NEP steps up live remote productions with new Belgian data centre for improved connectivity in Europe
NEP is heavily involved in remote productions and ways of working; NEP helped Fox Sports go cloud-based at MediaArena in Amsterdam in 2020
NEP is stepping up its European-based live remote production capabilities with a new data centre based in Belgium.
The broadcast services provider is working with Dutch company, KevlinX, which builds and operates a pan-European platform of high performance, concurrently maintainable tier three data centre campuses, to facilitate its evolving support of cloud-based remote live productions.
With a specialty in the broadcast, media and gaming market, KevlinX is working with NEP and its media clients to create the first low latency, high proximity broadcast datacentre in Brussels, specifically for live video productions.
The move comes as NEP is investing heavily in its people and technology to increase its prowess in innovative, end-to-end solutions including centralised (remote) production.
By utilising KevlinX’s sustainable data centre, NEP can host platforms in the cloud allowing remote workers to manage productions from any location, with adoption being accelerated by the recent COVID pandemic where people are being forced to work from home.
Geert Thoelen, technical director, NEP Belgium, commented: “NEP has decades of experience in live productions with over 2,000 highly trained and experienced technical engineers working for a variety of broadcast clients and projects across our worldwide network. However, with the move to remote production coupled with IP cloud-based workflows, this major digital transformation redefines all of our working practices.
“There are major benefits to do this in terms of both cost savings and improving the quality of our service and broadcast output. But actually, there are other benefits such as improving the quality of the working day for our employees where they don’t need to spend long periods away from their families,” added Thoelen.
Barro Luitjes, CEO at KevlinX, explained further: “Being perfectly located in between Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam and Paris, the KevlinX data centre has the shortest latency to all the important internet, cloud and media hubs in Europe. What this means for our partner NEP is that we are delighted to offer a large scale data centre that provides a media based ecosystem with fast connectivity to many international services and cloud partners, which is ideal for their distributed working practices. In addition, both NEP and KevlinX provide a common goal of sustainability by facilitating cloud-based services for the media production workflows that are good for the climate without the need to send people around the world.”
Thoelen concluded: “Cloud-based services have already proved to provide versatility and agility to our customers where we can spin up additional resources to cover peak demands as and when required. Also worldwide events can be delivered more reliably and cost efficiently over our worldwide IP-network and well-spread satellite-link hubs. We are delighted to be working with KevlinX to give us a sustainable data centre for our next generation of cloud-based media workflows. For NEP that is especially important for major live broadcasting events, often with audiences in the many millions where reliability, quality, and low latency connections are non-negotiable as we are under constant exposure in real-time from our customers and viewers alike.”