Timeline Television expands to take advantage of remote possibilities By David Fox
Friday, February 14, 2020 - 15:22
Print This Story
Over the last 18 months, Timeline Television has increasingly been moving towards more remote production, particularly with SailGP, which opens its second season with racing in Sydney at the end of February. To enable this, Timeline has just opened a new gallery at its base in London, as part of a wider expansion.
The upgraded facilities at Ealing Studios, in west London, will make it easier to offer remote productions both at the OB end and the studio end, and Timeline's MD, Daniel McDonnell is now seeing a big drive to reduce the number of people you need at an OB, and the amount of equipment you need at an OB, to reduce costs and, more importantly, reduce the impact on the environment.
Timeline Television MD Daniel McDonnell in the new gallery
On UK-based productions it means they can use smaller trucks, have fewer people on site and reduce numbers travelling. But, there is a bigger impact on shows abroad, if we can reduce the amount of equipment that we are sending on boats or planes, and the number of people flying out. That's been a big driver, he said.
In 2019, it did SailGP's first season as a remote production. The whole host broadcast is directed from Ealing. So, everybody who would normally be on site the director, the EVS ops, the graphics ops are all based in Ealing and there is a very small team on site, just collecting the shots, he explained.
We also do that week in, week out for football matches, where the only people on site are the camera operators and a small core team of engineers. All the production staff, graphics, EVS and sound are based at Ealing. It allows the BBC to cover every match in the FA Women's Super League as single camera or multi-camera games, all of which are presented live on the FA's web site. It allows us to do comprehensive production at a very competitive price, while also reducing the number of trucks and people traveling around the country.
Most weeks it covers two of the seven matches as multi-camera productions, each directed from a gallery in Ealing, while the single-camera matches have commentators, sound mixing and graphics added at the studios.
It's all about connectivity
Other events Timeline has done as remote productions include half-marathons, using a combination of 4G or radio camera links and satellite or fibre, to get all feeds from about 12 cameras (on motorbikes, hoists and in fixed positions) back to Ealing, with no need for an OB truck on site.
It is very good for those sorts of road events (marathons or cycle races), where you have lots of cameras spread out over a long distance. Traditionally you would have linked all those back to an OB truck at the start or finish, but there is no need to do that anymore, said McDonnell.
4G is shared with the public, so we can send a camera anywhere and it will work fantastically well, but add in 10,000 people and it won't work very well. You've got to be careful where you use 4G.
A football final, with lots of people trying to stream video on their phones would be impossible, but a motorbike camera following runners through a city will probably work, because the number of people per cell will be low enough. However, with 5G, the promised ability for broadcasters to book bandwidth should change everything, and it won't matter how many people are trying to stream video at the same time.
4G is shared with the public, so we can send a camera anywhere and it will work fantastically well, but add in 10,000 people and it won't work very well. You've got to be careful where you use 4G
But it is incredibly powerful technology now, 4G, and we do live TV with it all the time, he said. Timeline has invested heavily in Mobile Viewpoint H.265 equipment, with multiple backpacks and camera kits, which he says are very high quality and very reliable.
It means they can send multiple backpacks to a match and require no cabling or other infrastructure. They just book the number of camera operators needed and all the feeds come back to Ealing. We can run off batteries if we need to, so it is a very lightweight OB with very few people on site. All the cameras are locked to a timecode transmitter, and if there is an disparity in a feed it can be easily adjusted back at the studio.
SailGP demonstrated that Timeline could produce a large-scale event from London, even when the location was halfway around the world, as with racing in Sydney Harbour. There is always going to be latency when you are doing a remote OB, because you've got the speed of light to the OB - and we were 20,000km away, he said.
The unknown when they started was how much latency can people cope with? It turns out that if people know about the latency then it can be dealt with, and staff very quickly forget that they are so far away from the OB. This year they are experimenting with removing further functions from site, such as racking and camera control for the on-board cameras on each yacht.
