ARD and ZDF shared Avid Everywhere for UEFA EURO and Olympics coverage

Avid has confirmed that its content creation, management and distribution solutions will once again be at the heart of the live production infrastructure for ZDF’s and ARD’s shared German television coverage of the two main sport events of the year. The extensive media production from both events – the UEFA European Championship in France and the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil – will be powered by the Avid MediaCentral Platform.

Avid’s production asset management and shared storage systems are seamlessly integrated with third-party solutions to enable the public broadcasters to deliver content to millions of viewers in Germany anytime, anywhere from multiple locations.

ZDF and ARD will share facilities to benefit from greater operational synergies. Westdeutsche Rundfunk (WDR), a Cologne-based public broadcaster with its own regional television channel and a member of ARD (a consortium of German public-broadcasting institutions), will be responsible for the UEFA EURO, taking place in France during June and July. Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR), based in Hamburg and also a member of ARD, will be in charge of the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro in August.

The coverage will be aired through both ARD and ZDF’s television channels.

This set-up required a fast, efficient and robust workflow to cater to a wide range of content and distribution demands – from on-the-fly editing, graphics creation and processing to production, management and distribution of content. Together, the Avid and third-party integrated workflow will enable collaboration among all members of the production team across complex, multi-location environments. Once the UEFA EURO 2016 is over, this proven end-to-end production infrastructure will then be shipped to Brazil and used in a similar way for media production covering the Olympic Games.

“The aim of the MediaCentral Platform is to provide holistic solutions that integrate smoothly with systems from third-party providers, thereby offering a real added value to our customers. It enables a highly efficient workflow that serves to meet complex challenges such as the media production for major sports events,” said Tom Cordiner, vice president of International Sales at Avid. “ZDF and ARD continue to rely on our trusted solutions to deliver exciting, high-quality content to their audiences anytime, anywhere.”

Systems integrator Qvest Media, the largest Avid reseller worldwide, implemented the solution. The production capabilities are based around Avid Interplay and Avid shared storage systems. Avid Media Composer is used for editing, while iNEWS and several Interplay clients are used for news production. EVS’ XT3 media server and IPDirector are being used for ingest and playout, and Vizrt graphics solutions are also part of the integrated, file-based HD media production workflow.