Live production company Whisper will once again be responsible for Channel 4’s coverage of the Winter Paralympic Games, which begin today, with staff on the ground in Milano Cortina and at the company’s Cymru Broadcast Centre in Cardiff.
The Whisper team will deliver live coverage of the Games from 8am-1pm on Channel 4’s linear channels, as well as a highlights show each evening. Viewers will also be able to watch all of the afternoon action via Channel 4’s YouTube channel.
The broadcaster intends to showcase up to 665 athletes from around 50 nations competing for 79 medals across six sports: Para alpine skiing, Para biathlon, Para cross-country skiing, Para ice hockey, Para snowboarding and wheelchair curling. The Games’ Opening and Closing ceremonies will be simulcast on 4seven and Channel 4 streaming with British Sign Language (BSL), subtitles and descriptive commentary.
As Channel 4 only acquired the rights to the Games last summer, there’s been a lot of work packed into a short amount of time to ensure the team in Italy is able to bring viewers all the action. The presenters will be based at a restaurant 1800 metres up a mountain, which has meant lots of planning for the Whisper team, not least in terms of how they get their equipment to the venue.
“Everything has to go up in the gondola, so nothing can be too large,” Richard Lancaster, Whisper’s chief technology officer, tells TVBEurope. The production team is using flight cases based in the restaurant to send RF signals to a truck parked near the curling arena in Cortina.
“We have two paths coming out. One is an RF link down the mountain, and the other is a combination of Starlink and LiveU. Should we have an issue with our main path, we still have the ability to get signals out,” he adds.
Sending those signals down the mountain is no mean feat, admits Matt Roberts, live sports producer at Whisper. But the team believe there is a “physical benefit to the viewer at home” in having the studio at such a high altitude. “We are also going to have a studio inside the curling arena. That is one of the key Paralympics GB medal chances. So that’s where we’ve concentrated our resources,” he adds.
Elsewhere, Channel 4’s reporters will use mobile LiveU units, with stand-up positions around the events available thanks to connectivity provided by Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS).
Remote production
In terms of manpower, there will be fewer people working on Milano Cortina than there were on Channel 4’s coverage of Paris 2024, when around 400 people worked on the project. “This is probably around 100-110 with 30 people out in Italy,” states Roberts. “We’re fortunate we started doing remote broadcasting on the Tokyo Olympics during Covid with our backend broadcast operation. All the galleries and production staff worked out of Timeline in Ealing. Now we have the Cymru Broadcast Centre, which we used for the very first time for the Paris Paralympics, and it’s one of the most accessible production facilities in the UK.”
Whisper will employ one gallery at its Cardiff base for Milano Cortina, with the other used for Channel 4’s Formula One coverage. “We are using it to its maximum, but that remote broadcast operation is well established these days, and we’re confident of delivering our fourth Games using that method,” adds Roberts.
Cardiff will receive feeds from OBS via cloud delivery, which, according to Lancaster, is two SRT encoders, with one feed going to a local data centre in Italy and the other directly to the UK. “We pick them up at two separate locations as well,” he adds. “One goes directly to Cardiff, and the second path lands at the Timeline’s Ealing Broadcast Centre (EBC), so they will decode it there. Should Cardiff suddenly fall off the edge of the world for no apparent reason, the EBC will send the feeds to Cardiff.” From there, the feeds are sent to Red Bee, which delivers pictures and audio to viewers’ screens.
For such an important event, the Whisper team will have plenty of redundancies in place. Explains Roberts: “We are adding commentary to select events at Cardiff. So if we fall off, there’ll just be any host commentary that is present on those feeds. Then obviously we are still ingesting content on EVS during the course of the day, and we have our studio, so we have fallbacks, but we’re confident.”
Watch the full interview below.
