REMI

Video: Where The Puck Is Going: What’s Next for Esports & Sports Streaming

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

How’s sports streaming changing as the pandemic continues? Esports has the edge on physical sports as it allows people to compete from diverse locations. But both physical and esports benefit from bringing people into one place and getting the fans to see the players.

This panel from Streaming Media, moderated by Jeff Jacobs, looks at how producers, publishers, streamers and distributors reacted to 2020 and where they’re positioning themselves to be ahead in 2021. The panel opens by looking at the tools and the preferred workflows. There are so many ways to do remote production. Sam Asfahani from OS Studios, explained how they had already adopted some remote workflows to keep costs down but he has been impressed at the number of innovations released which help improve remote production. He explains they have a physical NDI Control room where they also use VMix for contribution. The changed workflows during the pandemic have convinced them that the second control room they were planning to build should now be in the cloud.

Aaron Nagler from Cheesehead TV discussed the way he’s stopped flying to watch games and has changed to watching syncronised using LiveX Director with his co-presenter. Within a few milliseconds, he is seeing the same footage so they can both present and comment in real-time. Intriguingly, Tyler Champley from Poker Central explains that, for them, remote production hasn’t been needed since the tournaments have been canceled and they use their studio facilities. Their biggest issue is that their players need to be in the same room to play the game, close to each other and without masks.

Link to video

The panel discusses what will stick after the pandemic. Sam makes the point that he’s gone from paying $20,000 for a star to stay overnight and be part of the show. The pandemic has made it so that sports stars are happy to be paid $5,000 for the two hours on a programme without having to leave their house and the show saves money too. He feels this will continue to be an option on an on-going basis, though the panel notes that technical capability is limited with contributors, even top dollar talent without anyone else there to help. Tyler says that his studio has been more in demand during Covid so his team has become better at tear-downs to accommodate multiple uses. And lastly, the panel makes the point that hybrid programme making models are going to continue.

After some questions from the audience, the panel comments on future strategies. Sean Gardner from Xilinx talks about the need and arrival of newer codecs such as AV1 and LCEVC can help do deliver lower bitrates and/or lower latency. Aaron mentions that he’s seen ways of gamifying the streams which he hasn’t used before which helps with monetising. And Sam leaves us with the thought that game APIs can help create fantastic productions when they’re done well, but he sees an even better future where APIs allow information to be fed back into the game which will be able to create a two-way event between the fans and the game.

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Speakers

Jeff Jacobs Moderator:Jeff Jacobs
Executive Vice President & General Manager,
VENN
Aaron Nagler Aaron Nagler
Co-Founder,
Cheesehead TV
Sam Asfahani Sam Asfahani
CEO,
OS Studios
Sean Gardner Sean Gardner
Snr Manager, Market Development & Strategy, Cloud Video,
Xilinx
Tyler Champley Tyler Champley
VP Marketing & Audience Development,
Poker Central

Video: Remote Production in Real Life

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

Remote production is in heightened demand at the moment, but the trend has been ongoing for several years. For each small advance in technology, it becomes practical for another event to go remote. Remote production solutions have to be extremely flexible as a remote production workflow for one copmany won’t work for the next This is why the move to remote has been gradual over the last decade.

In this video, Dirk Skyora from Lawo gives three examples of remote production projects stretching back as far as 2016 to the present day in this RAVENNA webinar with evangelist Andreas Hildebrand.

The first case study is remote production for Belgian second division football. Working with Belgian telco Proximus along with Videohouse & NEP, LAWO setup remote production for stadia kitted out with 6 cameras and 2 commentary positions. With only 1 gigabit connectivity to the stadiums, they opted to use JPEG 2000 encoding at 100 Mbps for both the cameras out of the stadia but also the two return feeds back in for the commentators.

The project called for two simultaneous matches feeding into an existing gallery/PCR. Deployment was swift with flightcases deployed remotely and a double set of equipment being installed into the fixed PCR. Overall latency was around 2.5 frames one-way, so the camera viewfinders were about 5 frames adrift once transport and en/decoding delay were accounted for.

The main challenges were with the MPLS network into the stadia which would spontanously reroute and be loaded with unrelated traffic at around 21:00. Although there was packet loss, none was noticable on the 100Mbps J2K feeds. Latency for the commentators was a problem so some local mixing was needed and lastly PTP wasn’t possible over the network. Timing was, therefore, derived from the return video feed into the stadium which had come from the PTP-locked gallery. Locally this incoming timing was used to lock a locally generated PTP signal.

The next case study is inter-country links for the European Council connecting the Luxembourg and Brussels buildings for the European Council. The project was to move all production to a single tech control room in Brussells and relied on two 10GbE links between the buildings going through an Arista 7280 carrying 18 videos in one direction and two in return. Although initially reluctant to compress, the Council realised after testing that VC2 which offers around 4x compression would work well and deliver no noticable latency (approx 20ms end to end). Thanks to using VC2, the 10Gig links saw low usage from the project and the Council were able to migrate other business activities onto the link. PTP was generated in Brussels and Luxembourg re-generated their PTP from the Brussels signal, to be distributed locally. Overall latency was 1 frame.

Lastly, Dirk outlines the work done for the Belgium Daily News which had been bought out by DPG Media. This buy-out prompted a move from Brussels to Antwerp where a new building opened. However, all of the techinical equipmennt was already in Brussels. This led to the decision to remote control everything in Brussels from Antwerp. The production staff moved to Antwerp, causing some issues with the disconnect between production and technical, but also due to personnel relocating and getting used to new facilities.

