Getting set for the Winter Olympics: Inside SVT’s ongoing software-based production evolution
SVT is fundamentally changing how it produces live sports content by adopting software-based tools as part of its Neo (Next Gen Online Production) project. SVT head of production development, production and technology Dennis Buhr and head of IT development and infrastructure Katarina Persson spoke with SVG Europe about the aims of the project, recent use cases at Rally Sweden 2025 and the Singapore Smash table tennis event, plus what the shift means for SVT’s production – and IT – staff.
Just as some of the world’s top athletes are in training for the Winter Olympics 2026, so too is Swedish public service broadcaster SVT getting set for Milano Cortina.
With the Winter Olympics as its ultimate goal, SVT is midway through a technology transformation project that is shifting production to an entirely software-based environment with a ‘self-service’ approach for operators. And it’s not just an evolution in the technology and tools that are being used, there is also an ongoing change to the way in which SVT’s production, technology and IT teams work together.
The project – titled Neo (Next gen online production) – traces its origins back to 2018, with the aim of building a live production and distribution platform, 100% software-based, on COTs (commercial off-the-shelf) servers.
Key goals of Neo include reducing environmental impact by at least 50%, optimising production processes, and cutting costs—all while reallocating resources to expand the capacity for content creation.
“In recent years there has been a shift in mindset and a cultural movement in the production area, where we have talked a lot about whether you really need to see an uncompressed video signal on €20,000 a screen”
And while the Winter Olympics looms on the horizon, several recent sporting – and non-sporting – events have provided opportunities to test and evolve the technology, key to which are tools and services from Ateliere Creative Technologies, Eyevinn Technology, and Vindral.
The 2024 Great Moose Migration, a 500-hour piece of annual ‘slow TV’ that captures herds of moose making their way to summer grazing pastures, was, at the time, SVT’s biggest proof of concept to date of its Neo project.
But it was the Singapore Smash, a World Table Tennis event that took place earlier this year (30 January to 9 February) that was the first time the SVT sports division ran the broadcast independently, with content team members switching between up to four incoming feeds and managing the production, while technical producers remained on hand to provide support.
Singapore Smash was SVT’s first attempt to divide technology and content into two pieces, explains Buhr.
He says: “For the first time, we’re really trying to address this new way of working, this new era of working with software and focusing on self-service.
“If we look at how we previously did the Olympics – or that level of sports production – in a traditional way, we would have had our own image switchers, our own directors, our own technical operators and so on. But they are not in this new build.
“So, for us as a production and technology department, we are not the ones pushing the buttons and we are not in the front row. We are more focused on creating software layouts and smart buttons that will be self-explanatory for the sports crew. We’re just there to make it happen.”
Buhr explains that SVT has been working with Ateliere for a few years, helping to shape the Ateliere Live software which provides SVT with the ability to add graphics, perform image switching and audio handling.
“It’s funny, because when we talk to Katarina and her team, they are not that impressed, because they’ve been doing this for years, capturing and compressing and publishing frames on the internet. They have a black belt in it!
“But when they see what the product actually does, and that it is more than just encoding and shifting between cameras but creating picture in picture, super imposing images, graphics overlay and all the things that are common in an image switcher…they didn’t know production as well as many others, so now they’re starting to be a little bit more impressed by what this product actually does.”
“If we’re going to change television production, then we also need to discuss roles and responsibilities as well as workflows”
Powered by Nvidia GPU processing and Ateliere Live’s remote proxy vision mixing technology, the software-defined approach aids scalability and helps to address environmental concerns, with Ateliere claiming that its product reduces production costs by at least 50% and lowers environmental impact by at least 70%.
On Vindral, Buhr says: “It’s made for the betting industry, so has low latency and it is really fast to push video over a GPU, over to Vindral’s Media over QUIC, to viewers who can see the stream real-time in a web browser. That’s their game. When we started to produce in software, we noticed early on that we needed to look at the video feedback when producing fast – we can’t have any delays there. So, we took their product and used it internally to push video as fast as we can to the web browser in the gallery. So that’s what Vindral has solved for us.
“And Eyevinn Technology is a media and streaming focused developing house in Stockholm, and they’ve been helping us to make the UIs for Ateliere Live. Ateliere Live has a very well written REST API so you can make your own UIs simply. So Eyevinn Technology has helped us with that. And that’s the bouquet of technologies that helped us with the table tennis.”
SVT’s broadcast of Rally Sweden 2025 (15-18 February) – the second leg of the FIA World Rally Championship (WRC), which took place in Umeå – provided an opportunity to build on the setup used for Singapore Smash, with SVT completing its first fully software-defined live sports production.
