deltatre renews Results System fleet
deltatre has ordered 16 new 3.5 tonne Digital Sports Vans, which are being outfitted by Sony Professional Services in time for Euro 2012, as it upgrades the mobile vehicles that feed its deltatre Central Results System (d3CRS) ahead of the tournament.
“A big proportion of our business is the results system, which in turn drives other services such as the digital media service,” explains Carlo Lisa, Director of Sales & Business Development for the Turin-based company. “Our clients are mainly UEFA, FIFA, the IAA and others, and we provide them with a full data collection and results management system which includes a lot of services we provide both at venue and remotely.”
The company has operated the d3CRS since it was established 25 years ago, and the current, third generation fleet of Digital Sports Vans – hard at work across the continent on projects such as Champions’ League football – are now in their tenth year of operation
Lisa describes them as a “little bit different’ from classical OB vans as they mostly serve the digital world. Based on an Iveco chassis, and under 3.5t so they can be driven on a standard driving license across Europe, they comfortably seat three people, four at a push.
“The video infrastructure is based around an Evertz HD-SDI 3G, media routing system which is 64×64 upgradeable and double redundant,” he says. “All of this is in parallel with a classical, standard manual media patchbay, with of course a distribution system in case we need to be redundant. Video distribution is based on Snell chassis and cards, for both audio and video, though mainly for us its TV graphics.”
Featuring an LCD monitor wall and the ability to host EVS servers for highlight creation, Lisa says the vans bring the power of the company’s €2m Results Centre to local venues across the continent.
“If we need to provide digital streaming of a football match we can manage it out of Turin via satellite, no problem, but it’s going to be complicated if you want to manage isolated cameras, feeds, additional angles and such,” he says. “It’s more convenient to be at the venue, be able to plug into the EVS network and get all the clips that are available there, and encode those clips and send them over rather than buying a lot of fibre or satellite connectivity.”
The vans are also future-proofed for work in 3D.
“We can manage up to six different HD graphics feeds which can become 3x 3D graphics feeds as well, via our own d3D 3D graphics engines,” says Lisa. “We have historically always been independent in graphics production, though we do work with major systems on the market such as vizrt and Chyron. But when you have to manage a large number of outputs in different languages the number of licenses and the price which can be associated with that justifies the development of an internal solution.”