He predicts that over the next 12 to 18 months remote production is going to pick up speed as more people look to bring things back to central locations. It may not always save money, although it shouldn't cost more, but from an environmental point of view, even if it is cost neutral, it is a positive thing to do.
As an OB company, moving to remote production may change what it invests in next, but we still need a lot of the equipment, because we still capture the signals, we still need the cameras, we still need engineers on site to make sure all of that happens. The engineering role may change, because it emphasises connectivity and people who understand that.
There is still a need for a lot of equipment on site,
Most recent headlines
04/08/2024
Dalet, a leading technology and service provider for media-rich organizations, is excited to announce Santiago Solanas as its new Chief Executive Officer (CEO)....
03/06/2024
Dalet, a leading technology and service provider for media-rich organizations, a...
28/04/2024
Mediahaus delivers the first SRT live-streaming sports production over 5G with U...
25/04/2024
Sundance Institute Founder Robert Redford during a press conference at the 1996 ...
25/04/2024
alt= class=wp-image-12361 data-lazy-src=/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/NAB-booth-2024-960x540-1.jpg/> Set against a vibrant backdrop of innovation and collaboratio...
25/04/2024
alt= class=wp-image-12356 data-lazy-src=/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/NAB-mod-win-960x540-1.jpg/>NAB's Eric Trabb (right) awards SNS with two NAB Show Product...
25/04/2024
PHILADELPHIA Comcast beat earnings estimates in its Q1 2024 financial report, as streaming losses continued to decline and Peacock's paid subscribers spiked...
25/04/2024
SEATTLE The Seattle Kraken have inked new multi-year agreements with Tegna and Prime Video that will expand access to their games over broadcast stations and st...
25/04/2024
M2A Medias Matt Hughes asks, is it time for news broadcasting to shift to the cloud?
By Contributor
Published: April 25, 2024
M2A Media's Matt Hughes ...
25/04/2024
Cintel Scanner G3 HDR Restores Egypt's Cinema Treasures to Their Former Glo...
25/04/2024
Sinclair Broadcast Group said it named Kevin Coskren chief meteorologist at KTUL, its ABC affiliate in Tulsa, Oklahoma....
25/04/2024
The Business of TV News, a new one-day event featuring Martha Raddatz, Shannon Bream, Glenn Kirschner and other major figures in television news, happens at Hot...
25/04/2024
Conditions put on the proposed sale of WADL Detroit, to Mission Broadcasting have created a potential drama in the Motor City....
25/04/2024
TelevisaUnivision reported a $52 million loss in the first quarter, up from $3 m...
25/04/2024
Comcast reported flat first-quarter earnings as it reduced the red ink at Peacock but continued to lose video and broadband customers....
25/04/2024
Music-video network Vevo said it launched its app on Telly, the company offering consumers free dual-screen TVs in return for data about what they're watchi...
25/04/2024
Future Today said it has introduced a redesigned user interface for about half of its 300 streaming apps, including Fawesome, HappyKids and iFood.TV....
25/04/2024
The writer and director of a hit Czech series tell Robert Shepherd about their approach to portraying real-life Pakistani kidnappings on the small screen, while...
25/04/2024
Notorious DIT will work with the Liverpool Film Office to increase opportunities for regional talent
By Matthew Corrigan
Published: April 25, 2024
Notorio...
25/04/2024
Broadpeak , a leading provider of content delivery network (CDN) and video streaming solutions for content providers and pay-TV operators worldwide, announced t...
25/04/2024
Lightware Visual Engineering, a leading manufacturer of connectivity solutions for the professional integrated systems market and a pioneer in signal management...
25/04/2024
Net Insight has entered into a collaboration with DMC Production that positions Net Insight at the forefront of sports broadcasting in the Nordics. Net Insight ...
25/04/2024
GlobalM has announced a strategic partnership with scoopa, the specialists in broadcast-quality content distribution, offering a complementary service for live ...
25/04/2024
PlayBox Neo announces the completion of a new multichannel playout system for the DDish direct-to-home satellite television network in Mongolia. Based in the na...
