Lift and shift: NEP Germany and Dyn Media break away for more content By Kevin Emmott Wednesday, November 27, 2024 - 11:17
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It is always the big sporting events that make the most noise, and this year has been very, very noisy. Fan engagement has blossomed as broadcasters and content creators have adapted to consumers' ravenous appetite for stories by reinventing how they produce live content. It's all been pretty revolutionary.
Far away from those big sporting events, German sports streamer Dyn Media has also been reinventing the way that it produces live content, and it is no less of a technical revolution. Launched in August 2023, Dyn Media is the brainchild of Christian Seifert, former MD of the Deutsche Fu ball Liga (DFL). His idea was not to concentrate on those big events, but to deliver live sports content directly to the 17 million German sports fans who follow handball, basketball, volleyball, table tennis and hockey.
We are responsible for the whole production process for every sport and league for Dyn Media, including the host production content we'll be doing with NEP Germany for Handball Bundesliga and Basketball Bundesliga in Germany, says Verena G ttl, managing director of Dyn Productions, the daughter company of Dyn Media. We have ventured into uncharted territory with this concept and are still at the beginning of a journey, but we have already made significant progress.
Progress has definitely been made. Now into its second year, Dyn Media operates a full glass-to-glass IP infrastructure across a fully distributed production model. In its first season, it broadcast over 2,500 national and international games, while its partnerships with ARD, ZDF, and Welt TV with Bild Sport helped it achieve a cumulative reach of almost 500 million viewers.
Verena G ttl, managing director of Dyn Productions, daughter company of Dyn Media
Pure distribution
This phenomenal amount of content is possible thanks to Dyn's media network, designed and operated by NEP Germany and is a masterclass in pure distributed production, with two large remote production control rooms (PCRs) at NEP Germany's headquarters in Munich and four more at Dyn Media's headquarters in Cologne.
It is designed around six portable venue kits which are shipped around event venues. Each kit has two Prodigy MC units for connecting I/O, and two Prodigy MP units that have additional audio processing, both paired for redundancy. Everything is connected via a SMPTE 2110 network with all audio signals transported to the hub in Munich and received by one of eight processing units dedicated to creating the final audio mix for one transmission feed.
In fact, all shared hardware for automated event mixing is centrally located at NEP's Munich hub, accessible to the entire network. The hub hosts an array of advanced equipment, including multiple Prodigy DirectOut units, five Mac Minis for running plugins, a Riedel Artist 1024 system, the backend of three Kula vision mixers, six Riedel Simplylive Production Suite systems, two Lawo MC 36 consoles for manually mixing larger events, and two EVS systems.
Meanwhile, Dyn's PCRs in Cologne also provide control over Riedel's Simplylive units, and with the Kula vision mixer, is also capable of producing bigger events with more cameras and more signals. An additional processing unit in Cologne adds delay and runs NEP Germany's smart com commentator system.
The network boasts a total of 34 x DirectOut Prodigy units, a configuration that NEP Germany managing director Zlatan Gavran asserts is, for sure the largest Prodigy setup in the world . It delivers IP connectivity to more than 40 venues and is managed by NEP's proprietary management system, Total Facility Control (TFC).
Flexibility and control
Having first worked with them as a freelance audio engineer in 1999, the mastermind behind this flexible audio network is Michael Lindermeir, who joined NEP Germany as a contractor in 2016 and has been its head of audio since 2021.
We can control the network on hardware or on a proprietary GUI that operates TFC to manage the entire broadcast and network infrastructure, says Lindermeir. All the signal transport is direct between the venues and the hub in Munich, where we process everything for transmission, while Cologne provides control over the network.
Having so much control gives us the ability to create many workarounds: the commentator can be sitting on site, the PCR people can be in Cologne, and the audio mixer can be in Munich. Or the audio mixer can be in Munich with the commentator and the PCR crew in Cologne. Or it can all be in Cologne, or all in Munich. And we can switch very quickly between all these different signal flows.
NEP Germany's bespoke GUI makes it easy to to manage all routing between all streams and devices. Click on the image to view a larger version.
Signal simplifier
While the ability to switch workflows is provided by TFC, the system still deals with a huge number of signals, which Lindermeir was keen to simplify; luckily, NEP's signal management system is designed for this.
We handle all our streaming with TFC, says Lindermeir. It's fast and dependable, but crucially it enabled NEP Germany to create a bespoke GUI to bring all the different venue kits together into all the different production units.
Developed over the last 12 months as Dyn Media's streaming service has bedded in, the bespoke GUI is a custom workflow implemented by NEP Germany that utilises TFC to assign different tech from different locations within the network; TFC seamlessly manages all routing between streams and devices, regardless of their location, operating in the background. This applies not only to the media transport layer but also to control protocol layers, such as GPI, fader
