Deutsche Telekom’s MagentaTV is the only platform broadcasting all matches of the FIFA World Cup 2026 live in Germany. Acting as general contractor on behalf of Deutsche Telekom — responsible for both editorial content and production — thinXpool has designed, together with a number of specialist production companies including TV Skyline, a setup that spans the tournament’s venues across three countries and TV studios in New York and Munich.
Deutsche Telekom’s MagentaTV is the only platform in Germany broadcasting all 104 matches of the FIFA World Cup 2026 live, 44 of them exclusively. Public broadcasters ARD and ZDF have acquired a sub-licence package to co-broadcast 60 of those matches, including every game involving the German national team, the opening match, the semi-finals and the final — but for viewers who want every fixture, MagentaTV is the only option.
Stefan Torka, thinXpool head of production who holds overall responsibility for the World Cup production at MagentaTV, explains: “Our ambition was a stadium presence comparable to Euro 2024, where the on-air show-runners were directed at three different positions in the stadium from a gallery in the OB truck.
“Because of the geographical distances and logistical challenges, thinXpool had to rethink this concept for remote operation — but with the ambition of maintaining the same production value. To this day, we have achieved our goal one hundred per cent.”
The technical architecture supporting MagentaTV’s World Cup offering is provided by thinXpool and TV Skyline, which handles signal management, camera control, audio and PTZ operation for stadium venues, a fixed studio in New York, the unilateral production and travelling ENG crews across the US, Mexico and Canada, all of it run from a single truck, TV Skyline’s Ü12 (OB12), based permanently in Munich.
TV Skyline was brought in by thinXpool, the Munich-based production company acting as general contractor to Deutsche Telekom, working alongside DMC Production Germany, which handles the internal studio infrastructure in Munich.
He says: “This is a real, working remote setup. Sometimes production companies talk about doing a large remote setup in Germany. In that situation, if they have a problem, they can get in their car, drive 200 kilometres, and help out. But here, my guys are 8,500 kilometres away so I can’t help them; it needs to work — they need to plug in, and it needs to work.”
The operation runs across three locations: a fixed team runs the studio in New York, on the 18th floor of a building in the Financial District, opposite One World Trade Center; two travelling teams cover the tournament’s stadium venues; and in Munich, OB12 collects every signal — from two stadium venues, from the New York studio, and from nine ENG crews travelling the tournament — processing it before handing finished feeds on to DMC’s studio complex in Munich for MagentaTV’s wider programming.
The ENG teams are equipped with Haivision Pro460 backpacks, with the signals handed over to the main DMC-run studio complex so they can use interviews for breakfast-time content, pre-show programming, the half-time shows and so on.
Torka explains: “We devised four technical standards to do justice to the different editorial tierings of the fixtures. With Black, there is only a commentary camera that can be cut into the studio from two hours before kick-off. With Red, a reporter is on site who can deliver impressions from the stadium in ten-minute slots via the HBS cameras. For Silver, we use a unilateral camera that permanently allows presentation pitchside and can cover up to three talents. Gold is the premium standard, in which a presentation platform, two different pitch presentation positions, the centre-circle stand-up and the flash all work together.”
“For the Gold premium production, we do the show in OB 12,“ Schiltz says.
Signal transmission runs over three parallel paths. Says Schiltz: “We use the layer 2 tunnels provided from the stadium to the IBC from HBS, and from the IBC we use fully redundant layer 2 tunnels from MTI Teleport into Munich. The third transmission line is the public internet: we transmit everything in parallel over the public internet by SRT, in cooperation with Haivision, because you need to have that resilience.”
That third path proved its worth before a ball was kicked. A last-mile fibre problem at the New York studio during rehearsal week meant TV Skyline relied on the public internet as an emergency line for three days. “We did the first rehearsal over the public internet emergency line, and it worked well — about 800 milliseconds latency, so that’s still working well in case of emergency,” Schiltz says. On the primary MTI fibre path itself, latency is around 145 milliseconds.
And the redundancy was tested for real when a routing issue took out both of TV Skyline’s main paths simultaneously, hours before a live broadcast.
“Three hours before we went live both lines were gone. That’s when you see how important it is to have a fallback, and that is when we knew this setup was the right way to go: we have a backup line we can use, and that works really well together with Haivision,” Schiltz says.
Only five TV Skyline staff are on site per venue, handling rigging and set-up. Everything else — live shading, colour matching, and control of the Sony FR7 PTZ cameras used pitch-side — is operated remotely by two OB12 operators covering both stadiums and the New York studio simultaneously.
Schiltz says: “In the stadium we have one central connection case placed in the CIR (cable interconnection room) of HBS. From this case we use the fibre lines from FIFA to our Tribune presentation, to our two pitch presentation positions, and to the flash interview position. On these positions we have a stagebox, where the customer can connect microphone, camera and remote control for the camera. We’re also controlling the full camera setup out of Munich: live shading, live colour matching and so on. We’re also controlling the PTZ cameras, because we’re using Sony FR7 PTZ cameras in the stadiums, and we control those out of Munich too. There are two operators in OB12 remoting the PTZ cameras in stadium one, stadium two and the studio in New York.”
