Tyrell’s Take goes out on tour in Dublin, London and Manchester

Tyrell has gone on tour with a series of events to showcase ‘Tyrell’s Take’ across the UK and Ireland. The tour kicked off with ‘The Top Players in News and Sports Production’ earlier this month at Chelsea Football Club, moving on to Manchester United and arriving at Croke Park in Dublin last Thursday.

The events, which took the format of a personalised tradeshow, included hands-on demos to highlight product features from various Tyrell partners combined to offer an end-to-end workflow.

Broadcasters, OBs and sports clubs are having to change the way they produce and manage their content. Driven by an increasing audience demand for niche or off-grid types of sports and ever-evolving viewing behaviours, the Tyrell’s Take on Tour was designed to help visitors to explore new opportunities and expand revenue streams. The partners showcasing their solutions at the three venues were ABonAir, Blackbird, Clear-Com, Intinor, JVC, LiveU and Streamstar.

Tyrell sales and marketing director Dan Muchmore told SVG Europe, “We’ve been looking at different ways to run an OB, to run an event, that won’t necessarily require an OB level of equipment. You have a camera; how do you get the signal back to site?

“Here we’ve got JVC showing their IP-connected range of cameras. We can take a stream from an individual camera over IP, or alternatively we can send it via bonded cellular, or alternatively over SDI via RF. So we are showing three different ways of taking a camera feed from the field and getting it back to a site.

“Effectively in the demo room here we’re showing a flyaway OB – acquisition from JVC, bonding from LiveU and from Intinor, and wireless RF from ABonAir. The camera RF is being received into encoding technology by Intinor as well as the IP stream from the JVC camera into Intinor. That Intinor hardware is then number-crunching, taking those signals, re-encoding and sending out over NDI to the Streamstar switching system.

“ABonAir, Intinor and Streamstar are all new to Tyrell within the past year,” said Muchmore. “We’ve now taken over sole distribution for Streamstar in the UK and Ireland. Streamstar is interesting because it’s not just a production system – it’s also a replay system and a streaming system.

“With this workflow we’ve got the encoders from Intinor, sending over NDI to Streamstar, which is producing the show, camera switching and outputting to Facebook Live. While we’re doing that, at the same time we’re taking the signals from Streamstar out of SDI into Blackbird hardware.

“So we have cameras, a location eight-camera switching system producing the show, and then elsewhere, remotely, we have Blackbird receiving the constant feed from Streamstar and doing the necessary edits for highlights package or show reel or social. Blackbird never actually touches the real files; they’re always working off a cloud version of an EDL. It’s a proxy workflow; and then when it’s finished it’s writing back to the original files that are sitting back at source – whether that’s on an Avid Nexis system or in the cloud.

“Then the whole thing is brought together by Clear-Com, with the Clear-Com hardware talking via ABonAir, LiveU or Intinor back to camera – so three different ways of sending comms back to the camera set-up as well as between the various elements of the production chain.

“We’re looking at the second and third divisions of football, the Under 21s and Under 18s where content is still required but they don’t necessarily have the budget to produce professional output,” said Muchmore. “Sometimes those lower tiers think they cannot afford that level so they decide not to produce any content at all.

“We’re saying ‘it’s not expensive and not complicated to do this, if you are open-minded to ask the question, how would we do it?’ Yesterday we put this flyaway OB together in one hour.

“We’ve actually had some Premier League clubs coming in here, and some soap opera people as well. And quite a lot of local authority people. They might want a system with a couple of cameras and streaming over IP, with very little staff involvement and less staff knowledge. We’ve been very pleased with the attendance,” he said.