Sweden’s national public broadcaster Sveriges Television has partnered with Net Insight and Grass Valley to employ remote IP production for its coverage of the FIS Alpine World Ski Championships.
The production setup for the competition is using the largest number of cameras deployed and the highest volume of remote signals – video, audio and data – transmitted to date from a live location to SVT’s headquarters in Stockholm, over 600 km away.
SVT is using 80 LDX 86 Series cameras from Grass Valley, located along the ski course in Åre to deliver uncompressed HD signals over two 100 Gbps fibre circuits from Telia, to three control rooms at its Stockholm facility.
Each circuit uses Net Insight’s Nimbra transport solutions, as well as Grass Valley’s DirectIP which enables the XCU base stations to be situated in the central equipment room in Stockholm, while the cameras are in Åre. DirectIP allows all the camera signals to connect straight into the XCU, enabling the shaders to match the cameras, without any delay.
The remote production workflow is set up to support a team of around 150 camera operators and technicians on location in Åre, with the rest of the production workflow and staff in Stockholm.
“This accomplishment demonstrates how far we’ve come in executing remote productions, especially looking back at our remote setup in 2012 for the London Summer Games,” said Adde Grandberg, director of technology, CTO, at SVT. “To achieve this feat for the Alpine World Ski Championships, we knew from the beginning that we’d need more bandwidth, an adaptable workflow and very tight collaboration with Net Insight and Grass Valley – with no compromise to our ability to deliver high quality, synchronised images to our rights holders. The stunning pictures they deliver, with minimal latency, made Grass Valley’s cameras the brand of choice for us and this project. These, coupled with its DirectIP capability, were instrumental in enabling us to create a robust and reliable workflow that can cope with the unique conditions of a live ski event. Together we’ve set a new benchmark for live remote production at a major sporting event.”
