Nevion streams Swedish football coverage via JPEG 2000

Sweden: Onside TV Production, a full-service production facility owned by the Swedish Football Association (Svenska Fotbollförbundet; SvFF) and Svensk Elit Fotboll (SEF), has implemented Nevion’s VideoIPath along with the company’s Ventura JPEG 2000 compression system to transport live content from 16 football stadiums across Sweden—from Gävle in the north to Malmö in the south—over IP.

The Nevion kit is being used to transport live SD content, such as news, interviews, clips and match updates, from 16 local production studios owned and operated by KLUBB TV, the media production arm of SvFF, at the top team’s stadiums over a 100Mbps IP circuit using just three decoders. The content is delivered to Onside TV’s central facility, which packages the content using Final Cut Pro for their customers who range from local and regional broadcasters to Web-based sites and other media. Previously, KLUBB TV could only make file-based transfers from each stadium.

Onside TV is using VideoIPath’s Web-based tools to manage content, as well as for scheduling, provisioning and complete monitoring of video-over-IP services. VideoIPath makes it simple to dynamically shift the connections to wherever they’re needed, whether scheduled in advance or on an ad-hoc basis. This provides significant efficiency and cost benefits, eliminating the need for 16 individual connections.

“VideoIPath serves several critical functions for Onside TV,” said Ikbal Ustraliof Onside TV Production. “First, the ability to link to 16 different locations on an as-needed basis enables us to produce and deliver content to our customers in a very rapid and flexible way. It would’ve been too costly to set up that many permanent connections. This way, we can have three connections at any given time, receiving content where and when it makes sense, according to the match schedule. VideoIPath handles the details and monitors the transmissions to make sure that all goes well.”

Nevion and Onside TV worked closely with JMG, a Swedish-based broadcast equipment supplier. JMG has a longstanding relationship with both Onside TV and Nevion, for whom they provide local product support.

All 16 football stadiums have an identical setup featuring two Sony BRC-Z700 robotic cameras, a handheld Sony XDCAM EX3 camera,and a Mac workstation with Final Cut Pro for local editing. Each robotic camera can be operated remotely from Onside TV Production’s central facility or from the local KLUBB TV studio. Content can be streamed in real time, with VideoIPath making the connection to the central site. Producers can set up video-over-IP connections and record directly to Onside TV Production, or locally to the Mac workstation, transferring the files using EditShare at a later time. The entire process is managed over IP.

At KLUBB TV, the SD video is compressed and mapped to IP using Nevion’s Ventura VS901-IED-GE JPEG 2000 encoder/decoder cards. Identical cards are deployed at both the transmission and reception ends of the system, since the VS901-IED-GE can function as an encoder or decoder.

“We haven’t used live streaming before this, but in testing other kinds of live distribution systems Nevion worked better and the picture is better quality than with H.264, says Ustraliof.

“We have no plans to move to HD at this moment because it’s not needed for the web, but in the future we probably will,” he adds.