Getting set for the Winter Olympics: Inside SVT's ongoing software-based production evolution By George Bevir Tuesday, March 11, 2025 - 07:11
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SVT is fundamentally changing how it produces live sports content by adopting software-based tools as part of its Neo (Next Gen Online Production) project. SVT head of production development, production and technology Dennis Buhr and head of IT development and infrastructure Katarina Persson spoke with SVG Europe about the aims of the project, recent use cases at Rally Sweden 2025 and the Singapore Smash table tennis event, plus what the shift means for SVT's production - and IT staff.
Just as some of the world's top athletes are in training for the Winter Olympics 2026, so too is Swedish public service broadcaster SVT getting set for Milano Cortina.
With the Winter Olympics as its ultimate goal, SVT is midway through a technology transformation project that is shifting production to an entirely software-based environment with a self-service' approach for operators. And it's not just an evolution in the technology and tools that are being used, there is also an ongoing change to the way in which SVT's production, technology and IT teams work together.
The project - titled Neo (Next gen online production) - traces its origins back to 2018, with the aim of building a live production and distribution platform, 100% software-based, on COTs (commercial off-the-shelf) servers.
Key goals of Neo include reducing environmental impact by at least 50%, optimising production processes, and cutting costs-all while reallocating resources to expand the capacity for content creation.
In recent years there has been a shift in mindset and a cultural movement in the production area, where we have talked a lot about whether you really need to see an uncompressed video signal on 20,000 a screen
And while the Winter Olympics looms on the horizon, several recent sporting - and non-sporting - events have provided opportunities to test and evolve the technology, key to which are tools and services from Ateliere Creative Technologies, Eyevinn Technology, and Vindral.
The 2024 Great Moose Migration, a 500-hour piece of annual slow TV' that captures herds of moose making their way to summer grazing pastures, was, at the time, SVT's biggest proof of concept to date of its Neo project.
But it was the Singapore Smash, a World Table Tennis event that took place earlier this year (30 January to 9 February) that was the first time the SVT sports division ran the broadcast independently, with content team members switching between up to four incoming feeds and managing the production, while technical producers remained on hand to provide support.
Singapore Smash was SVT's first attempt to divide technology and content into two pieces, explains Buhr.
He says: For the first time, we're really trying to address this new way of working, this new era of working with software and focusing on self-service.
If we look at how we previously did the Olympics or that level of sports production in a traditional way, we would have had our own image switchers, our own directors, our own technical operators and so on. But they are not in this new build.
So, for us as a production and technology department, we are not the ones pushing the buttons and we are not in the front row. We are more focused on creating software layouts and smart buttons that will be self-explanatory for the sports crew. We're just there to make it happen.
Buhr explains that SVT has been working with Ateliere for a few years, helping to shape the Ateliere Live software which provides SVT with the ability to add graphics, perform image switching and audio handling.
It's funny, because when we talk to Katarina and her team, they are not that impressed, because they've been doing this for years, capturing and compressing and publishing frames on the internet. They have a black belt in it!
But when they see what the product actually does, and that it is more than just encoding and shifting between cameras but creating picture in picture, super imposing images, graphics overlay and all the things that are common in an image switcher they didn't know production as well as many others, so now they're starting to be a little bit more impressed by what this product actually does.
If we're going to change television production, then we also need to discuss roles and responsibilities as well as workflows
Powered by Nvidia GPU processing and Ateliere Live's remote proxy vision mixing technology, the software-defined approach aids scalability and helps to address environmental concerns, with Ateliere claiming that its product reduces production costs by at least 50% and lowers environmental impact by at least 70%.
On Vindral, Buhr says: It's made for the betting industry, so has low latency and it is really fast to push video over a GPU, over to Web RTC in a web browser. That's their game. When we started to produce in software, we noticed early on that we needed to look at the video feedback when producing fast we can't have any delays there. So, we took their product and used it internally to push video as fast as we can to the web browser in the gallery. So that's what Vindral has solved for us.
And Eyevinn Technology is a media and streaming focused developing house in Stockholm, and they've been helping us to make the UIs for Ateliere Live. Ateliere Live has a very well written REST API so you can make your own UIs simply. So Eyevinn Technology has helped us with that. And that's the bouquet of technologies that helped us with the table tennis.
SVT's broadcast of Rally Sweden 2025 (15-18 February) the second leg of the FIA World Rally Championship (WRC), which took place
