BT Sport masterminds the first live broadcast of a UEFA club match produced in the cloud By Heather McLean, Editor Friday, October 28, 2022 - 13:00
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UEFA Youth League clash between Tottenham Hotspur and Sporting Lisbon at a training ground in Enfield, North London, where a cloud production trial was broadcast live to BT Sport customers
BT Sport is working with UEFA to create a pioneering new cloud-based approach to live broadcasting that has the potential to reduce the carbon footprint of sports broadcasts, plus enhance content innovation possibilities.
Supporting UEFA's new Football Sustainability Strategy 2030', UEFA entrusted BT Sport to produce a UEFA club competition match on Wednesday 26 October in the cloud, with a significantly pared-back on-site presence.
This production - the first UEFA club match produced in the cloud - is showcasing the future roadmap for live football production options where much of the crew are physically disconnected from the event.
It further underlines that the sustainability footprints of cloud productions are significantly smaller than for comparative traditional OB-based productions. The Bafta Albert calculator shows that the 26 October UEFA Youth League (UYL) production of Tottenham Hotspur versus Sporting Lisbon had a carbon footprint of 1.23 CO2 tonnes, versus a traditional OB as a comparison for the 12 October UEFA Youth League game production for Spurs versus Eintracht Frankfurt, which had a carbon footprint of 1.65 CO2 tonnes, resulting in a 25% reduction of the carbon footprint for the cloud OB, according to Bafta's calculations.
BT Sport's cloud set up for the trial
Huge step forward
At the UYL clash between Spurs and Sporting Lisbon at a training ground in Enfield, North London, the cloud trial was broadcast live to BT Sport customers and was the world feed sent to other UEFA media partners as the sole outside broadcast set up, showcasing the reliability of the approach.
The cloud footprint used for the Youth League match was significantly smaller than it would have been using a traditional set up. Andy Beale, BT Sport chief engineer, goes through how things are usually done for a match of this type: So traditionally, a Youth League game would be six-camera coverage, and to support that six-camera coverage, we would send a traditional OB truck; a 37 and a half tonne articulated lorry. There'd be a tender vehicle there with the cameras and the tripods and the cable and the microphones, there'd be a twin set generator supporting that. There would then be the links vehicle with the satellite uplink and there's about 25 people that have to travel to the site to make that happen, including the camera operators, match director, VT and replay operators, etc. So not an insignificant amount of people making the journey, and infrastructure making the journey to that venue to produce what is effectively just a six-camera clean world feed. There's no commentary put on at that point in this particular set of rights; initially just match graphics. Really, really simple.
[We'd also] have a separate little gallery here at Stratford adding in the BT sport personalisation, so we then have our own commentary and our own photo graphics on top of that world feed. So that's two teams working remotely traditionally to make this relatively simple production and all that transit.
So we said look, we've done this work in the past with our 5G cellular backpack type connectivity. Why don't we try and combine that with the advances we're making in cloud production and actually see if we can just abstract all this straight into the cloud and get rid of a lot of that infrastructure, continues Beale. So the only thing that really remains is the six cameras and the tripods and the microphones. Everything else is gone, apart from the introduction of six LiveView backpacks, which will allow us to bring back those signals from those six cameras into our cloud environment.
That transit van is capable of carrying six cameras, 12 microphones, six LiveView backpacks and some tripods. It would be operated by six camera operators, a sound engineer and a vision engineer, plus the floor manager on site. Beale states: So we've vastly reduced by almost a third or a quarter the head count on site. The number of people driving [to the venue] and all the big vehicles have gone; all the really heavy vehicles have gone completely. So this is a massive change, a huge step forward in the amount of carbon produced to make this sort of coverage.
The cloud-based director's multiview interface
Little transit van
Beale explains the cloud set up for the trial: Now, in this new world, we've got rid of all that infrastructure on site. So, there's just a little transit van and a small internal generator to charge the batteries, so basically one transit and eight people. The camera ops, sound assistant and engineer, and those cameras are now plugged into the LiveView packs, which are connected both via the [local] infrastructure internet plus also the 5G on site, available at Tottenham. That goes off into our virtual production system in our AWS account where we do all of the production. So audio, video, replays, graphics, multiviewers, commentaries added, etc.
He explains the cloud workflow in more detail: So we're using the LiveView cloud server. It literally goes straight off the ground either by a combination of 5G and fixed broadband at the ground into the cloud. We literally pick it up in the public cloud, in our AWS instance in the LiveView server. We decode that into our production environment, and then in our cloud production environment we are running all of the production tools you expect to find in the truck.
Now we're making both the world feed and the BT Sport produ
