BT Sport and Timeline TV are shortlisted for IBC2014 Innovation Awards
BT Sport and Timeline Television have been shortlisted for the IBC2014 Innovation Awards in the Content Management category for the forward-thinking design of BT Sport’s new production centre located in what was the international broadcast centre at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in Stratford, the home of the London 2012 Olympic Games.
Launched on the first of August last year, BT Sport broadcasts a range of live sports content including Barclays Premier League football and Aviva Premiership Rugby plus Serie A, Ligue 1, Brasileirão and Major League Soccer from overseas. Jamie Hindhaugh, chief operating officer of BT Sport said: “At the core of our new studios’ build is a spirit of collaboration that brings the best of industry – and sometimes competitors – working together toward a common aim: to make the BT Sport studios a world-class hub for the best ideas and talent.”
The new studios are a production hub for all the content created by BT Sport, including a range of original debate and information shows every day of the week, which come directly from the studios, demanding a facility capable of multiple live broadcasts at the same time.
“Dalet AmberFin sits at the centre of the BT Sport workflow, providing file ingest, re-versioning and delivery for BT’s new flagship sports channels. AmberFin’s API allows the flexibility to customize its monitoring, control and integration within the rest of the facility’s systems and AmberFin’s integrated DPP capabilities have helped BT Sport become the UK’s first fully DPP-compliant broadcast production hub,” commented Charlie Tear, technical director at Timeline Television.
The new production facility scores a number of firsts – not least that BT Sport has become the first UK broadcaster to adopt the Digital Production Partnership (DPP) file-based delivery specifications for all of its own internal productions and externally-delivered content. BT Sport led on the strategic direction of the project, while Timeline Television worked closely with Dalet – a supporter of the DPP initiative and developer of a sophisticated family of DPP-enabling products and systems.
“We’re really proud to have helped enable this first-of-a-kind facility”, said Bruce Devlin, chief media scientist at Dalet. “AmberFin has always promoted open standards and the DPP delivery specification is the first, truly national standard of its kind. BT and Timeline TV have really embraced the concept of using that standard to improve interoperability and create great levels of efficiency and collaboration. Now that AmberFin is part of Dalet, that desire to support standards and improve efficiency is even stronger.”