Live from the UEFA Youth League Semi-Final cloud production showcase By George Bevir Monday, May 15, 2023 - 08:00
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Director Rob Levi, foreground, with trainee director Russell Yates
UEFA and TEAM Marketing invited a group of European broadcasters and SVG Europe to the BT Sport studios in London for a live demonstration of a cloud workflow of the 2023 UEFA Youth League Semi-Finals on 21 April in Geneva.
The UEFA Youth League was introduced in 2013 with the aim of developing youth football, providing players at the Under-19 level with the opportunity and experience of competing in an international tournament. It has also served as an opportunity for UEFA Youth League broadcaster BT Sport and its technology partners to try some innovative and more sustainable approaches to live production.
Organised by TEAM UEFA's global marketing partner the showcase was attended by a host of rights-holding European broadcasters who gathered at BT Sport's studios in Stratford, east London to watch a live cloud production (that ran in parallel to the main, traditional UEFA host broadcast) of the UEFA Youth League semi-final tie between Portugal's Sporting CP and Dutch club AZ Alkmaar at the Stade de Gen ve, Geneva, Switzerland.
Hardware is so hard to get hold of, and switches are in short supply, so if you want to build something quickly it is almost impossible - the future is clearly software-based.
BT Sport chief engineer Andy Beale explains that historically, a production of a UEFA Youth League tie with eight cameras would still require some heavy lifting in terms of infrastructure and kit.
He says: Typically, we would send a large articulated OB truck, scanner, generators, satellite truck and around 25 people to every game, just to create the multilateral world feed. And then back here at BT Sport in Stratford we would have another team in the gallery taking that satellite feed and adding BT Sport unilateral personalisation, such as commentary, GFX, replay, and so on.
So that is 30-something people and a significant amount of carbon by the time you have driven all those vehicles to the venue. That is how we did it for years, and of course it was reliable and successful, but we wanted to consider if there was a better way.
That led to BT Sport staging a multicamera cloud-based production of the UEFA Youth League tie between Tottenham Hotspur and Sporting Lisbon in Enfield, North London in October last year a setup that provided the basis for the semi-final showcase between Sporting CP and AZ Alkmaar.
In Enfield last year, there was one vehicle and that was a small, two-ton van to take tripods and scaffold clamps, cameras, lenses and LiveU backpacks and pre-charged batteries for the day. So we had taken off the road all of those vehicles and backhauled those signals into the cloud via the LiveU cloud service.
Our friends at Limitless Broadcast who were doing the OB and shading the cameras weren't on site either; shading was done by engineers at the Limitless HQ in Woking outside the M25, but with exactly the same camera spec - we didn't change anything in terms of what we provided. And our production team was based here at BT Sport in east London. That is the beauty of the cloud; collaboration is relatively simple and there is no need for everyone to be co-located.
NDI was the main cloud production codec, with the NDI Tools suite of applications a critical part of BT Sport's cloud infrastructure. The setup also used LiveU packs on site, with a LiveU cloud-based decoder used to break out the LiveU camera signals as NDI streams.
Viz Vectar was the vision mixer and audio mixer of choice, with Viz (NewTek) 3Play engines running in the cloud, Chyron Prime for GFX and Kiloview multiviewers used for a couple of the ancillary multiviewers with Unity talkback systems for comms. Comprimato encoders were used for handling signals for transmission to Red Bee Media and on pass for the world feed.
Eric Orengo, UEFA, Senior Broadcast Engineering Expert, Andy Beale, BT Sport chief engineer and Claire Wilkie, managing director, Limitless Broadcast in the gallery at BT Sport in London.
We went from 24 to eight people on site: six camera ops who also rigged the cameras, an audio guarantee providing audio and general video support, plus a floor manager, says Beale.
We also ran a variety of microservices in the cloud: LiveU decode, vision mix, replay, Chyron GFX, audio mix - those were then brought back to ground using the NDI Bridge tool, which we ran in the cloud and on on-prem. Bridge allows us to pull any of those NDI streams whether camera sources or raw cameras, multiviewers and so on - which can then be routed over NDI Bridge into a cloud gallery for the production of the programme.
BT Sport produced a few UEFA Youth League games using that model, which Beale describes as super reliable . He says: The only thing we had to check is the internet capacity at each venue and whether there was adequate 4G coverage. With relatively small crowds at Youth League matches we don't have huge contention to deal with, so we are usually able to get good performance off those mobile networks.
For the cloud production of the semi-final, one of the biggest changes to the setup described above is an increase in the number of cameras, from 8 to 12.
The host broadcaster is providing 10 cameras, and we have added one for ourselves because we will be doing a shadow cut and our director wanted the confidence they wouldn't be beholden to the camera under the control of main host director, so we have a clone of camera two - which is our camera 11 - with a big lens on the gantry.
And we have our own beauty cameras in the corner for somewhere to go when the host is doing their own thing we need somewhere to go safely, so we have two get out