The two locations were connected with a 400GbE, redundant infrastructure using IP<->SDI gateways. Latency was 1 frame and, again, PTP on one site was created from the incoming PTP from the other.

The video finishes with a detailed Q&A.

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Speakers

Dirk Sykora Dirk Sykora
Technical Sales Manager,
Lawo
Andreas Hildebrand Andreas Hildebrand
RAVENNA Evangelist,
ALC NetworX

Video: Decentralised Production Tips and Best Practices

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

Live sports production has seen a massive change during COVID. We looked at how this changed at the MCR recently on The Broadcast Knowledge hearing how Sky Sports had radically changed along with Arsenal TV. This time we look to see how life in the truck has changed. The headline being that most people are staying at home, so how to you keep people at home and mix a multi-camera event?

Ken Kerschbaumer from Sports Video Group talks to VidOvation Jim Jachetta
and James Japhet from Hawk-Eye to understand the role they’ve been playing in bringing live sports to screen where the REMI/Outside Broadcast has been pared down to the minimum and most staff are at home. The conversation starts with the backdrop of The Players Championship, part of the PGA Tour which was produced by 28 operators in the UK who mixes 120+ camera angles and the audio to produce 25 live streams including graphics for broadcasters around the world.

Lip-sync and genlock aren’t optional when it comes to live sports. Jim explains that his equipment can do up to fifty cameras with genlock synchronisation over bonded cellular and this is how The Players worked with a bonded cellular on each camera. Jim discusses how audio, also has to be frame-accurate as they had many, many mics always open going back to the sound mixer at home.

James from Hawk-Eye explained that part of their decision to leave equipment on-site was due to lip-sync concerns. Their system worked differently to VidOvation, allowing people to ‘remote desktop’, using a Hawk-Eye-specifc low-latency technology dedicated to video transport. This also works well for events where there isn’t enough connectivity to support streaming of 10, 20 or 50+ feeds to different locations from the location.

The production has to change to take account of two factors: the chance a camera’s connectivity might go down and latency. It’s important to plan shots ahead of time to account for these factors, outlining what the backup plan is, say going to a wide shot on camera 3, if camera 1 can’t be used. When working with bonded cellular, latency is an unavoidable factor and can be as high as 3 seconds. In this scenario, Jim explains it’s important to explain to the camera operators what you’re looking for in a shot and let them work more autonomously than you might traditionally do.

Latency is also very noticeable for the camera shaders who usually rack cameras with milliseconds of latency. CCU’s are not used to waiting a long time for responses, so a lot of faked messages need to be sent to keep the CCU and controller happy. The shader operator needs to then get used to the latency, which won’t be as high as the video latency and take things a little slower in order to get the job done.

Not travelling everywhere has been received fairly well by freelancers who can now book in more jobs and don’t need to suffer reduced pay for travel days. There are still people travelling to site, Jim says, but usually, people who can drive and then will sit in the control room with shields. For the PGA Tour, the savings are racking up. Whilst there are a lot of other costs/losses at the moment for so many industries, it’s clear that the reduced travel and hosting will continue to be beneficial after restrictions are lifted.

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Speakers

Jim Jachetta Jim Jachetta
EVP & CTO: Wireless Video & Cellular Uplinks
VidOvation
James Japhet James Japhet
Managing Director
Hawk-Eye North America
Ken Kerschbaumer Ken Kerschbaumer
Editorial Director,
Sports Video Group

Video: Benefits of IP Systems for Sporting Venues

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

As you walk around any exhibitions there seems to be a myriad of ‘benefits’ of IP working, many of which don’t resonate for particular use cases. Only the most extraordinary businesses need all of the benefits, so in this talk, Imagine Communication’s John Mailhot discusses how IP helps sports venues.

John sets the scene by separating out the function of OB trucks and the ‘inside production’ facilities which have a whole host of non-TV production to do including driving scoreboards, displays inside the venue, replays and importantly has to deal with over 250 events a year, not all of which will have an OB truck.

We see that the scale that IP can work at is a great benefit as many signals can fit down one fibre and 2022-7 seamless switching can easily provide full redundancy for every fibre and SFP. This is a level of redundancy which is simply not seen in SDI systems. With stadia being very large, necessitating cable runs of over 500m, the fact that IP needs fewer cables overall is a great benefit.

John shows an example of an Arista switch only 7U in height which provides 144x 100G ports meaning it could support over 4000 inputs and 4000 outputs. Such density is unprecedented and for OB trucks can be a dealbreaker. For sports venues, this can also be a big motivator but also allow more flexibility in distributing the solution rather than relying on a massive central interconnect with a 1100×1100 SDI router in a central CTA.

TV is nothing without audio and the benefits to audio in 2110 are non trivial since with the audio being split off from the video, we are no longer limited to dealing with just 16 channels per video and de-embedding from a video frame any time we want to touch it.

Timing is an interesting benefit. I say this because, whilst PTP can end up being quite complex compared to black and burst, it has some big benefits. First off, it can live in the same cables as your data where as black and burst requires a whole separate cable infrastructure. PTP also allows you to timestamp all essences which helps with lip-sync throughout your workflow.

John leads us through some examples of how this works for different areas finishing by summing up the relevant benefits such as scalability, multi-format, space efficient, and timing amongst others.

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Download the slides
Speakers

John Mailhot John Mailhot
CTO, Networking & Infrastructure,
Imagine Communications