mobility — with its Thomson Elite 100
and Elite 1000 transmission systems.
“Thomson has been a leader in live
HD sports coverage for many years,
but this year’s Summer Games give us
a chance to really shine with both HD
and mobile TV,” says Jacques Dunogué,
senior EVP of Thomson’s Systems
Division. ‘We are proud to supply the
OB companies contracted by the host
broadcaster nearly 70 percent of the
HD cameras the host broadcaster used
at the Games and to help CCTV bring
the Olympics into the homes of viewers throughout China, as well as to support coverage of the Games through
mobile TV. Only Thomson can provide
this breadth of end-to-end solutions
to broadcasters and media companies
around the world.”
CCTV’s news-production department, located in Beijing, provided live
coverage of the Games in HD from
numerous venues. CCTV used the
Infinity’s built-in JPEG 2000 codec to
streamline their HD workflow and
bring finished segments to air faster.
Token Creek Mobile
Television
oken Creek Mobile Television is
in the process of converting Hiawatha, the company’s 53-foot digital
truck to HD. “Hiawatha was integrated
in 2000 with the HD upgrade planned
for at that time,” says John Salzwedel,
president of Token Creek. ‘With that
pre-planning in place, our time frame
for completion of the project will be at
a minimum.’ The truck will be equipped
similarly to Varsity, Token Creek’s digital
expando truck that was placed into
operation last fall.
T
Total RF
otal RF has been the RF-systems
vendor for NBC Olympics since
the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics.
T
In past Olympics, Total RF has been
called upon to provided everything
from wireless cameras, wireless microphones, RF PLs, and IFBs all the way
down to hand-held radios. Now part of
CP Communications, Total RF provided
all the RF equipment and personnel
required to cover the Beijing Games for
NBC Olympics. Within the venues, this
included eight high-definition wireless
cameras with camera control, 64 RF
microphones, 10 RF IFB systems, six
RF PL systems, 25 base radios, and 275
hand-held radios.
Uplit
pLit provided ESPN pre- and postgame uplink services for the 2008
NBA Playoffs’ second-round matchup
between the New Orleans Hornets
and the San Antonio Spurs. Uplit, with
teleport facilities and services in Houston and New Orleans, offers mobile
satellite uplinks, video production,
satellite-space leasing, and on-location
phone and broadband Internet services.
In addition to being a part of the final
Hornets post-season game, UpLit participated in other NBA events during the
year, including broadcasting all New Orleans Hornets regular-season games in
HD. The company also supported NBA
All Star events in New Orleans for the
D-League and rookie basketball games
and slam-dunk contests and provided
uplink services for the All-Star game.
U
Vinten
hanghai Media Group (SMG) used a
variety of Vinten heads, tripods, and
other accessories to equip its OB trucks
at the Olympics. Vinten, a Vitec Group
brand, provides support equipment to
OB-truck companies. Shanghai Media
Group OB trucks are equipped with
Vector 70 pan-and-tilt heads; HDT-1
heavy-duty tripods, and ENG dollies.
“Vector pan-and-tilt heads are our preferred option because so many of our
OB camera operators are familiar with
them,” says Lin Yunchuan, vice director
of transmissions at SMG.
S
Vista
ISTA’s Special Event Team (SET)
helps deliver content to and from
any region in the world and recent
projects include PGA golf, worldwide
soccer events, and horseracing from
Dubai. VISTA’s team provides full-service
V
management events, on-site coordination, standup positions, mobile and fixed
uplink services, and excellent pricing on
all international satellite or fiber capacity.
In Beijing, the VISTA Team prepared
solutions for the non-rightsholders
looking for production and transmission requirements from the Olympics
and Special Olympics. With expert
coordination teams in place, VISTA is
prepared with services to and from any
location throughout China.
Vividas
ividas technology helped visitors to
Abril (www.abril.com.br), a popular
news and information portal serving
Brazil, appreciate the 2008 Olympic
experience away from the fields of
competition. Abril streamed 150 two- to
three-minute videos of interviews with
athletes and featured the sights, sounds,
and spirit of the Olympics as they took
place in Beijing. The mini-documentaries were shown in Abril’s HD video
section. To ensure the highest-quality
streaming experience, the Brazilian
portal made use of Vividas’ encoding
technology provided by ZeroUm (www.
zeroum.com.br), the company’s reseller
in Brazil. Abril sent a crew to Beijing to
shoot the video to be encoded and
then streamed on the portal.
V
Vizrt
n the Olympic spirit of bringing the
world together, Vizrt is bringing
workflows together through its newest
enabling feature, Viz Link. Bridging
graphics and video workflows, Viz Link
enables an operator to embed video
into graphics for quick-turnaround
on-air images, creating a real-time editing system that syncs with an existing
video archive.
