Scottish Premiership embraces remote production with custom-built workflow and distribution services from QTV Multi-year contract signed by SPFL to raise matchday production standards By Heather McLean, Editor Wednesday, May 19, 2021 - 07:00
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Inside the Glasgow-based MCR at QTV, created with help from technical partner, ES Broadcast
Glasgow-based broadcast facilities and production company, QTV, has signed a multi-year agreement with the Scottish Professional Football League (SPFL) to provide outside broadcast, production, and distribution services from season 2020/21 onwards.
The deal includes coverage of 142 Scottish Premiership matches per season, match highlights of all 228 Premiership matches, production and distribution of the SPFL's world feeds across Premiership, Championship, and Betfred Cup, as well as managing contribution and distribution of the SPFL's streaming to its data and international betting partners.
Consistent production
For the first time, match footage from across the Premiership is being captured, ingested, and distributed in a consistent way, providing all SPFL partners with a better quality product. This is being powered by the growth and development of QTV's production facility in Glasgow, which is now transformed during Premiership fixture rounds into a matchday production centre for SPFL content, as well as QTV's successful introduction of remote production for the SPFL, which is enabling higher quality and more uniform productions.
QTV's centralised remote production model has opened up technological and commercial opportunities for the SPFL and its clubs alike. It has worked with Hibernian, Celtic, Ross County, St Mirren, and Hamilton clubs on providing facilities and matchday production for their own club content.
The first Premiership match to benefit from this new workflow was Ross County versus St Mirren on 21 April, which was produced with only five crew at the stadium. Since then, two matches per fixture round have been produced remotely. This will increase to three per fixture round from the start of the 2021/22 season with an overall ambition to remotely produce over 100 Scottish Premiership matches per season.
Outside of the Premiership, QTV has also been innovating with a lower-spec live streaming model of remote production for match coverage at Heart of Midlothian, Partick Thistle, and Queen's Park FC, all three of which won their respective divisions.
Neil Doncaster, chief executive of the Scottish Professional Football League, says: The start of our new broadcast agreement cycle from the beginning of Season 2020/21 gave us the opportunity to review our Scottish Premiership match production and distribution processes. Working with QTV has allowed us to modernise our approach with the addition of the match day production centre, which has not only made delivery to partners and Clubs more efficient, but also presented further commercial opportunities.
The introduction of remote production at Premiership matches, adds Doncaster, is an exciting development that will also make the undertaking of our weekly production more sustainable. Our aim is to capture Scottish football in an exciting and powerful way for our Clubs, supporters and partners to enjoy, and QTV will be a key contributor to help us achieve that.
QTV chief executive Jack McGill
Innovative approach
QTV has established itself as the biggest live production provider in Scotland, off the back of its work with the Scottish Football Association, Scottish Rugby, and Scottish Hockey. The proposal to centralise the SPFL's matchday production was made in April 2019 and was refined to include remote production in August of the same year. The innovative approach was approved by the SPFL board in December 2019 before the COVID-19 pandemic interrupted QTV's planning.
Jack McGill, QTV CEO, explains: In Season 2017-18 we began looking at the SPFL's production model, which was fragmented with five different OB providers and match footage arriving at BBC Scotland at STV in different formats and at different times, some of it mixed, some of it ISOs on XDCAM! We recognised that there was an opportunity to take at least the worst of these delivery methods and make it better. We had merged with a smaller production company, IDTV, which owned a small OB truck. We put it to use providing one match OB per fixture round for the SPFL from Season 2018/19.
We took the temperature of the SPFL and realised that with the broadcast rights cycle due for renewal in 2020, there was a one-time opportunity to disrupt the status quo.
At the same time, we had signed a three year deal with World Archery to provide OB and world feeds [World Archery was the first to use the new infrastructure during 2020 as well as this year], we had moved to bigger premises, and were utilising Mobile Viewpoint and LiveU technology to take in contributions for remote commentary and graphics operations. We piloted this successfully with international netball and then with the UIAA's Ice Climbing World Cup. These were our first experiences with remote production and they had an instant impact on the profitability of those projects.
QTV invested in 24/7 vision paths to and from BT Tower to open up a market for producing world feeds and it used this as its relationship with the SPFL became stronger to win the contract for producing the SPFL world feed when it came up for renewal in 2018.
Continues McGill: We engaged with ES Broadcast to design and build our first full-fledged OB truck, but our ambitions were still limited to maybe poaching one more OB perhaps from BBC Scotland per fixture round. It was my fellow director David McNeil who first proposed the idea of a more holistic approach to SPFL production.
Explains David McNeil, QTVs head of production:
