Live from the Rugby World Cup: Content production integration extends tournament reach for World Rugby By Fergal Ringrose, Editorial Director, Europe Friday, October 11, 2019 - 07:20
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Ronan Donagher, World Rugby (left) and James Barton, Hawk-Eye Innovations
Headquartered in Dublin, World Rugby is comprised of 103 national member unions and 18 associate unions from the game's six regional associations. World Rugby's mission is to continue growing the rugby family and build a global mass-participation sport.
Under the control of World Rugby are the Women's Rugby World Cup, Rugby World Cup Sevens, HSBC World Rugby Sevens Series, World Rugby U20 Championship, World Rugby U20 Trophy and the World Rugby Pacific Nations Cup. The principal World Rugby property is, however, Rugby World Cup (RWC).
At the tournament head office in central Tokyo SVG Europe sat down with World Rugby IT and broadcast manager Ronan Donagher, along with Hawk-Eye Innovations Director of SMART Sports James Barton, to talk about content production for the tournament and some of the working relationships that have been put in place for 2019.
Some key suppliers are Alston Elliot, Great Big Events, Hawk-Eye, Opta and Sound Sure, and it is clear from the integration of the content output and ecosystem - along with the IGBS host broadcast piece provided by the HBS and IMG Media joint venture - that 2019 is a radical departure from previous RWC tournaments in terms of content production workflows and output.
For the first time at a Rugby World Cup, all 48 matches are being produced in multiple formats, with UHD/SDR, 1080p and 1080i available. As well as the traditional World Feed, rights holding broadcasters have access to additional uninterrupted live feeds to complement their studio coverage.
Dedicated RWC ENG crews provide content from around the country, and a dedicated post production team is producing a variety of features and magazine shows.
All live and ENG content is available via the World Rugby Media Server, and new
View of social media teams producing content at World Rugby Tokyo HQ for the Rugby World Cup
for 2019 is the Match Day Preview Show. World Rugby is also producing specific content to help promote the event on a variety of social media platforms, with short form graphics, info graphics and 360 VR clips available for the first time.
Design agency Ignite delivered the graphics design for titles and in-match graphics, through a tender process. Alston Elliott and Opta are delivering the Tournament Information Services (TIS), which encompasses the stats collection and delivery of onscreen graphics, Donagher told SVG Europe.
We started working with Hawk-Eye back in 2014, for the 2015 tournament. The relationship has moved on a lot from where it started, which was primarily focused on player welfare. Medical was the initial driver to embrace an independent video replay solution in rugby, for Head Injury Assessment (HIA).
For the same tournament we also took in player citing, TMO [Television Match Official] and in addition to the above Hawk-Eye encode and provide a number of different feeds to the teams and other stakeholders. This footage is key to the analysis of the game for the teams and likewise for the match officials who use it to review the performance of all officials including the TMO via the TMO cam.
While providing all those services again, we have refined and enhanced how these services are delivered. If you just look at the citing aspect, it's not just about supplying files to the citing commissioners any more. It's actually about sitting with them and really being their assistant - and producing the output that's needed for a player hearing, said Donagher.
The storage and onward distribution of this footage utilises a number of different systems including Signiant as the primary storage and delivery mechanism. All this footage is offloaded in real-time to a different cloud storage application, which serves as a backup to the original location in the event of a failure but also as a collection point for the RWC digital media team who use this footage in the creation of their short form content and social media output.
Every broadcast angle is ingested centrally with seven servers writing to circular buffers providing around eight hours of match footage at any given time. That is all captured during the game, and there is live access to that from each of the clients in the venue. It's all synchronised on ingest.
Parallel to this the footage is also offloaded to the RWC AMS (Athlete Management System) which is used in the management of the match officials.
Whistle to whistle, we provide full match exports of camera ISOs (TX and seven different camera angles). Seven of those ISOs go straight to the teams so they can do their analysis, said James Barton.
In-venue they get live HD-SDI feeds, so that they are coding things in-game, enabling them to use that information at half time. Post-match, every team gets access to all of the footage, so you don't have to be in-venue to get footage of the team you will be playing in two weeks.
We integrate heavily with [host broadcaster] IGBS, said Barton. In venue we have kits that essentially follow their technical units. We have a Video Operations Room (VOR) cabin in the OB compound, with a rack of our seven SMART Replay servers. This is the IP-based video replay backbone that now drives the vast majority of Hawk-Eye services.
Every broadcast angle is ingested centrally with seven servers writing to circular buffers providing around eight hours of match footage at any given time. That is all captured during the game, and there is live access to that from each of the clients in the venue. It's all synchronised on ingest.
For TMO you have the Television Match Official from Wor