The idea is relatively simple: make
video as available to graphics operators
as images currently are, using the video
libraries already stored in a broadcaster’s asset-management system.
“Viz Link allows for skipping the whole
tradition of editing,” explains Petter Ole
Jakobsen, chief technology officer for
Vizrt. “I like to call it real-time editing because it skips the traditional editing route
where one person has to go to an editing room and merge graphics manually
before playout. This will be much richer,
too, because the video is embedded into
the graphics in one package.”
I
Jakobsen say Vizrt clients have
much content available stored away
in video and graphics systems, but it’s
still relatively tedious to get a hold of
it and bring it together in a very fast
way during the editing process. “The
Viz Link takes care of that, because suddenly the repertoire of video material
in the large asset-management system
is now accessible to any graphics
template,” he says.
Vusion
usion, provider of instant-on, fullscreen, high-definition streaming
video, recently announced a strategic
partnership with the Sports Video
Group to provide the next generation
of Internet technology to the wordwide sports-video industry.
Despite the fact that most sports
video is shot using HD cameras, media
companies are forced to reduce the
quality of their online video offerings
due to the exorbitant bandwidth fees
associated with traditional contentdelivery-network (CDN) technology. As
an end-to-end service for commercial
media companies to deliver premium,
high-definition video over the Internet,
Vusion is capable of delivering instanton, streaming video to millions of
concurrent viewers at a fraction of the
cost of CDNs.
“The sports-video market has been
an aggressive adopter of HD equipment, even at the high school and
college level, but there has not been
an effective online HD distribution
channel up until now,” says Eli Habib,
CEO of Vusion. “The Internet is the
perfect medium to deliver hundreds
of tailored sports channels so that fans
can select what they want to watch,
whether that is an Olympic triathlon or
their kid’s high school track meet.”
V
WiseDV
iseDV’s handheld device has a
4-in. screen, audio, and now a
Shadebox to make it easier to watch
video on a bright, sunny day. It was
used at the Ryder Cup, the U.S. tennis
open, and the U.S. Open at the Torrey
Pines Golf Course in San Diego.
After last year’s success at the U.S.
Open tennis tournament, WiseDV found
continued momentum in the market
by being used at the Byron Nelson PGA
Tour event in April (the sponsor partner
W
WISE DV
handheld device
was AccuVue) and can now incorporate
Shotlink data and the scoreboard.
WiseDV president Atul Anandpura
says the company hopes to eventually
have a presence at many major sporting events with devices available for
free via sponsorship deals or for rent.
The dedicated functionality of the device, he believes, gives it a competitive
edge versus other handheld systems,
such as PDAs or Apple iPhones.
Wohler
anal Overseas, a division of French
broadcast group Canal+, is using
Wohler’s HDCC-200A HD/SD-SDI closedcaptioning bridge to enable efficient
handling and storage of World System
Teletext (WST) subtitle data within an
HD/SD playout infrastructure. By encoding subtitles within an HD ingest workflow and subsequently decoding those
subtitles back at the time of playout, this
new card supports a single video ingest
and playout workflow regardless of the
availability of subtitles.
Canal Overseas uses 11 HDCC200A units to embed WST data in the
HD-SDI signal (VANC) during ingest.
Six programs are simultaneously
recorded from external HD feeds
with SD and the VBI-related signal,
from external SD feeds upconverted
during the ingest process or from HD
tape programs with EBU subtitle files
and subsequently stored on an HD
broadcast server.
C
Yamaha
BC Olympics used 10 Yamaha
DM1000 digital audio consoles in
its on-site temporary postproduction
suites in Beijing. Television bumpers/promos were posted using the
digital consoles during all events. Unlike
conventional equipment that operates
in 96-kHz mode only with a reduced
number of channels, the DM1000 delivers a full number of channels at 44.1
kHz, 48 kHz, 88.2 kHz, or 96 kHz. NBC
Olympics used its comprehensive range
of 96-kHz-compatible stereo effects
with 32-bit internal processing to allow
as many as four individual-effect processors to operate simultaneously.
N
The Final Buzzer
Beijing Games:
End of a Broadcast Era?
By Ken Kerschbaumer,
Editorial Director, Sports Video Group
W
ith the 2008 Summer Games winding down this weekend, one can’t help wondering if this
is the end of an era when networks sent massive production teams to the location of the
Olympics.
Both NBC Olympics and the CBC are proving that it’s possible to use existing transmission pipes
and file-based workflows to pump content thousands of miles for final production and distribution. And for 2010, the BBC is already eying a similar move…toss in the fact that London is hosting
the 2012 Games, and odds are that BBC presence at the IBC for the next two Games will be much
smaller, impacting not only the head count but also the sense of international community.
