Remote challenges: ISB talks latency, comms, transmission and the changing face of engineering for remote productions
The 2024 Para Swimming European Open Championships, held on Madeira Island, Portugal, were host broadcaster ISB’s first foray into a full remote production
Host broadcaster International Sports Broadcasting (ISB) took the leap into full remote production for the recent 2024 Para Swimming European Open Championships, held on Madeira Island, Portugal.
While ISB has carried out remote productions before, it has never operated from outside the city the production was taking place in, and never using its own facilities which are based in Madrid, Spain.
Ursula Romero, managing director at ISB, found that setting up a remote production for this singular event, which took place from 21 to 27 April 2024, held its own challenges versus preparing a production for a regular event. She explains: “Is it easy to do remote for these one-off short events? No, I think that remote production is definitely much, much easier when you have a regular event, as Sky does with football, where it’s always the same venue; you have the same infrastructure and it happens weekly or what have you.”
“Before, you would pull out a cable and plug it back in, turn off a switch and turn it back on, and then eventually by hit-and-miss, you would understand what the problem was then you can fix it with duct tape or a new cable or whatever. Now, you’re looking at graphs and numbers and different colours going up and down, and it’s like, “what are you looking at?””
She adds the conversely, “these one-offs are quite stressful because you by not being there [on location], it’s really difficult to sometimes pinpoint what a problem may be because between all the internet lines and communications, you don’t know where it’s happening”.
Romero continues: “So it adds a little bit of level of stress on the engineering side. Yes, it works when the technology works, but these one-off events make it a bit more difficult because you only have so much time. You have a very reduced budget.”
ISB ran it’s remote production between Madeira Island, Portugal, and its gallery and studios in Madrid, Spain
IT consultant time
Remote production is changing the profile of the people that need to run sports broadcasting operations technically, ISB’s David Taunton, head of production, notes. “I would say that it’s not even IT. It’s a specific type of IT. It’s broadcast IT, because I can bring in an IT person, very knowledgeable on IT, but it’s just a different world.
“I am not being an engineer myself, but just listening into it and having conversations with IT personnel, purely IT, it’s not the same. They’re speaking different variables and different information.”
ISB used a broadcast IT consultant for this remote production. Taunton says: “The team knows what the plan is, but then going into the finer details of clicking here and putting stuff here, we need a specialist; adding in a question mark to the middle of this sentence to make the code work is just the sort of thing that we don’t expect our engineering team to know or to be knowledgeable on.”
Romero adds: “Before, you would pull out a cable and plug it back in, turn off a switch and turn it back on, and then eventually by hit-and-miss, you would understand what the problem was then you can fix it with duct tape or a new cable or whatever. Now, you’re looking at graphs and numbers and different colours going up and down, and it’s like, “what are you looking at?”.”
Comms challenges
Greg Breakell is the ISB director for this event. Romero says, “he’s our favourite swimming director!”. On how working from Madrid affects Breakell’s directing, Romero comments: “One valid point [affecting directors working remotely], and as a director myself, I know you have to get your head around the time delay on comms because there’s always a little bit of a time delay.
“So when he says, “camera one, go”, by the time it gets to the camera operator, there’s a second, second and a half. And then by the time he makes the movement, there’s another bit of a delay. So you have to get the timings right.
“It’s the same with graphics,” she continues. “He says to the graphics operator, “insert the graphic”, and it takes a second and a half, two seconds for him to react and the graphics to pop up. So you have to pre-empt a lot of the times or time shift, which what I’ve been doing.”
Romero continues that camera meetings can also be tricky when the director is based elsewhere. She notes: “You can’t be in person. [The director is] dealing with some camera operators that don’t speak very good English, so he’s doing separate video calls to try and explain; obviously, if you’re in person, you can go to the venue and you can show them and say, “I want this, I want that”. And then also for [the director] to see the venue is difficult to work out what things might be in the way or what doesn’t look so good. So we spend a lot of time on the phone or on calls, pre-producing those on a daily basis.”
She adds: “And then you need to have somebody in the pool who can help the director out with liaising, so we spend a lot of time either on TalkBack or on the phone.”
Latency and transmission were two key challenges that ISB has to overcome for the remote production of the 2024 Para Swimming European Open Championships
Transmission issues
On the technical for this event, Taunton says: “The internet wiring from Madeira to Madrid; it took us a while to clean that up. We had signals coming in, but before going on air, we still had problems here and there on air. There were little issues that were quickly resolved, though. But it is one of those things that you have to go step by step to solve. Fortunately, we had crystal clear pictures and the voices coming in perfectly, but it has presented a challenge for sure. Luckily we’ve been able to surpass those challenges in time.”
Testing the set up was more of a challenge with the vast majority of ISB based in Madrid. The crew at both ends of the production has three days to test everything and make sure both the main workflow route and the two backups – over 4G and Starlink – were operational.
Taunton says that he would have preferred longer, however. “We did have testing three days before we went live, but a couple more days if we could have been on site would have been beneficial. Being on the island, you want to just triple check everything a little bit more. There’s good infrastructure on the island for sure in Madeira, but being in-person would have been advantageous.”
He continues: “The camera set up itself is half a day, but it’s more the connectivity and syncing of cameras and all these things that has to be coordinated well. That’s why we had ISB personnel on site to liaise with what was already set in motion a month or more ago on paper. Now we had to just follow that paperwork and find the correct path to send all these signals,” concludes Taunton.
For the 2024 Para Swimming European Open Championships ISB used a mixture of technologies. Threse included Haivision’s MCR technology based in ISB’s Madrid operation, which was used for distribution, and was controlled by Taunton. TVU was used for the remote commentary. On backup, Dejero was used for 4G bonding of signals, and the broadcast version of Starlink was used as an alternative internet route.