25/04/2024
Canadian music producer and engineer Garth Richardson also known as Gggarth due to his stutter - has embraced immersive audio by installing a PMC monitoring s...
25/04/2024
Leading video software provider Synamedia today announced that Televisa, the Mexican telecommunications and broadcasting company, has chosen Synamedia as its pa...
25/04/2024
OTTera, a leading provider of end-to-end OTT and FAST channel solutions, proudly announces its strategic partnership with ThinkAnalytics, a global leader in adv...
25/04/2024
The American Tobacco Campus will be hopping with activity tonight and this weekend with two fun events!
Durham Night Market
At last! The Durham Night Market i...
25/04/2024
WEST CHESTER, Pa. Video commerce provider Qurate Retail Group has launched The Big Dish, a new culinary-themed FAST channel on The Roku Channel....
25/04/2024
LOS ANGELES The Hollywood Professional Association has announced that submissions for the 2024 HPA Engineering Excellence Awards are now being accepted. This re...
25/04/2024
NEW YORK The digital media measurement and analytics firm DoubleVerify has announced that it has received Media Rating Council (MRC) accreditation for Video Vie...
25/04/2024
SAN FRANCISCO Fox Corp.'s ad-supported streaming service Tubi has announced a licensing agreement with the sports platform DAZN that will see DAZN Ringside ...
25/04/2024
NEW YORK In the runup to the 2024 IAB NewFronts, the IAB has announced three key appointments to its leadership team....
25/04/2024
Epic Games releases Unreal Engine 5.4 with new Motion Design Mode, Unreal VCam f...
25/04/2024
Content Creation, Production, Distribution Is In a State of Flux
Andy Marken April 24, 2024
0 Comments
My empathy is creeping towards what I would de...
25/04/2024
The Carolina Panthers and Capitol Broadcasting Company (CBC) announced they have...
25/04/2024
Berklee Student Riko Sasaski Named 2024 Yamaha Young Performing Artist The accomplished saxophonist secured a spot among the elite winners of this year's ...
25/04/2024
Stations everywhere take pride in having a main anchor who comes from the market they represent. That applies in St. Louis, too, but it also pertains to general...
25/04/2024
Edward Moody is joining the WBTW Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, anchor crew, and will anchor the 5, 6 and 11 p.m. newscasts alongside Trish Williford. He comes f...
25/04/2024
MTV said the 2024 Video Music Awards will return to New York and take place at the new UBS Arena....
25/04/2024
Season three of comedy The Outlaws premieres on Prime Video May 31. Stephen Merchant co-created the show, and stars. There are five episodes....
25/04/2024
The E.W. Scripps Co. is evaluating offers for Bounce, its multicast channel for African-American viewers, according to a report from CNBC....
25/04/2024
Paramount Plus has ordered a second season for Dora, the animated preschool show based on Dora the Explorer. The show, featuring Dora on a rainforest adventure ...
25/04/2024
Bayanat AI PLC (ADX: BAYANAT), a leading AI-powered geospatial solutions provider, and Al Yah Satellite Communications Company P.J.S.C. (ADX: YAHSAT), the UAE&#...
25/04/2024
April 25th, 2024 Press Materials Available Here
TRIBECA FESTIVAL 2024 ANNOUNCES AUDIO STORYTELLING AND GAMES LINEUP
Audio Storytelling Program Features 10th ...
25/04/2024
NFL Draft 2024: Verizon Expands Broadband Capacity To Handle the Spike in Demand Mobile cells will help accommodate first responders, social media, sports betti...
25/04/2024
NFL Draft 2024: NFL Media Teams With The Fantasy Footballers on Hybrid, REMI Pro...
25/04/2024
NFL Draft 2024: ESPN Motors Into Detroit With Trio of Simultaneous Live Presenta...
25/04/2024
Published On: April 25th, 2024
data-orig-src=https://www.sgo.es/wp-content/upl...
Timeline Television expands to take advantage of remote possibilities By David Fox 