SVT took the maximum number of feeds its rights deal allowed, plus content from a few roaming reporters. SVT adopted a studio and REMI (remote integration model) production, with the local WRC compound acting as the ingest node for the multilateral world feed, while SVT’s Umeå facilities acted as a hub for Swedish-language commentary and domestic coverage, equipped with Panasonic 160 PTZ cameras and commentary kits, with audio transported over a WebRTC-based intercom developed with fellow Scandinavian broadcasters NRK, YLE and TV2, known as ‘NeoCom’.
Two roaming reporters used LiveU backpacks for on-the-ground content, and the production team used a hybrid workflow with SVT’s Neo system in Stockholm, managing live feeds, vision and audio mixing and graphics remotely.
Ateliere business development director Andy Beale says that having watched the SVT team in action, he was impressed by their effectiveness and the collaborative manner in which SVT’s production and IT teams worked together. He says: “The cultural change in broadcast is not to be underestimated and it’s really gratifying to see Ateliere’s software playing a key role in the technology stack that underpins that at SVT.”
Mindset shift
For last year’s Moose Migration, the cameras (a mix of Sony PTZ during the day and Axis surveillance cameras at night) and mics were converted from SDI to IP by VideoXLink and transported as H.264 streams over the internet to SVT’s hub at Umeå, where the rest of the IP streams were captured into Ateliere Live, a software-based system jointly developed over a number of years by SVT and Agile Content. Image mixing and overlay graphics were performed by operators in Umeå with rendering done on-prem in Stockholm 650km away.
At the time, Buhr explained to SVG Europe that it wasn’t the technicalities of the cloud-based workflow that were difficult. Instead, it was the need to rethink their approach to production that was more of a challenge. And it’s a sentiment he returns to when speaking with SVG Europe about the recent deployments for this year’s WRC and Singapore Smash.
“In recent years there has been a shift in mindset and a cultural movement in the production area, where we have talked a lot about whether you really need to see an uncompressed video signal on €20,000 a screen,” he says.
“Do you actually need that? The answer, usually, is no. And do you really, really need all these buttons when you’re just pushing three of them? And again, the answer is usually ‘no’. It’s taken us several years to come to that. And now I see that we are in the next phase of transformation, where we really need to understand the needs and the culture of IT and learn from each other – both ways.”
SVT Production & Technology has a glass-to-glass approach and aims to be fully software-driven in production and distribution. While it is clearly pushing boundaries when it comes to adopting software-based production, Buhr makes clear that the use of legacy equipment will continue the immediate future.
“While it might sound like we are getting rid of all the Grass Valley and SDI kit next Friday, we will live in two worlds for, I would say, at least five years. We are focused on making this software bubble grow, and we are very careful in our in technical investments. We are not investing in what we think is the wrong direction. And this is where Adde [Adde Granberg, SVT CTO] is very focused on pushing us towards these sort of technologies.
“That is what makes us confident to work this way, because we have his support. Adde is a real visionary, and he will be there if it fails. But the technology is not the hard work. The hard work is the shift in mindset and bringing cultures together.”
Technology transformation
“If someone has been working in IT their entire life and ended up at SVT, they might not have ever experienced their heart start racing when the red light and tally turns on,” says Buhr. “So, Katarina and I are working together on how we bring people along and how we learn from each other. So that’s the next phase of transformation,” he says.
Persson and her department primarily work on internal products and platforms, including infrastructure and IT security. And while Persson has a history in TV production, the rest of her team don’t.
“For these teams, the production environment is a really new area,” she says. “They haven’t worked in galleries or been a part of a production team before, so many of them had a lot of things to learn.
“At the moment we are planning them to go parallel with other teams in and near the production, seeing how everything is working, learning a lot about intercoms, cameras and everything, to also be able to contribute their skills in development, but also with a new perspective. If we’re going to change television production, then we also need to discuss roles and responsibilities as well as workflows.”
One obvious – but very important – example, is that some teams might not be used to working when the sporting action takes place, which is typically at weekends or during the evening.
“When we ran the moose migration, we were so happy,” says Buhr. “There were some small bumps here and there, but overall it ran great. And then a couple of days later, I realised that if the computer with the hosting platform stopped after 5pm, it would be stopped until the next morning! So those sorts of things we are realising now.”
More yet-to-be-announced innovations will be rolled out for this spring’s moose migration (Buhr says there will be 50 feeds this year – up from 40 in 2024), with the plan to have the Milan-Cortina 2026 production setup in place by this summer.
As well as enabling SVT to manage and distribute multiple streams of content for the Winter and Summer Olympics, it will also help the sports department bring more deals and rights to SVT, because it’s fundamentally so much cheaper to produce in a software-based environment, explains Buhr.
“You just can’t compare the investments, because in this world a gallery is just an IT workspace. And that’s why we exist at SVT as a production and technology department, to adapt ourselves to what’s incoming. So, if the sport department says we want to do the World Championships and the Olympics in the same year, we just have to adapt to that. And this is our way to cope with it. It results in a much lighter footprint in every way, both economically and environmentally.”