Lions live: Dublin opener sees Sky Sports take remote route

Becky Lea, Sky Sports production manager, in the Aviva Stadium on Match Day -1

Sky Sports’ coverage of the British & Irish Lions Men’s Tour to Australia opened with the 1888 Cup match in Ireland against Argentina on Friday 20 June, and will run until Saturday 2 August when the Lions face the Wallabies in the third and final Test match in Sydney.

Sky Sports is using its state-of-the-art studio that is also home to many of its flagship sports shows at its Osterley headquarters to cover the Lions tour of Australia this summer, with a new look developed in collaboration with First Nations artist Konstina. Every Test match will be live on Sky Sports in Ultra HD, and available to stream via Now.

For Friday’s Dublin game, minority language public service broadcasters S4C Wales and TG4 Ireland came together to take on the host broadcast production, with Sky Sports producing its own seven-camera presentation add-on, working with Irish OB facilities provider TVM.

The add-on delivered pitch-side presentation from lead anchor Alex Payne with on-screen analysts John Barclay, Owen Farrell and Conor Murray, along with a commentary team of Miles Harrison, Will Greenwood and Sam Warburton, plus Eleanor Roper as roving reporter.

“We’re doing this as a remote production, which is how we’re doing the whole Lions Tour. What we have for this match is really similar to what we’ll have for the Test matches in terms of camera specs. This is our first ever remote production in Ireland,” Sky Sports production manager Becky Lea tells SVG Europe in Dublin.

“We’ve taken some vision and audio kit off our regular Football League trucks, as the football season is finished, and shipped it over to Ireland. That allows us to get pictures back remotely to our Sky gallery – you can actually hear our director Sam doing checks in the gallery at the moment. So every camera we have here is going back to a big production gallery at Sky.

“Our add-on production is seven cameras. We’ve got two presentation cameras for our pitch-side position, and a radio camera that will be doing pieces at the side of the pitch and in the hospitality area with our reporter, and during the live game it will be filming the Lions bench (and that footage is being shared with the host broadcasters).

“Then we’ve got two big lens cameras, one pitch-side behind the try line which will swap ends at half-time so we can always capture Lions attacking play; one to the left of the tunnel area which can also get close-ups; and then two ENG cameras which have match positions but are also filming for Sky Sports News, doing links from the Lions hotel and colour with fans in and around the stadium.”

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She continues: “All those feeds come back into the TVM truck and we send them straight to the Sky gallery. It’s a TVM OB and largely TVM crew, but we’ve brought some of our own connectivity and audio kit, which means pictures and audio are going back to Sky, and the actual programme sound mix will also be done from Sky. So we’re making sure everything comes good to us, monitoring it, and then sending it on. This is normally a full match production truck, but we’ve converted it into a Sky remote production truck for this match only.

“In Australia we’ll be working with NEP Australia and we’ll again be taking some of our own kit to put alongside their trucks for our pres add-on. The host broadcaster is Stan Sport.

“This game is full presentation on-site. For the first five matches of the Tour we’ll be presenting from our studio at Sky, with a reporter and commentary on-site. And then for the three Test matches the presentation team flies over to be pitch-side.

“We’re taking a clean match feed from the host here and then adding our own match and presentation graphics back at Sky. Our graphics for the wider Lions Tour are being replicated here so we can maintain a consistent uniform graphics approach across all the productions – clock graphics and team graphics. AE Live are doing the graphics here for the host and then we’ve got AE Live in our gallery as well doing Sky versions.”

“By doing this remotely we can be more sustainable as well, as we haven’t had to fly as many people over. We’ll use Telstra as our main connectivity provider in Australia, with NEP Australia for back-up circuits and disaster recovery for the Test matches.”

Shot clock synchronisation to Sky and back

Sky Sports head of production technology Gordon Roxburgh was on hand at the Aviva Stadium to oversee technical delivery of the broadcaster’s first remote production from Ireland. “We always do remote production now for a pres add-on, anywhere in the UK. It’s really our modus operandi, from the top end of Formula 1 to a tentpole event such as the Lions Tour.

Gordon Roxburgh, Sky Sports, head of production technology, in the TVM truck on Match Day

“We make better television programmes that way, back to the studio in London with our team, virtual graphics, archive, and control set up. The NEP Connect connectivity into this stadium is proven from American football matches, so we’ve just brought some kit from the UK that regularly does the Football League for us with NEP Connect. We plug that into the network and off we go.

“We’ve got two NEP Connect Net Insight Nimbras, a switch that extends the Sky network through all our firewalls and security to the venues, Sky-provisioned Appear encoding and decoding devices with low latency HEVC, Riedel VOIP comms, Tieline codec for DR with a satellite link, a Calrec RP1 to allow remote audio mixing, and Dataprobe for GPIs.”

The Sky Sports graphics package designed for the Lions Tour was shared for the Lions vs Argentina host broadcast production, with the fibre network link to London allowing Sky to adjust its on-screen graphics and clocks working with AE Live teams in Osterley and on-site in Dublin.

Roxburgh says: “Something that is new to rugby since the last Lions Tour is the on-screen shot clock, so when someone starts the shot clock here you want that to be the same on the broadcast back in the UK. Because if you are out by a second and the player has kicked the ball with a second to go, it would be out in our broadcast when legally it was in, and people watching the broadcast would think ‘oh we’ve been done here!’.

“So actually, the ability to synchronise all the clock timing data together has been really important, with the AE Live team and the Sky Content and Technology teams to ensure we get that link with the official time back in London.”

“We have a long-term relationship with Bart Arnold and the TVM team from doing football and GAA here in Ireland. We have a great relationship, so when we needed to come here and do this they had one of their larger trucks available. It just eats a remote production for us, with all the facilities available for everyone to do what they need to do,” he adds.

“We’re here with proper pres add-on cameras, big lens cameras in the venue, and synchronisation of all the clock data back into the control room at Sky – as if it is a Test match. The specification here is basically the same as the one we’ll be doing down in Australia for the Test matches. We’re able to bring the technology to give it a lift, so that it looks great on-screen for our viewers.”