ATP Media adopts remote production for Miami Open
ATP Media has taken a major step towards a global remote production operation, with an innovative workflow deployed for this week’s Miami Open (17-31 March).
ATP Media successfully implemented full backhaul remote production of two fully-produced, eight-camera courts from the BNP Paribas Open, an ATP Masters 1000 in Indian Wells earlier this month, back to ATP Media Studios in West London.
It follows more than five years of planning and intensive testing throughout the 2023 season between the in-house ATP Media broadcast engineering team and Gravity Media that allowed ATP Media to successfully move its live production of Court C and D from the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells to a fully remote workflow at ATP Media Studios, West London.
“This whole operation has only been made possible with the recent advances in ULL HEVC encoding”
Director of ATP Media Studios and Live Operations Rachael Watson said: ‘When establishing our remote workflows, it was essential that we didn’t compromise our core values of quality, innovation and reliability for our broadcast partners.
“Our technical team and court directors have been instrumental in fine tuning the processes, and our output from Indian Wells has been testament to this approach. We’re excited to embark on our next phase of remote production whilst continuing to deliver the highest quality content.”
ATP Media Studios was launched in June 2023 at the Gravity Media owned Westworks facility in West London.
With production of 62 tournaments over 11 months, from host broadcast of the 9 ATP Masters 1000 tournaments and Nitto ATP Finals to World and International feed production from all ATP 500 and 250 tournaments, ATP Media looked to implement a bespoke production model to control all facets of this end-to-end solution.
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In this phased approach, ATP Media will see all four primary court production undertaken at ATP Media Studios through a mixture of remote surface control and full backhaul remote production.
Given the global nature and volume of the production, where more than 3300 matches are produced annually, the “unrelenting” nature of the production needed to be of consistent quality, robust, cost effective over the long term and sustainable, ATP Media said.
Throughout the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells, ATP Media Studios hosted all operators that would normally be based onsite, including directors, graphics operators, sound operators, CCU operators and EVS operators leaving only camera operators and a small amount of rigging engineers onsite for the setup.
This drastically reduced ATP Media’s carbon footprint by removing up to 20 long haul flights from the UK to the West Coast of America.
Director of technology Tom Copeland said: ‘With more than 100+ feeds being encoded back to the ATP Media Studios remote hub in London bandwidth was a major consideration when designing the workflows, this whole operation has only been made possible with the recent advances in ULL HEVC encoding. With such a complex setup we began expanding our ATP Media Broadcast and Engineering team last year, who’s expertise is integral to ensuring the stability of the remote production process.”
Camera and audio feeds are sent back to London before being processed through usual vision, sound mixers and EVS workflows including multiple SSM Camera phases. Utilising ultra-low latency HEVC encoding to transport the camera feeds back as quickly as possible ensured minimal delay for the directors and return video paths for camera operators and onsite broadcaster distribution via JPXS minimised the total roundtrip time.
In addition, audio is transported via Hitless AES67 Audio Streams with embedded audio on the SDI feeds as a backup.
The Miami Open presented by Itau takes place 17-31 March at Hard Rock Stadium.
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