Live from Rio 2016: YLE Finland Embraces IP, Remote Production

YLE Finland’s presence at the Rio Olympics is making the most of IP technologies and remote production as Kaj Flood, YLE, senior technical advisor, says that the goal is to continue to pass more production control back to the team in Finland.

(l-to-r) Kaj Flood, Samuli Ljikanen, and Arttu Horttanainen of YLE Finland in the channel’s IBC production control area.

“We’ve expanded the use of remote production so that all we are doing here is just the technical part,” says Flood. “We have 150 people in Helsinki working the Olympics and we have our biggest OB truck that has two control rooms that is handling the 24/7 channel. Our biggest studio control room is being used for a second channel but that channel is not 24/7.”

YLE will broadcast 600 hours of Olympics coverage to viewers back home and there are 11 cameramen on hand in Rio for unilateral production. There is a studio in an apartment overlooking Copacabana Beach that has four cameras (a beauty camera, two GVG cameras, and an RF camera that can shoot live from the beach) and YLE also has a presence at five mixed zone positions: athletics, shooting, aquatics, sailing, and golf.

The core of the coverage is the MDS service from OBS that is received in Finland via satellite. But the team in Rio steps in to help for those instances where the MDS might not be covering a Finnish athlete. The team back in Helsinki can order up content (an automation system helps make sure content requests are fulfilled properly) and there are eight video circuits between the IBC and Helsinki via a 1 Gbps circuit. There is also a 1 Gbps circuit between the Copacabana location and the IBC.

“If there are three wrestling matches going on and the MDS is not showing the Finnish match then we can get them the correct match,” says Flood. “Otherwise the lines are used for sending the mixed zone signals.”

There are also two production switchers at the IBC that are used to perform a premix on the Copacabana studio cameras and also for a premix of athletics coverage. There is also an EVS XT3 server recording athletics signals and three Avid editing suites in use for creating feature packages.

Lawo’s V Remote 4 IP systems are being used as well to help with IP transport of audio and video signals. Also playing a part in the IP workflow is Ravenna audio over IP transport and Riedel Artist intercoms.

“It gives us the flexibility to do whatever we want to change the mixed zone channel operations,” says Flood.

Operations are going smoothly with the only glitch being that OBS does not use GPS to lock sync.

“If they had that it would make our lives much easier as we have been using GPS for seven years in Helsinki as it makes for a much more robust network,” adds Flood.