Football Production Summit 06: How UEFA is preparing for EURO 06 Football Championship

Football Production Summit 2016: How UEFA is preparing for EURO 2016 Football Championship posted: 03/04/2016

The latest edition of SVG Europe's Football Production Summit commenced with an in-depth examination of the organisational set-up and broadcast workflow evolutions being put in place for the EURO 2016 Championships, which are due to commence on June 10. The revealing presentation was given by UEFA digital media solutions manager Oliver Gaches and TV transmission manager Nicolas Deal.

For the third time in the history of the game, France, the French Football Federation and French football as a whole are preparing to host the finals of the UEFA European Football Championship - known to most as UEFA EURO 2016. And perhaps returning to France is appropriate, as the whole idea of the Championships was the brainchild of Frenchman, Henri Delaunay. He became the first general secretary of UEFA and the trophy that the tournament winners receive is named in his honour.

The original line-up for the EURO 2016 qualifying rounds saw a record number of 54 teams take part. Those qualifiers produced the 24 teams that will take part in the finals. This increase from 16 finalists in previous tournaments means that many countries are now appearing at this stage of the Championships for the first time.

Massive Audience

Friday 10 June sees the EURO 2016 finals tournament kick off in the Stade de France, Paris with hosts France playing Romania. Over the following month, 51 matches will be played at ten host cities throughout France, with the final taking place on 10 July in the capital. While the actual physical' attendance is expected to surpass 2.5 million, the global broadcast viewership will be on another level altogether; to wit, the 2012 championships attracted more than 8.1 bn viewers.

The highly experienced UEFA marketing division team working on the event includes Gaches and Deal alongside: Bernard Ross (head of TV production), Guy-Laurent Epstein (marketing director), Maurice Tollenaar (head of media rights and services), Markus H vel (live and host broadcast), Phillip Williams (additional programming), Alessandro Bocca (production resources), Andr Nel (broadcast engineering and technical), Bernd Luithle (senior broadcaster services manager), Andrew Scott (live and host broadcast), Daniel Fuehr (HB venue and operations), and Alexandra Soares (unilateral services manager).

Production Concept Principles

UEFA, in its capacity as Host Broadcaster (HB), will use five Outside Broadcast (OB) suppliers for its coverage. These companies are NEP (Belgium), Euromedia (France), Telegenic (UK), AMP Visual (France) and NEP (Sweden). All replays will be housed outside the OB trucks via a centralised solution provided by EVS.

Supervising the coverage for UEFA will be five multilateral producers and four Quality Control (QC) producers. Selected from their pool of cross-competition talent, the UEFA HB is using five extremely experienced match directors with their dedicated teams - Jean-Jaques Amsellem, Knut Fleischmann, Fran ois Lanaud, Jamie Oakford and Laurent Lachand - to oversee their live production. Each team covering two venues (Paris/Saint Denis, Lyon/Saint Etienne, Lille/Lens, Bordeaux/Toulouse, Marseille/Nice).

Building on the successes of UEFA EURO 2008 and UEFA EURO 2012, a minimum of 38 live match cameras will cover each game in France in High Definition (HD) and encoded with Dolby 5.1 surround sound. From the quarter-final matches onwards, 46-cameras will be the standard. These 8 additional cameras will include one additional mini-camera behind each goal, a remote robotic camera in the players' tunnel, a remote robotic camera in the press conference room and another helicopter camera. The multilateral world feed, or Live Stadium Feed (LSF), will be available in English, with ten lead and colour commentators being used across the entire tournament.

The host broadcast implementation will involve no fewer than 20 permanent OB units. Ten multilateral OB units will feature multilateral production and additional feed areas, as well as multi-channel audio delivery. Meanwhile, a further ten FAN/unilateral OB units will comprise FANtertainment' areas, unilateral production areas, audio/technical areas and emergency production capability.

Camera Plan HD Production

Complementing the coverage

In addition to the LSF, rights' holding broadcasters (known as UEFA Broadcast Partners or UBPs) will have access to 11 additional feeds to enrich their coverage. These will be Camera 1, Clips 1, Clips 2, Team A, Team B, Player A, Player B, Tactical, Stadium Beauty, Stadium Aerial and 4K. Five camera ISOs will also be available: 16m left, 16m right, high behind goal left, high reverse stand and VIP venue. Other, non-bookable ISOs, will be used and made available via the two dedicated Clips Channels, ensuring UBPs have access to all the match action. Both ISOs and feeds will be available at the stadium venue or IBC.

LSF (Live Stadium Feed)

As well as the bookable feeds and ISOs, UEFA TV Production will provide broadcasters with a wealth of additional programming material to supplement their productions. This material includes raw and turnkey' content produced by the 24 dedicated crews following each team at the tournament. UEFA will also provide footage of the teams arriving at the stadium the day before the game, pre-match press conferences and post-match interviews, as well as the build-up and reaction in the host cities and dedicated fan-zones.

All broadcast quality video content will be delivered via the EURO 2016 Livex broadcast media server, UEFA's content publication and distribution platform, across the purpose-built cross-France fibre network. From Livex, which is based on EVS technologies, broadcasters will have access to video and audio clips, data, graphics an

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