TV2 Denmark, SNG use Quicklink for UK Elections

The UK General Election of 2015 took place this month to elect the 56th Parliament of the United Kingdom. Voting took place in all 650 parliamentary constituencies of the United Kingdom, SNG Broadcast based in Manchester was tasked to transmit high quality, low latency broadcasting of the ongoing live interviews and debates back to TV2 Denmark.

Using the Quicklink 1U Encoder, TV2 Denmark were able to produce for the first time a multi lingual news broadcast both in Danish and English for the UK elections. Spanning three days, constant live broadcasts were transmitted with excellent quality over the Ka Band Network. Paul Bridgeman from SNG Broadcast said, “I used SD quality running over a 6mb line, in the adaptive mode to squeeze as much bandwidth as possible. The quality was really good and this would be comparable to any Ku service.”

One of the main valuable features for TV2 Denmark is that the Quicklink 1U Encoder has constant audio return communication (IFB). Paul Bridgeman from SNG Broadcast explains; “This was very useful for our reporter and she relied on this heavily. The reporter was able to listen to her own language on the news channel over the comms to see what was happening around the UK. This was really valuable because it didn’t involve her being on the phone constantly to the newsroom and wondering what was going on”

During the 2015 elections SNG Broadcast was able to follow Ed Milliband and the Labour bus outside the Leeds City Museum, sending live footage back to TV2 Denmark via the satellite truck. On other days there was a permanent setup at Doncaster Racecourse, with a fibre link going to the election stage, which enabled multiple lives to be transmitted all night back to the main TV2 Denmark news channel.