For Sky Sports to bring the number of its exclusively live Premier League matches for the new 2025/26 season from 128 to at least 215, it needed to bring its best technologists to the table to make the multiple productions work.
The answer for the broadcaster has been IP. While it has been gradually shifting its internal systems over to IP during the last three years, the volume of matches needed to be bought live to viewers from 15 August for the Premier League meant a rapid boost in the implementation of its IP strategy.
Kevin McCue, Sky Sports’ director of studios and technology, has recently returned to the Sky Sports fold, having been previously leading the Group’s production engineering department where he personally drove the broadcaster’s IP transformation over the last three years.
Speaking to SVG Europe, McCue says of that IP transformation and the role that the Premier League contract has played in its advancement: “We very much took the view that we would move to IP capability by capability, as opposed to facility by facility. We have a core but very capable foundation of IP that we put in over the last few years, which is a huge Arista and Imagine infrastructure that we’ve built, and now we’re just starting to bring more capabilities online.”
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The Premier League contract is pushing Sky Sports’ ambitions in IP along more rapidly than expected. McCue says: “Whilst we had been steadily bringing capabilities onto the platform, like replay, contribution, graphics, studio floors, all that good stuff, we had been avoiding doing a big bang of a whole IP control room. It just so happened that we needed a control room for the [Premier League] contract, so we went two feet in and built our first fully IP control room, which has been a massive success.
“From a journey perspective, we’re on strategy if not slightly ahead of it, we’re now retrospectively looking at our other facilities and understanding what capabilities we can fold back into the overarching IP strategy, because it’s unlocking more and more things for us,” he continues. “So EVS efficiency it unlocks very quickly, when we talk about what we’re doing with things like Grass Valleys AMPP platform and where we’re talking about software-based production, all of that lands and exists inside our IP ecosystem as well. It is very rapidly unlocking things at a much faster rate than we thought it would, by starting to really centralise and create a kind of almost centre of gravity around IP that all of our facilities are connected to,” McCue states.
Mass production
Right now it is all hands on deck for the start of the new football season, says McCue: “This is the culmination of 18 months work. What we’ve now gone into is mass production in terms of remote production. We changed connectivity supplier, and that’s no mean feat in its own right, actually moving wholesale from one provider to another – BT Media & Broadcast – and all of the technical challenges and the whole transformation of that has been huge in its own right, moving to Jpeg-XS rather than J2K [Jpeg 2000] as a contribution format, which is better quality, lower latency; all of these good things.
“From an Osterley perspective, when you get into mass production all of a sudden you start to realise that actually just from a core tech perspective, we’re juggling 26 EVS servers now over the course of a weekend to produce all of our content [for the Premier League]. And the only natural way of doing that is to move most of that infrastructure onto IP.
“The core of our VT has been moved onto IP, the core of our contribution network has been moved onto IP,” McCue continues. “That’s come with the creation of another control room here at Osterley, which is again our first IP 2110 control room, to do match cuts.”
McCue says that the IP transformation is unlocking new capabilities in terms of remote production. “It also then starts to unlock things like our Wilmslow facility. So in Wilmslow we have two replay rooms that are now fully connected into the Osterley ecosystem; so full access to the core EVS infrastructure we’ve built. We’ve done a migration to the new EVS LSM-Via platform for all of the workflow things that unlocks and all of the distributed workflow things that it does for us. It allows us to seamlessly work across Wilmslow and Osterley, and then just lots more 2110.”
Pause to reflect
McCue elaborates on some of the significant technical changes that have occurred at Sky, which are fuelling its move to the SMPTE 2110 IP standards.
“Leading into this, we’ve introduced a bunch of new suppliers, introduced companies like Arkona with its Manifold product, Cerebrum has come in and started to eat away at what was the Atos Broadcast Network Control System (BNCS) footprint from a tech perspective, and really trying to overlay all of our facilities to allow us to do this kind of level of production.
“Up until the start of this [Premier League] season, we wouldn’t typically be doing two remote match cuts at the same time,” continues McCue. “That’s now standard for us. We’re now doing some of the match choice content, which is our 3pm Saturday [matches], which is coming through the remote facility with the associated replay facilities across Wilmslow and Osterley supporting that. [We’ve now got] a lot more monitoring, a lot more new ways of working around IP and intercom and all of those things that you need when you start mass producing.”
McCue adds: “At one point we were tracking 30 work streams to deliver across all of the delivery requirements, up to the edge of cricket, through cricket, and then up to the start of the Premier League. Sometimes we don’t take these moments to check ourselves on this a little bit; of these 215 matches, they’re all HDR. Producing HDR content is still difficult, it’s still an art form in its own right, and we take that for granted now. We take for granted that we are working in UHD, we’re working in Dolby Atmos, we’re working in HDR, we are working with JPEG-XS; we have massive specifications for a lot of our Premier League matches. Looking at Studio four and our OB sets, the way that these systems work and the complexity of the graphics that are running into them, the way our presentation works, it’s just monstrous.
“It is often moments like this where you actually pause to reflect a little bit when you start hearing it coming out of your mouth,” McCue laughs. “Because what we’ve been doing for the last 18 months, and very condensed in the last three months, is just deliver, deliver, deliver, every single day. Something had to fall out of the machine to make all of this work.
“Across Phil’s [Marshall, executive director for production and operations] team, Jennie’s [Blackmore, head of production at Sky Sports] group, my group in studios – whether that’s the operational folk, the technical folk, the project delivery folk – they’ve all had to work symbiotically for this; there was no room for error. This has been one of the biggest mobilisations I think of project teams and delivery people across a huge community within Sky Sports and across both production, operations, tech and studio operations to deliver this; it’s been amazing, it has been an absolutely phenomenal effort.”
As part of the gradual move towards IP over the last three years, the teams in group engineering and production engineering at Sky Sports have developed the skill sets required.
McCue notes, however: “The most visible, obvious and slightly uncomfortable change in this is when you start to move control systems. When you start to either be spanning a couple of different broadcast control systems, which we are now, which is a combination of having Cerebrum in certain places and BNCS in other places; it’s that little gap, that’s that little fear of the unknown, that introducing something that’s unfamiliar, that’s our hardest part I would say.
“But from a skills perspective, it’s credit to the quality of what’s been built by the engineering folk that that’s the last thing that we worry about,” McCue concludes.