The New York studio feed follows the same principle: shaded, converted and controlled remotely from Munich before being handed to DMC. On a full Gold production day, OB12 takes in around 32 signals from the studio alone, on top of everything arriving from the stadium.
“These cameras are only received by OB12. We do the shading and the signal conversion to 50Hz, because everything needs to be converted — we produce in 50Hz here, and in the US it’s 59.94Hz. Once we’re done with the signals from the studio, we hand them over to the studio complex at DMC,” Schiltz says.
“When we work on a Gold setup, we receive around 32 signals from the studio into OB12, plus all the cameras from the stadium, to mix them together.”
That frame-rate conversion — from the US, Canadian and Mexican broadcast standard into the European 50Hz production standard — happens in real time, on a Ross Video Gator Toolbox frame, with each card in the frame handling two signals. The whole chain runs in HDR. “It’s fully produced in HDR — 1080p50 HDR in HLG, with extended colour range, wide colour gamut 2020,” Schiltz says.
Beyond the two fixed stadium venues, nine ENG crews travel throughout the US, Mexico and Canada carrying Haivision Pro460 bonded-cellular backpacks, connected over six SIM cards apiece. Each crew is a freelance cameraman and a presenter or editorial staffer supplied by the client — but every technical function beyond pointing the camera is handled remotely by TV Skyline from Munich.
Footage and return communication both route through Munich rather than direct to the US studios. “That content goes straight into the studio complex at DMC, and we receive the return picture and the IFB from DMC. We transmit that back over the 5G unit to wherever they’re working — Mexico, Canada, the US,” Schiltz says.
In-ear monitor mixing for presenters, experts and guests in the stadium has to happen physically on site, because remote mixing would introduce too much delay for people trying to talk over each other in real time. But the desk doing that mixing is not staffed locally at all — it’s operated remotely, from Munich.
“For the in-ear mix in the stadium — the presenter, the expert and the guests need to hear each other — that can only be done by mixing the IFB on site, because remotely there would be too much delay. But the sound engineer sitting in OB12 in Munich does the full mix remotely. There’s nobody on site doing the mix at all — that’s also done remotely,” Schiltz says. “It’s mixed on an audio desk in the stadium, but it’s operated by the guy in Munich.” He adds: “On productions before, you had to have a sound engineer on site. This isn’t needed anymore.”
Perhaps the clearest example of the production’s approach to resilience is in the equipment itself. Two full Gold stadium kits travel between venues; a third is held in reserve in a New York warehouse, ready to be activated as a like-for-like replacement if either travelling kit is damaged, lost or stolen in transit.
“If something happens to set one or set two while they’re travelling around — if it’s broken, or stolen, or whatever — we can activate set three, which is a full copy of everything,” Schiltz says.
Which venue gets the full Gold rig on any given matchday is a call made by the client, weighed against which fixture merits the fuller presentation treatment. Moving a Gold kit between stadiums takes time — through customs, through the country — so TV Skyline built a lighter tier specifically to bridge that gap: three Silver kits, one shadowing each Gold set, that can be checked in as hand luggage and flown ahead to cover a stadium while the Gold kit is in transit.
“Our logistics company, SOS Global (Rock-it Cargo), takes care of the movement of those kits,” Schiltz says. “The customer also uses the time during the transfer of one kit — if a kit is transferred to another stadium, that takes time through the country, through customs and so on. They take out a part of the kit — a part of the Gold set — that’s called the Silver set. So we also have three Silver sets: normally Silver set one belongs to Gold set one, and so on, and Silver set three is also parked in the warehouse for an emergency.”
The Silver kit itself, he says, is “one camera, three microphones, three in-ears and the 5G backpack in the set, which they can carry by hand — carry-on luggage on the plane. While the Gold set is moved to another stadium, the Silver set is taken out beforehand and goes to a stadium the customer chooses, and does a small production — one standard position, with light, camera, microphones, IFB (interruptible foldback) and so on.”
Every set combined — three Gold kits, three Silver kits and the New York studio kit — weighs in at under four tonnes.
Weeks into the tournament and into the knockout stages, Schiltz says the core architecture hasn’t changed — only capacity has, and even that was straightforward, thanks to a redundant Haivision SRT gateway that TV Skyline can use to route additional feeds on request.
“We didn’t change anything — we upgraded some parts, because the customer requested more possibilities: some more encodings, some more returns. That was very easy, because we use our Haivision SRT gateway in the company, fully redundant. If somebody in a hotel wants a feed to work on a story, we can use it as a router in the cloud, so they get that feed. So those were some small updates,” Schiltz says.
“It’s thinXpool’s philosophy that technical workflows always follow an editorial purpose,” Torka says. “TV Skyline fully grasped that.”
“I’d go the same way, even in another year, because it works well and it’s safe. The redundant concept is the most important part, because it’s a live transmission, and we have one main line, one backup line, and one emergency line — the public internet — that we’ve already needed,” Schiltz says.
“We are very proud and happy to have played our part here for our client thinXpool in making the biggest FIFA World Cup of all time in Germany a huge success. And when we can also break new ground technologically — solutions that work and could well redefine the future of unilateral production overseas — we couldn’t be happier.”
