Norwegian broadcaster TV 2 and telecom service provider Telenor are working with virtualised media production solutions company Nevion to build a new sport production ecosystem.
The technical ecosystem defines how sports venues and production companies can participate in TV 2’s production workflows, said the companies.
TV 2 said its objective is to deliver the highest quality possible live coverage of men’s and women’s football, handball and ice hockey to its audience.
Content will be produced remotely for TV 2 by several production companies, with the broadcaster taking charge of what goes on air, effectively making the programmes a distributed production, with centralised production hubs. TV 2 will also be able to produce other events directly, from the venues or new locations.
TV 2 has contracted Telenor to build the WAN infrastructure needed to achieve the workflow and provide it as a service to them. Telenor, together with Nevion and TV 2, is now creating the remote-production solution linking venues, production companies and the broadcaster itself. The ecosystem is based on Nevion’s software-defined media node, Virtuoso; its SDN media fabric, eMerge; and its media orchestration platform, VideoIPath.
The Virtuosos are used to provide the transport of video, audio and data signals over Telenor’s network which connects venues, production companies and TV 2, said the companies. This involves, amongst others, the encoding of uncompressed SDI and SMPTE ST 2110-20 signals as JPEG XS (SMPTE ST 2110-22).
The 25G/100G eMerges will be used as access switches, providing aggregation amongst others, while Nevion’s VideoIPath will be employed to orchestrate the media flows between every location involved.
The production companies will be able to employ the multi-tenanting feature of VideoIPath to control the flows involved in their own productions, said Nevion. Some production companies are also using VideoIPath’s new broadcast control functionality to manage the connectivity.
VideoIPath will also be federated with TV 2’s existing VideoIPath system, which already orchestrates media flows within and between the broadcaster’s SMPTE ST 2110 production facilities.
In addition, Nevion is providing a full range of professional and support services, including consultancy, infrastructure design, device configuration, device integration, setup of the orchestration system, testing and troubleshooting.
Svein Henning Skaga, solutions architect at TV 2 said: “Our objective is to create the most compelling sports content for our audience, and that means using the highest production values for all leagues, both elite and lower tier. This would normally be a logistical and financial challenge, but the new production ecosystem allows us to overcome this.”
Thomas Heinzer, CEO at Nevion added: “This project is highly innovative from both a business and technical standpoint, and we are excited to be part of it. We are obviously pleased our flagship products and their latest features are being used. We are also very happy about the collaboration between TV 2, Telenor and Nevion to make this production ecosystem as reality.”
