MAMma Mia! Dalet delivers centralised media assets, archive and highlights system to Lega Serie A

The highlights room in Lissone where the Dalet technology is used

Coverage of Italy’s Lega Serie A has been produced from a production centre in Lissone since 2021, but recent additions have seen the creation of two new departments – MCR2 or MCR Content for signal control, managed by EIT Sports, and a facility dedicated entirely to the highlights and digital archive of Serie A.

All phases of the production, planning, fibre signal transport, national and international distribution process have been centralised in the Lissone production centre, which delivers five different feeds for Europe, Asia, Mena and America.

All signals from the 18 stadiums where matches are held are received in Lissone, centralised graphics are applied in several languages, the customisation of the virtual carpets and virtual LEDs is managed for 20 teams, and international commentary is created in different languages.

The fight against unauthorised viewing is also managed from here, with anti-piracy technology, global monitoring of social networks, TV, IPTV, sites and apps. One floor is dedicated to remote arbitration; the VAR centre has eight VAR rooms and a position reserved for the supervisor.

Showing the highlights

At the centre of the new highlight packaging system and of the entire archive is Dalet, a media solutions and service provider that offer products in the media, production, supply chain and MAM fields.

“The system,” says Massimo Berardi, general manager of Dalet Italia, “consists of a suite of products for the management of production, MAM, archive and the distribution of content. It was created in just three months and manages the end-to-end workflow of the production and distribution of highlights.”

Dalet collaborated with EI Towers and CVE to deliver more than 100 ingest channels, 12 playout channels, online production, nearline and archive storage, as well as editing and highlight production applications.

The production centre is based on IP signal transport and utilises Dalet’s Brio IP video server, which is capable of managing all incoming signals from 18 stadiums transported by EI Towers on Sony/Nevion equipment, for a total of 20 signals for each game. It is designed to cover all matches in both the league and the Italian Cup.

The ingest takes place on 100 channels in 1080p and 10 in 4K, and the real-time production is managed by EIT Sport personnel.

The OB vans present in each stadium receive the best action and goals at the end of the first half and at the end of the game from the centralised system, using the Brio video servers in playout.

These highlights are then edited and produced in different formats, with different graphic and audio templates, and then distributed on YouTube and other portals as well as being delivered to takers all over the world.

An online catalogue in the cloud

At the same time, the Dalet MAM, which moves part of the material to AWS for security reasons, allows some customers of the league, including external federations, teams and international takers, to access the catalogue in preview. Here they can see the metadata, browse images and clips, carry out searches and pre-select content.

The central system processes the pre-selection and then sends the selected material in the desired format in high quality, based on the request of each customer. Some customers are also able to receive all the material, if they have the specific rights.

The system operates in the cloud and a new MAM application called Dalet Flex was recently installed, which makes the collaborative workflow even more efficient.

Each managed event has a workstation for generating the highlights in real time used for the playout contribution to the stadiums and a workstation for editing and generating them in the final format of different durations and characteristics that will be distributed on the internet and to various users, allowing several dozen users to access the content simultaneously.

The flexibility of the architecture, in addition to ensuring the correct redundancy of extremely important data, allows for quick and simple use through the suite of applications available.

“All the flows acquired by the stadiums,” concludes Berardi, “are concentrated in a storage of about 300TB for high-quality online processing and a local archive in Lissone which is constantly expanding. It is currently 2PB and is expected to double by the beginning of next season with the adoption of double storage to increase redundancies.”

He continues: “The Dalet solution takes care of all archive management of the Lega Serie A. Therefore, all the high-quality material from each match is stored, managed, moved from the MAM to the archive and becomes the general catalogue, which can be consulted online. The entire production and management chain is supervised by a co-ordinator, and an operator-creator and a journalist work in each station.

“Dalet provides contextual support to the system in collaboration with CVE which runs the first level support services.”