IMG Studios Draws Up Route Plan to IP for Premier League, Rugby World Cup

IMG Studios draws up route plan to IP for Premier League and Rugby World Cup By David Fox

Wednesday, February 6, 2019 - 14:14

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IMG Studios delivers multiple 24-hour sports channels and enables coverage of some of the world's biggest sporting events, often having to shoehorn in new projects to tight deadlines.

So, in planning its next infrastructure upgrade, for installation in the Summer, ease of scalability is its first priority - which has led it to IP.

It is currently evaluating IP routers, because we have outgrown our current router capacity, explained Richard Bagnall, head of engineering, live operations and channels, IMG Media. Rather than buying another SDI router it plans to move to IP.

Richard Bagnall, IMG Media's head of engineering, live operations and channels, in the soon-to-be-expanded master control room at IMG Studios

It hopes to have the new router in place before the Rugby World Cup this Autumn, for which IMG is the co-host broadcaster. It will bring feeds back to IMG Studios in West London, as an aggregation point for RWC content and a back-up hub, particularly for broadcasters that don't have a presence in Japan.

Currently, everything is available to be routed anywhere, so we have ultimate flexibility on how we can use the equipment we have internally, but the downside of that is we have had to invest a lot in router technology. The building has 200 incoming fibres and 200 outgoing, plus a satellite dish farm with five fixed antennae and two steerable. It currently uses Miranda routers, controlled by BNCS, which also controls the dishes and IMG's Riedel talkback system and Tallyman tallies.

Bagnall intends that the new router will run in parallel with the Miranda and will link up with new equipment and new areas IMG is building, and he hopes it will gradually replace the SDI router. We don't see SDI disappearing straight away. SDI's still got a bit of life left in it. It's still got a use within the building, so it's not going to be a complete change overnight. It will be a gradual growth.

The big attraction of going IP is scalability. Given how IMG has grown over the years, it has to be easy for it to add a lot of capability very quickly to respond to new projects as they come in.

You don't want to end up where we are at the moment with three different routers and tie lines between them, which work adequately well. We've got delineation of what's on what router, but that flexibility of being able to put everything onto the same router and grow it is the key consideration that we're looking at.

With UHD, HDR and potentially 8K on the horizon, we have to have that ability to absorb those new technologies and IP routing gives us that ability, he explained.

As part of its upgrade, it is also absorbing the streaming side of IMG Studios into the master control

IMG's Live Gallery 1 on air with a Premier League match

room, which will allow synergies between the guys that bring in those feeds and the guys that are sending them out as IP streams, and bring those two skillsets together, so that we can offer a more coherent service between streaming and broadcast distribution.

Currently, the streaming team is down a corridor, and this division of labour hampers its development, but Bagnall believes it shouldn't matter whether content comes in as an uncompressed HD feed or an RTMP (Real Time Messaging Protocol) stream. It should be treated exactly the same, and IMG should be agnostic in terms of what a feed is and where it is going. The important thing is the content rather than the method of delivery or contribution.

Its investment in IP routing will help enable this development, but a lot of it will be down to giving the MCR more space. We have the technology within the building, we have the personnel, what we need is to just bring those personnel together in the same room and start that spread of knowledge between the two groups.

To enable the expansion, IMG has taken over a floor in the building next door, where it will move production staff, freeing up an area upstairs that will take transmission suites that currently surround the MCR, which will allow the MCR to spread out.

Premier League Content

One of IMG's main projects is working with the UK's Premier League. It takes in video from each stadium, to create and distribute feeds of each match. Part of that production is the Premier League Content Service, which is a 24-hour channel, based in this building, distributed to any rights holders around the globe - mainly Asia and the Americas.

About 25 broadcasters take the channel, which can either be re-broadcast whole (with locally inserted advertising), or used to take individual programmes or news. The channel includes 11 different magazine shows per week and every match - some live and the rest shown overnight.

Each game is also offered live, and there is a clips channel, offering a continuous feed of highlights of the games, while the games are ongoing. This contribution channel goes to the some 90 licensees worldwide.

One of the transmission suites for the Premier League Content Service at IMG Studios, with Pebble Beach's Marina automation in use to the left of the main monitor

Each Premier League ground has 24 circuits out, and IMG can aggregate 100 of those into its studios, usually taking at least seven feeds into each live gallery. They turn the match in to a 130-minute programme, which is offered on a main and a backup satellite path. Those games are also fed into our studio, which provides the source for the Premier League Content Service.

To create the slightly cut-down match re-runs, the game is edited on EVS in the gallery, to produce a 104-minute package containing most of the match (particularly the second half), plus some build

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