Fox Sports Netherlands expands playout facilities with Videlio

Videlio is expanding Fox Sports’ playout facilities located in Hilversum. The platform, which was originally deployed in 2015 and upgraded in 2016, will be made fully redundant. A staging platform will also be implemented to validate future upgrades and new workflows prior to their roll-out.

This expansion follows the increased number of channels distributed from Hilversum. In addition to the original fifteen channels dedicated to the Dutch market (6 live, 9 on-line), three new outbound feeds have been added: two channels dedicated to the 22 countries Fox Sports beams into Africa and one master feed for Fox Sports affiliates.

“With the growing number of channels we now reach millions of viewers in Europe and Africa, explained Jinne Tania, Broadcast Specialist Fox Sports channels at Eredivisie Media & Marketing CV. “We had to take our playout centre to the next level, but we needed a partner that we trust to manage such an upgrade in a live 24/7 environment such as ours.”

The transmission and playout system has been designed upfront with components from major suppliers including Axon video processing, EVS and Harmonic servers, Imagine Communications router, Juniper Network equipment, LSM control system and Pebble Beach automation. The platform leverages VSM to allow for any operational position within the playout centre to be assigned to any operational task.

As a result, any workstation can be allocated to any task in the workflow, be it QC operations, monitoring, editing or ingest. The user interface was designed to give a graphical representation of the facility so the operators could easily select their seat and assign the workflow offering ultimate flexibility of space and resource.