TVM OB10 Hits the Road in Ireland for GAA Gaelic Games Championships, European Rugby Coverage

TVM OB10 hits the road in Ireland for GAA Gaelic Games Championships and European rugby coverage By Fergal Ringrose

Wednesday, May 25, 2022 - 08:39

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Irish OB provider TVM is on the road with its new single-expanding OB10 truck, covering the European Rugby Championship Cup for BT Sport and the GAA Gaelic Games Championships for RT Sport. OB10 is TVM's first SMPTE 2110 IP-based truck and joins flagship triple-expanding OB8 as a UHD-capable production unit.

On OB10 the IP network is anchored by an Arista Ethernet switch. EVS Cerebrum is the enabler for multi-vendor device integration within the truck, controlling a Grass Valley K-Frame vision mixer, Calrec Artemis audio mixer, EVS Neuron IP processing, EVS XT-VIA servers and LSM-VIA replay controllers, XFile3 connected archive and transcoding, an XNet-VIA high speed network, Clear-Com Freespeak II Dect-based intercoms and Adam Audio loudspeakers.

TVM was established in 1986 in the small village of Bartlemy in County Cork by Bart and Helen Arnold and remains an independent family-run business. When the journey towards the realisation of OB10 commenced in pre-pandemic 2019, remote production was not really a consideration. And that situation has pertained for live outside broadcasts in Ireland: the country is simply too small to make the remote operation centre (ROC) concept feasible, with sports and events venues being easily accessible within a couple of hours drive.

Bart and Helen Arnold, founders and owners of TVM OB

Nor was UHD production headroom a major concern for the TVM team. We don't do a lot of UHD here in Ireland: a little bit of sport and a little bit of music, says managing director Bart Arnold. There is no real market for it in Ireland because no broadcaster has the capability to transmit progressive. So it's really our two main customers in England, and occasional music shows here produced in 4K progressive.

The driver was that we were noticing a change in manufacturer support for traditional 12G infrastructure and we felt now was the time to make the move to IP, says Arnold. And, to be fair, the Neuron concept was appealing in the flexibility and roadmap EVS were putting in front of us, not just from a vision point of view but from an audio point of view as well. That led us to believe that with their support we could go forward with an IP-based rather than traditional 3G-SDI or 12G-SDI approach.

Another key driver for us was the fact that we can make decisions that other businesses can't make, adds TVM technical director Eoin Coakley. Bart allows us to go into new technologies maybe when they don't 100% make sense at the time, but they're the right thing for us and that's where we go.

We were first into HD here in Ireland, first into 3D, first into 4K, and now first into IP. As a technology business we want to be relevant and we want to be dipping our toes into technologies so we have real life experiences and learnings that give us a way forward if other opportunities come along that we can take advantage of - and we're not sitting here with a limited knowledge.

We don't build trucks for contracts. If you're building a truck to do 100 days of football or whatever it is, you'll build it completely differently. Whereas we've built something that's as flexible and as future-proof as we can make it

If you make a business case for it, you don't go IP, adds Coakley. It's still way more expensive than baseband. But one of the main reasons we went down the IP road wasn't necessarily because we had to, rather that we wanted to drive our technology and our knowledge so that we would be ready for something that we didn't know was coming. We wanted to be ahead of the curve. For instance, if remote production kicks off here in this country we have way more knowledge in the area than we had say a year ago.

We don't build trucks for contracts, says Coakley. If you're building a truck to do 100 days of football or whatever it is, you'll build it completely differently. Whereas we've built something that's as flexible and as future-proof as we can make it.

Scalability was the big thing we looked for at the start. We put in a big switch that we don't need today, but we future-proofed ourselves. It took us a long time to decide on the switch: but now we can hang boxes off the switch reasonably quickly if we have the business case to do it.

Driving forward through lockdown

OB10 was built to replace an existing single-expander truck and TVM decided to stay with the same footprint, providing flexibility to park on the side of the road and around tighter venues where a triple-expander is too big to operate.

We were a bit hesitant initially about the design of the truck because it's not the traditional expander, says Arnold. You can't actually get into the truck or open a connection panel until you expand it. This makes it bigger and more spacious inside, but we were a little concerned that on some of the hillier locations we go to we couldn't get it level enough. But so far so good.

Scalability was the big thing we looked for at the start. We put in a big switch that we don't need today, but we future-proofed ourselves

The timeline for commissioning of the truck coincided with the Covid-19 pandemic and that created headaches and delays for the TVM team. When we got delivery of kit we weren't able to fly people in for commissioning and training, says Arnold. We couldn't bring anyone in because everyone was in lockdown.

So it meant that all the people here had to learn a lot quicker, with help over the phone and Zoom and dialing in to get to grips with how to make the kit work. But we've got a broader base of knowledge now, and less fear about a scenario where

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