SAM LiveTouch used by BT Sport for first 360/VR production of CL Final

BT Sport used Snell Advanced Media’s LiveTouch replay and highlights system for its first ever 360/VR UHD production of the UEFA Champions League final on Saturday, June 3, 2017. The LiveTouch system handled all the live UHD 360 VR replays for the broadcaster’s dedicated VR app and the BT Sport YouTube channel. BT Sport also produced a world version of the curated 360 VR feed for other broadcasters on behalf of UEFA.

4K UHD feeds were delivered from 12 Nokia Ozo 360 camera rigs, featuring eight lenses each, to BT Sport’s dedicated 360 VR mobile truck on site at Cardiff’s National Stadium. Three LiveTouch servers were used together with inter-server streaming as a 10 in/2 out UHD configuration.

The sources were accessed from a single LiveTouch Panel during the game providing instant replay, highlights and playlists from any 360 VR source. File-based UHD 360 VR highlights were delivered in twice realtime during and after the event directly to NAS storage using SAM’s Fileflow transcode and delivery workflow engine. The LiveTouch replay workstation also offered a complete craft editor offering a powerful creative toolset unique to LiveTouch.

Neil Maycock, EVP and General Manager, Media Software Solutions, SAM added, “We are very proud to have been chosen by BT Sport to support its evolution into live 4K 360 VR sports coverage and to be involved in such an important milestone. LiveTouch was built from the ground up to be fast, intuitive and responsive as well as robust enough to deal with the pressure of the live sports environment, all while handling any resolution content and supporting more cameras than any other system. This capability really came to the fore with the UEFA Champions League final.”