Then, of course, there is what the Olympics have done to this nation. As Charlie Jablonski, selfproclaimed NBC “Olympic hanger-on,” told me the other day, “Look around, because you will never,
ever see an Olympics like this again.” The Chinese not only threw people at the Games (and let us
not forget, threw people out of homes) but also threw billions of dollars, a move that was self-evident through not only the
occasional blue skies but
the smooth operations everywhere.
But leaving aside the
pomp and circumstance,
the real change will be the
result of technical advances.
The move to server-based
storage, tightened content
exchange between EVS and
Avid editing systems, and
1.5-Gbps infrastructures is
the norm for even the smallest broadcaster in the IBC
(in fact, the smallest simply
ride on top of the BOB EVS
infrastructure,
delivering
prepackaged networks).
So, for me, it was great to
(AP Photo/Bullit Marquez)
be here, not only to revel in
the Olympic excitement and spend some quality time with top engineering and production talent
but to experience something that might not exist again: a vibrant, impressively large IBC that felt like
the world’s largest TV-production truck (complete with staffers sleeping on couches). Or over-sized
on-site staffs that meet the over-sized demands for content delivery.
Time will tell, but odds are, technology will help make it easier for broadcasters to deliver topquality productions from afar. And while the taxi-cab drivers in London may not like to hear that, it
should be music to the ears of TV-network finance departments the world over.
Just let me savor this one.
80
Published by the
Sports
Video group
260 Fifth Ave., Ste. 600,
New York, NY 10001
Tel: 212.481.8140,
Fax: 212.696.1783
www.sportsvideo.org
Paul Gallo, Executive Director
[email protected]
Martin Porter, Executive Director
[email protected]
Tel: 516.767.6720
Ken Kerschbaumer,
Editorial Director
[email protected]
Tel: 212.481.8140, Fax: 212.696.1783
Rob Payne,
Director of Sponsor Development
Tel: 212.481.8131 • [email protected]
Andrew Lippe, Assistant Editor
[email protected] • Tel: 212.481.8133
Cristina Ernst,
Director of Special Events
917 309 5174 • [email protected]
Riva Danzig,Art Director
Tel: 917.602.4588 • [email protected]
About SVG
The Sports Video Group was formed in
2006 to support the professional community that relies on video, audio, and
broadband technologies to produce
and distribute sports content. Leagues,
owners, teams, players, broadcasters,
webcasters, and consumer technology
providers have joined the SVG to learn
from each other, turn vision into reality,
implement new innovations, while
sharing experiences that will lead to
advancements in the sports production/distribution process and the
overall consumer sports experience.
Mission:
• To advance the creation,
production, and distribution
of sports content
• To provide a knowledge resource
for the growing community of sports
video professionals working for broadcast/broadband organizations, professional teams and leagues, collegiate
and secondary schools, and facilities.
• To facilitate a dialogue with
manufacturers, suppliers and technology developers that will improve
the quality and profitability of sports
programming.
Interoperable workflows. Integrated technologies. Innovative solutions.
At Harris, we’re investing to validate and certify the interoperability of our products and technologies.
Why? Because moving content and information between and within workfl ows, seamlessly, creates
efficiencies you need to stay competitive.
Compatible and complementary technologies provide additional benefi ts. By integrating technologies
into common platforms, we help prevent expensive and time-consuming installation hassles, conserve
your valuable rack space, and offer cost effi ciencies that other broadcast manufacturers can’t match.
Interoperability and integration lead to unmatched innovation. Only from Harris.
For more information visit www.broadcast.harris.com.
To contact a Harris representative call:
North America +1 800 231 9673 • Caribbean and Latin America +1 786 437 1960.
Harris is the ONE company delivering interoperable workflow solutions across the entire broadcast delivery chain with a single, integrated approach.
BUSINESS OPERATIONS • MEDIA MANAGEMENT • NEWSROOMS & EDITING • CORE PROCESSING
CHANNEL RELEASE • MEDIA TRANSPORT • TRANSMISSION
assuredcommunications ®
www.harris.com
Government Communications Systems • RF Communications • Broadcast Communications • Harris Stratex Networks
sports technology journal / Fall 2008 Cover3
“The only company we thought
could do it right was Sony.”
When Washington Nationals VP of Marketing and Broadcasting
John Guagliano considered HD solutions for the stunning
new Nationals Park in DC, he “wanted more than just good
equipment for our control rooms. We wanted to create a
baseball theme park.” Sony covered the bases like no other.
“It was easy, one stop shopping,” Guagliano noted. “Their
support is excellent—their quality is turnkey. They made
my life easier.”
From acquisition, to control rooms, to displays throughout the
stadium, trust Sony to do HD right.
(SIMULATED IMAGE)
click: sony.com/sonysports
Cover4
© 2008 Sony Electronics Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. Features and specifications are subject to change without notice. Sony and
HDNA are trademarks of Sony.

SVG SPECIAL REPORT: BEIJING GAMES IN REVIEW RAISINg THe

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