On the final day of the January football transfer window, Sky Sports News HD used TVUPack mobile cellular uplink backpacks, to broadcast live from several locations, providing coverage of this international football event. Three TVUPacks were supplied by WTS Broadcast. Sky Sports News HD delivered nineteen hours of coverage from 6am on the 31 January to 1am on the 1 February, GMT. On what is known to be one of the busiest days of the year for Sky Sports News HD, TVUPack was used to supplement a fleet of ten SNG trucks to provide location reporting and breaking-news coverage, as it happened. During the broadcast, TVUPack was used in three different locations where SNG trucks were not suitable – including at Norwich City training ground, where parking was an issue and St Mary’s Stadium in Southampton, where the proximity of the airport meant that a SNG Truck couldn’t be used. A third backpack was based in the North West of England, to ‘float’ between the various football clubs in the vicinity and provide more mobility and faster transport than an SNG Truck, enabling the channel to follow the action as signings were announced. “The TVUPacks added to our live capability at a much lower cost than extra ad-hoc SNG trucks and satellite capacity would have done,” commented Ian Brash, technical manager at Sky Sports News HD. “January 31 was a very windy day, and occasionally the SNG trucks were blown by the wind and the signal lost. The TVUPacks suffered no such outages. Additionally, the TVUPack was a much more flexible solution for us from a staffing standpoint since it only required a single camera operator, and didn’t need any in-field configuration to transmit. The camera operator just needed to push the power button on the pack, and he was transmitting a live feed.” According to Brash, Sky Sports News HD plans to continue using TVUPack in future broadcasts, “TVUPack will enable us to deliver live contributions from locations that SNG trucks can’t access, or, in the event of breaking news, be deployed and on location delivering live picture much quicker than a SNG truck can get to the site. This is especially important overseas,” Brash said. www.wtsbroadcast.com
