Audio IP Upgrade Kicks Off a Busy Season for Belgium's Proximus Media House

Audio IP upgrade kicks off a busy season for Belgium's Proximus Media House By Kevin Emmott

Monday, August 14, 2023 - 15:06

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This summer, Proximus Media House (PMH) completed a full audio IP upgrade across its four studios and a vast network of football stadiums in preparation for the new football season. PMH CTO Larissa G rner and her team talk to SVG Europe about changing workflows, the challenges of repackaging content into three languages in real-time, and how IP is an enabler for future expansion.

When Royal Antwerp won Belgium's league championship in June, two fantastic things happened.

First, the 147-year-old football club hired an open-top bus to celebrate its first league crown since 1957 and Antwerp went bonkers. Second, Belgian media giant PMH quietly got to work completing its massive IP infrastructure overhaul which it began in 2021.

PMH is part of the Proximus Group, the provider of digital services and communications across Belgium. It not only covers a range of live sports on its own channels but holds the rights to UEFA Champions League football in Belgium and is the service provider for all Belgium football to DAZN, as well as to a multitude of other distribution companies.

Our orchestration is now completely switchable. In addition to our football coverage, we cover sports like basketball and cycling and for us, it is important to quickly switch to different configurations to make these different productions work.

The company squeezes a lot of production from those games: Belgium's Division One games are mixed at its central production hub and repackaged for a variety of end users with commentary. Pre- and post-game and halftime discussions are produced there, as are all Champions League games. Meanwhile, all Belgium Division Two matches are mixed there using pure remote workflows.

With such a lot going on, it's no wonder that upgrade time is limited to the off-season. The final piece of the puzzle in its transition to a full ST2110 IP network was its audio network, which was completed prior to the new season kicking off on 28th July, creating an end-to-end 2110-based network for both audio and video.

First came VAR

Known as Proximus ST2110 ViCoNG (Video Contribution Next Generation), PMH's network is built on dedicated fibre-optic network connections between 18 sporting arenas, the PMH production hub in Brussels, and the Royal Belgian Football Association's (RBFA) headquarters in nearby Tubize.

There was a requirement from the Belgium football rights holder to send more feeds from the stadiums to the central MCR here in Brussels, and to send more return feeds to them, says Kenneth De Buck, head of operations for Live Events and Linear Channels at PMH.

At the same time there was a request from the RBFA to centralise all VAR activities, which meant that they needed to have access to all the camera feeds at its hub in Tubize, so we combined those two projects together.

From the end of the football season to the start the new one gave us seven weeks to integrate 18 stadiums, upgrade our production hub at PMH, add the links to the VAR in Tubize and cater for a number of broadcasters who were being added to that same network. With Covid creating additional challenges in 2021 we had to split up the video upgrade from the audio upgrade due to time, but our commitments to VAR took priority.

Jetsen Van den Eede, who is a senior broadcast engineer at PMH and played a big part in managing the 2110 IP workflows, picks up the story: Part of the installation was to install cabinets in each stadium so the host broadcaster could connect an OB van and all the camera feeds. We decided to include our own infrastructure that started with the recording and replays on EVS to bring them into our control room environment.

With the infrastructure in place, the last piece of the puzzle was to upgrade our audio to an IP environment, which we completed with an upgrade from Lawo's Nova core infrastructure to a 2110 A_UHD core infrastructure this summer.

Part of the team

PMH are a long-time collaborator with Lawo and worked closely with the German company during the 2021 phase of the project, building on the integrations of Lawo's VSM broadcast control system and V__matrix units. But their relationship with the German company goes back further than that.

In 2016, the broadcaster was already pushing the boundaries of sports broadcasting, mixing live football remotely from a central production hub every single week. Connecting Lawo V_Remotes and A_Mics to the Proximus network and using Lawo's VSM for control allows PHM to produce all of Belgium's Division Two games as fully remote productions, with only minimal cameras and microphones on site.

This summer's audio IP upgrade builds on that relationship.

The IP upgrade now covers the entire infrastructure, says De Buck. A big part of it is for distribution, but the biggest benefits are the upgrades for our production control rooms. We have four production control rooms and four audio control rooms for the distribution of our linear channels.

We took the opportunity to replace two consoles with Lawo mc 56 consoles; this means we have six identical control surfaces which now sit on a 2110 audio network using Lawo's A_UHD cores. The network integration also enabled us to introduce geo-redundancy to our network, with one part of the A_UHD core located on-premise and another in a data centre in a different building. It allows us to have two fully redundant IP workflows.

Van den Eede adds: Our orchestration is now completely switchable. In addition to our football coverage, we cover sports like basketball and cycling and for us it is important to quickly switch to different configurations to make these different productions work.

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