Going good: RaceTech invests in new technical facilities as the move to remote continues
In a quiet corner of south-west London, is what CEO John Bozza describes as “the best-kept secret in broadcasting”. RaceTech has been around for more than 75 years, but the sheer scale of the services it provides and the number of live events it covers still comes as a surprise to many.
“We cover 1,500 fixtures across 60 racecourses from 7 bases across the UK and with 14 OBs,” says Bozza.
While the company produces content for British racing rightsholders Racing Media Group, ITV Racing, Sky Sports Racing and The Racing Partnership (TRP), its range of services goes way beyond this, with integrity services, archive management, on-course productions and more all part of the comprehensive services the company offers year round – there are only two days a year when no racing takes place.
To produce this level of content while maintaining quality levels and constantly enhancing the services offered to rightsholders, regulators and racecourses, RaceTech is no stranger to innovation. From the first photo finish camera being unveiled in the 1940s to supplying racing’s first HD scanners in 2010, it certainly isn’t a company that stands still.
The latest project for RaceTech is the repurposing of part of its Raynes Park facility to create a whole new technical space complete with six galleries, a master control room and two replay rooms, all part of the company’s continuing move to remote production.
While five of the galleries are already in use for RMG, the sixth currently isn’t being utilised, but it could provide opportunities for RaceTech going forward.
Bozza says: “We are talking to the other rightsholders about bringing them on that remote production journey with us. The spare gallery we’ve got is actually the biggest and it could be used for a number of different things. It could be dedicated to a larger race meeting or it could be used for another sport.”
Broadening out into other sports is certainly something on the mind of Bozza and the RaceTech team as the new facility means there is “more slack in the system”.
Remote operation
As with so many projects of this type, timescales were tight when it came to building the new facility, with work beginning in October, the first spaces becoming operational in March/April and full completion in July. RaceTech worked with ES Broadcast on the build, opting for kit including Evertz Nexx routers and Ross Ultra vision mixers.
Chris Clark, director of innovation at RaceTech, explains the setup: “All the camera feeds come off the course and end up at Ealing Broadcast Centre (EBC), and we’re effectively remotely controlling with all the mixer tops and sound from here, which makes it easier if we need to pull stuff up and have more galleries elsewhere, because the core of the equipment is at EBC. All the multiviewers for the vision mixers are then sent over the network to us so that our directors and the RMG producers can see the vision mixer outputs.”
Improvements to connectivity have been key in enabling this move.
“The big enabler is connectivity,” emphasises Bozza. “The fact that the courses upgraded to 10 times the original bandwidth that they had previously means that we can get all those camera feeds off. That was the key enabler.”
The MCR is used to monitor the incoming race feeds. There’s also a data monitoring area for the tracking data that comes from transponders in the saddle cloths of competing horses, providing information such as how fast the horse is running and positional data. The future plan is to rack cameras from the MCR and remote control them.
The replay rooms have been kitted out with Evertz Dreamcatcher. “We’re probably the largest user of Dreamcatcher in the UK, maybe Europe as well,” says Clark. We’ve worked closely with Evertz over a number of years, and they really put a huge amount of effort into the stewarding side of things – they invested a lot of time and effort to make a bespoke GUI for stewards to operate on course. Now on the course there’s a touchscreen and a controller so they can do their own VAR on course with less interaction from our VT ops. Dreamcatcher has been great and Evertz has been really good at supporting us and helping us build this. We have around 35 servers on the OBs and here.”
In time the replay rooms will be used for all the race replays across multiple courses, creating further efficiencies.
On the road
RaceTech is also continuing to enhance its fleet of OB trucks, with compact units joining the fleet of larger vehicles. The newest addition, which is set to make its debut in York later this month, is RPU, which brings the number of trucks up to 14.
Bozza adds: “When I joined, we had 10 very similar standard sized OBs. We’ve now got some that are bigger than others, and we’ve got some that are quite small and flexible and a bit more easily deployed. I think that we’ll continue to see the fleet evolve.”
This change to the OB line-up is also bringing benefits in terms of sustainability.
Bozza says: “We’ve moved from a two-lorry to a single-lorry model. Typically our OB fleet was the OB unit and a tender vehicle. With remote production, we’ve condensed that down to one vehicle, so we called it a remote production unit (RPU). There’s immediate efficiencies there around just having one lorry traveling around.”
Clark continues: “We’ve gone for inverter technology instead of UPS and it has solar panels on the roof to keep the batteries topped up but also for charging on the go. That’s one of our challenges, because we’re such a busy OB, if batteries are used, obviously they don’t get charged up until the truck’s next plugged in somewhere. So this is a new approach for us. We’re estimating that the truck will stay on in a power outage at least three or four times longer than any UPS, maybe even more.”
A 10,000-gallon HVO tank has also been installed on site and the company is looking at storing tanks on racecourses too.
“We looked at electric, but the range and availability of charging points, certainly for lorries, just isn’t there at the moment. So the next best step for us was to go to HVO. I think it’s circa 90% less emissions than normal diesel fuel. Our stated aim is to move all of our HGVs over to HVO,” says Bozza.
Not surprisingly, Bozza and Clark are already planning for future innovations. Bozza highlights camera technology as one area that the company has an eye on, with automated cameras seen as a potential future solution.
“The traditional model for us is one operator to one camera. We’ve had various different cameras that we now operate either remotely or where an operator can control more than one. That could be cameras that maybe aren’t doing the race coverage, but you might have a camera in a parade ring or in the wash down area of the horses, and you’ve got one operator operating those cameras, and they may not be on site. So camera tech’s definitely evolving.
“We’ve done trials with automated cameras. It’s not quite there yet, but it will come along. I don’t think it will be an all or nothing, it’ll be hybrid, or it’ll supplement the way the racing works.”
Future plans also include the building of a second remote production hub somewhere else in the UK. “We have teams across the UK to cover all 60 racecourses so it doesn’t make sense to just bring people to London to work remotely,” concludes Bozza.