Live from Rio 2016: Globosat, SporTV All in For Home Olympics

The Brazilian Olympics fan had no lack of choices when it came to deciding how to tune in for Brazil’s exciting win over Germany in men’s Olympic football and virtually every other sport as Globosat not only broadcast the action on its over-the-air service but also its SporTV cable channel and 16 total channels. And if that wasn’t enough it also sub-licensed over-the-air rights to Record and Bandieras and cable rights to Fox Sports Brazil and ESPN Brazil.

Diego Rangel de Menezes and David Presas of Globosat at the IBC.

The fact that Globosat and SporTV have sublicensed out the Games to four other entities (all of which are offering the same events) point to its domination in the market. And its IBC presence is just as dominant as it includes two large control rooms, Avid Media Composer for SporTV and Adobe Premier editing systems for the news editing, and a newsroom area where Globosat and SporTV journalists and producers plan a coverage attack.

One of the new channels for the games is a dedicated news channel. “We’re not just looping news but we have dedicated crews in the field,” says David Presas, Globo International, executive producer, news and sports division. “Wherever there is a Brazlian in any sport we have a camera.”

Globosat also has five of its OB vans that were used for unilateral productions at events like aquatics, athletics, and gymnastics. Those vans are connected to the Globosat production center and the IBC via fiber. For other sports, like judo and basketball, SporTV made use of aflypacks. And studio locations were connected via IP thanks to Lawo’s Remote 4 system for IP signal transport of audio and video signals.

Globosat’s SporTV control room is only a few miles away from the Olympics IBC.

Globosat’s main broadcast and production facility is located only a few miles away from the Olympic Park and IBC. That meant that early in the Olympic planning the Brazilian broadcaster decided to bring as many of the signals available at the IBC back to its main production facility. To make that happen the broadcaster set up 240 Gbps of connectivity in order to make the full suite of OBS signal services (the Multichannel Distribution Signal( MS), the VANDA+ package with 55 audio and video signals, and the Multi-Clip Feed (MCF) which provides more super slo-mo replays, crowd shots, and more. There is also a return circuit from Globosat to the IBC for sending content back as well as IPTV service.

Additionally, the Rio de Janeiro-based cable and satellite company is using Elemental encoding and decoding gear in those efforts. The workflow employs both HD-SDI and SMPTE 2022-6, a standard for transporting high bitrate media signals over IP networks, to packetize and deliver 1.6 Gb/s streams for each channel over standard fiber, which reduces the capital cost of installing multiple dedicated video circuits.

The result is an Olympics workflow that makes use of 21 control rooms with one main control room in the IBC used to produce the main SporTV channel and then 20 additional ones used to produce individual sports and events.

One of 20 control rooms at Globosat that relied on Vizrt Opus for Olympic production.

Each channel is running entirely on a Viz Opus control-room-in-a-box system which manages live sources, video, graphics, audio and commercial break content. Viz Opus has been integrated with Globosat’s traffic system, IBMS, to manage content for the commercial breaks, using Vizrt’s Showmaker rundown management tool for Viz Opus to organize and play out the content through the Viz Opus system. At the same time, Showmaker is also exporting and updating the as run commercial breaks list in Globosat’s traffic system.

In 2015, the broadcaster installed Viz Mosart studio automation systems in all 12 production control rooms at its permanent Rio de Janeiro-based production centre. All are currently being used to produce live coverage of the Games and feature real-time graphics and video controlled by the Viz Trio playlist controller which is played through Viz Engine.

“We needed a fast and efficient way to easily manage the massive amount of content coming in from the Games. This will include video, audio, data and multiple live feeds for the 8 of the 16 dedicated channels,” said Lourenço Carvano, engineering director of Globosat. “We’re very confident in Viz Mosart’s ability to manage our existing control rooms, while using Viz Opus allows us to use minimal staffing to maintain a consistent graphics design across all of our additional channels, simultaneously feeding live video streams with local audio and adding custom commercial breaks from a single, cost-effective solution.”

With such an in-depth archive of programming, Globosat uses Vizrt’s enterprise-level Media Asset Management (MAM) system Viz One to manage its extensive amount of content. For the summer Games, Globosat is using Viz One to manage a huge amount of content for use in its analysis shows. The production teams are using the system throughout production for ingest, cataloging, archiving and editing. Viz One includes powerful logging capabilities which let users enrich metadata by adding new markers, keywords, annotations and scene descriptors. All of this functionality lets Globosat streamline the workflow and helps editors, producers and journalists find the right files as quickly as possible.

All the video content from Viz One is being played live on air through the same Viz Engine video servers that will be outputting graphics from the control room.

To further enhance Globosat’s Games programming, augmented reality (AR) graphics systems have been implemented into the broadcaster’s studio on location in Rio. The AR graphics, powered by Viz Virtual Studio, feature scoreboards, explainer graphics and several other designs to help presenters illustrate post-event analysis.

Once the content in those control rooms is ready to be sent to viewers and subscribers Elemental Live software encodes the content for live over-the-top delivery (including the Globosat 4K service). Elemental Live also records and trims catch-up TV deliverables for distribution over different VOD platforms, including Net Brazil.