First for Scotland: QTV Brings VAR to the Scottish Professional Football League

First for Scotland: QTV brings VAR to the Scottish Professional Football League By Heather McLean, Editor

Tuesday, October 25, 2022 - 10:04

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Inside QTV's Clydesdale House VAR centre for Scottish Premiership football

As Scottish Premiership Football welcomed virtual assistant referee (VAR) technology for the first time on Friday 21 October, Glasgow-based outside broadcast facilities and production company, QTV, ensured the league and its referees were able to execute those split-second decisions with ease.

QTV is running the centralised VAR operations for the Scottish Professional Football League (SPFL) and Scottish FA. The technical services provider recently moved into its new production centre, Clydesdale House, which is the home for VAR in Scotland, as well as being home to the company's expanded production offices and four state-of-the-art remote production galleries, each capable of delivering up to eight-camera broadcasts.

The VAR operations centre at Clydesdale House is the final part of QTV's operations to come onstream, following the company's move there in the summer. Over 120 Premiership matches will be remotely produced from Clydesdale House this season. As well as all Scottish Premiership matches, VAR will also be used for all Scottish Cup and Premier Sports Cup semi-final and final matches played at Hampden Park.

On how the first-ever use of VAR in Scottish Premiership football went, founder and CEO at QTV, Jack McGill, says it was a resounding success: After months of careful preparation, week one was a triumph, although certainly not without stress and a unique intensity for everyone involved referees included. I'm immensely proud of that triumph but under no illusions that the hard work has only just begun. As any good football manager would say, we'll take it one match at a time'.

Critical role

QTV has played a critical role over the past 12 months in designing a technical workflow that would provide the best possible platform for VAR's introduction into Scottish football, and also deliver a financially sustainable solution.

The provider has been producing Scottish Premiership coverage remotely for two seasons, but the company's planned expansion into new premises was hampered by the COVID pandemic in 2020. In the intervening period, the VAR operations centre, where the Scottish FA referees are now based on matchdays, became an integral part of the centre's design, which was delivered by systems integration specialist ES Broadcast.

Read more on QTV's move to Clydesdale House here

McGill comments on the rush to build the new facilities over last summer, in time for the new SPFL season. It was about a 10-week build. I think we were offline, off grid, for three days within that, while BT Media & Broadcast migrated over all of our connectivity between the Premiership grounds and here, but also between BT Tower and here. We didn't have to turn down any work; we kept the order book full all through the summer, which was good.

From a technological point of view, it's an enormous step up, which is great. But from a cultural point of view as well as a company, it's fantastic to be in a premises that's purpose built for what we have to do, and gives us just a brilliant platform, a brilliant foundation, for whatever the next stage of growth is.

He adds: I suppose we had been in our old premises for maybe the first two years quite comfortably, and then I think from that point, which would have been about 2018, we started looking and thinking, OK, if we're going to grow at all, we need to be thinking about what's next'. I think the inspiration to go down the route of remote production back in 2019 for the SPFL certainly allowed us to start to crystallise in our minds what that move might look like, and what kind of premises we were looking to move to.

While the SPFL has a rights deal with Sky, which works with Cloudbass to produce its live televised Match of the Week, and a deferred transmission for matches with BBC Alba, which is produced by Irish production company Nemeton TV, QTV produces the other four matches in each fixture round which are produced live for club over the top (OTT) channels, but primarily for BBC highlights, the SPFL'S own highlights, and Sky's international SPFL highlights.

QTV's founder and CEO, Jack McGill

Clamour for VAR

When QTV went to the SPFL in 2019 with a pitch for the remote production of the league, McGill says: I think in the back of our minds we already had it in our heads that it was necessary to do it that way for any number of reasons, carbon footprint being one, consistency of product being another, and cost of production being a third .

He continues: So there's plenty of good reasons to do remote production. But the last part that definitely factored in our decision, was at the point at which the SPFL and the Scottish FA want to do VAR, if they're going to do it properly, they're going to need a VAR centre, because that's the path down which most of the major European leagues have gone. There are very few European leagues left where VAR is actually operated from within the stadium.

You have to look at the resources available and cut your cloth accordingly. I think being able to design something technically that was cost effective, that you could sell to the clubs, that the clubs would buy into and support, I think was probably one of the biggest challenges

We knew that eventually, inevitably, Scottish Football would have to follow English Football, and the other major leagues in Europe, and we wanted to position ourselves as the front runner to be able to facilitate that for them, he continues. But the conversation around actually implementing VAR didn't start until a year ago, in Oc

LINK:	https://www.svgeurope.org/blog/headlines/first-for-scotland-qtv-brings...
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