beIN Sports taps EVS for new workflow
beIN Sports is relying on EVS technologies to help power beIN Sports Max Highlights Service, enabling creation and management of sports-highlight packages from the network’s centralised production facilities in Doha, Qatar. “As beIN Sports provides exclusive access to prime sporting events like international football, basketball, and motorsports, having a highly efficient and effective highlights workflow is critical to our programming,” said Ali Salem, technical operations director, beIN Sports. “Our plans for this new workflow included easy integration with our third-party systems; it gave personnel in our global offices access to content while the entire system remained scalable to cope with future expansion. With all this functionality needed, we knew EVS technology would be crucial to the workflow’s success.”
EVS previously worked with beIN Sports to implement an ingest and playout centre in its Doha headquarters as well as a fully integrated digital workflow for its French channels. Knowing the reliability of EVS equipment and the enrichment it brings to live content, beIN Sports wanted EVS technology built into every point of the new workflow, from ingest and management to storage. Media Luso, part of the Mediapro group, was contracted by beIN Sports to provide the global service, including equipment and operations for the new system, and Media Burst — also part of the Mediapro Group — was responsible for the workflow design and implementation.
Five XT3 production servers and LSM remote-control panels sit at the heart of the workflow. This setup gives beIN Sports the ability to record up to 20 live HD-SDI feeds simultaneously while using up to 10 channels for output used for content review and delayed playout. While this element of the workflow creates clips, CleanEdit allows on-the-fly edits to be made to preformatted highlight templates. IPDirector, EVS’s suite of integrated production-management tools, schedules content ingest and gives beIN Sports total control over content once it is ingested.
IPDirector integrates the workflow and its storage — provided by an XStore solution — with third-party elements like Adobe Premiere Pro, a feature that was key in beIN Sports’ workflow design. Editors working from the edit suites benefit from having instant access to content while its logs are still being created.
IPWeb has also been included to allow production teams to remotely access content from beIN Sports global offices. The content managed with IPDirector can be viewed and searched using IPWeb’s online interface, which means production personnel anywhere in the world are able to find content available in the XStore central storage.
“beIN Sports has been a partner of ours for a long time, and the ambitious nature of this workflow’s functionality is perfectly suited to EVS technology,” said Jérôme Wauthoz, market solution manager, EVS. “This kind of project is something we thrive on providing solutions to. The results we achieved for beIN Sports through the implementation of EVS solutions in this workflow is a testament to live enrichment we can offer our partners.”