Live from IBC2013: SVG Europe fêtes Red Bull Media House, Riedel, Origin Digital, BSkyB, and ChyronHego
More than 270 industry professionals turned out to honour this year’s greatest sports productions and technologies at SVG Europe’s annual IBC Sport Technology Reception at the RAI in Amsterdam over the weekend. Red Bull Media House, Riedel, and Origin Digital took home the award for Production Achievement for their impressive work on last October’s Red Bull Stratos launch. The honourees for Technical Achievement were BSkyB and ChyronHego for development of Premier League player-tracking graphics.
From left: SVG Europe Advisory Board Chairman Peter Angell; Scott Gillies, head of technical production/co-producer, Red Bull Stratos; and Thomas Riedel, founder/managing director, Riedel Communications
To turn Felix Baumgartner’s supersonic 24-mile Red Bull Stratos skydive into a globally iconic moment, Red Bull Media House brought together a unique mix of bleeding-edge and traditional video-production tools. The Red Bull Stratos skydive teamed Red Bull Media House with a number of production partners, including Flightline Films, Riedel Communications, and Origin Digital. In the end, the live feed of Baumgartner’s 128,100-ft. free fall garnered a YouTube-record 8 million concurrent streams (280 digital syndication partners streamed it) and was picked up by 80 TV outlets in 50 countries.
The Red Bull compound in Roswell, NM, comprised mission control, production offices, media/press centre, and Lyon Video’s MU8 mobile production unit, along with the nearby capsule launch pad. Riedel tied the compound together with its Artist Digital Matrix fiber-based communications system.
In addition, all video signals on ground were distributed and routed with a Riedel fibre-based MediorNet real-time network. A total of 24 MediorNet nodes were installed in a redundant ring topology to prevent a connection loss, and the main system was connected to the launch pad via a MediorNet system with two MediorNet Compact frames.
Red Bull Media House brought on Origin Digital and its Live Events Automation Platform (LEAP) to help distribute the stream to devices around the globe. The live stream was sent via satellite from Roswell to Origin Digital’s encoding facility in Denver, where it was encoded and fed to YouTube’s CDN. The live stream was then played out on the same video play YouTube used for its record-breaking work at the London Olympic Games last summer.
BSkyB and ChyronHego
At the backend of the 2012-13 English Premier League season, Sky Sports wanted to trial a brand-new analysis tool for enhancing its live EPL football coverage. The aim was to enable the production to create fast-turnaround analyses of game-play events within a time window of a first or second replay. It was also to enable operators to make highlights where appropriate within the live coverage. To achieve this, Sky Sports relied on deployment of the Tracab player-tracking system from ChyronHego, which has recently been selected as the official player-tracking technology by the EPL for the next three seasons.
The data from the tracking system was fed over fibre from the tracking server within the stadium to the OB compound. Within the production truck, an operator received the data into a version of the acclaimed ChyronHego Virtual Placement system, which has been specially developed for the needs of virtual graphics in football. The result was that all players and the ball were able to have live graphics attached to them in real time and follow them around in true 3D space.