Building for the Future: NEP's Brian Sullivan and Mike Werteen on Creating a Global Production Ecosystem

Building for the future: NEP's Brian Sullivan and Mike Werteen on creating a global production ecosystem By George Bevir

Saturday, April 23, 2022 - 01:24

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With NAB about to open its doors for the first time since 2019, the industry will have a chance to gather and swap notes on the changes to the way content is now captured. And with many parts of the world now emerging from restrictions that were imposed during the pandemic, it will also provide an opportunity to move from firefighting mode to a longer-term view of production, says NEP chief executive Brian Sullivan.

The industry did an incredible job responding to the pandemic, Sullivan says. We're not quite back to normal yet, but I think we have moved from a very tactical environment over the last two years to a much more strategic one over the past three or four months.

Most of the clients we're speaking with are not just talking about how to get next week's event on air, but also their strategy for the next three, five, seven and even 10 years. And that lends itself to a different scope of conversation which is much more about future solution architecting, as well as current deliveries.

SVG Europe spoke with Sullivan and Mike Werteen, global president of NEP Broadcast Services, shortly before NAB and just as NEP Ireland opened a new production centre in Dublin. The facility in Ireland takes the number of NEP's centralised production centres opened since 2020 to 11, with additional facilities opened in Amsterdam, Brussels, Singapore, New York, LA, Bracknell, London along with client-owned facilities where NEP provides centralised production solutions in Germany and Italy.

Sullivan says that NEP has created a network of centres that will total more than 20 by next year, while also upgrading NEP's existing trucks with the group's proprietary network management architecture.

That makes those trucks effectively centralised production facilities on wheels, because they connect to our physical centres that we have around the globe, says Sullivan, pictured right.

We're creating a global production ecosystem and our priority now is to continue to build that global production ecosystem, because the pipeline of confirmed projects and those in discussion right now is the longest we have had in the history of the company, and they all involve some variation of a production ecosystem, whether it's regionally or even globally.

Client demands

While the world may be opening up, Werteen says that NEP is keen to acknowledge that there is still an element of concern from production teams about working in close environments. He says: No matter what the production needs are, whether that's centralised production, or OB units or fly packs, clients want to be able to continue to count on the trust that we've earned of providing a reliable, scalable solution, and having the agility to change when needed. It used to be the changes were along the lines of let's add a camera here', or let's add a replay server there'. Now, those requests have become much more complicated.

I would say that in 75% of the conversations that I have with clients today, centralised production or components of centralised production are at the at the core of those discussions. The deployment of that is going to be different depending on the geography, but everybody understands the importance of looking at production with fresh eyes.

Having said that, it doesn't mean we're not building OB trucks and mobile units. But it's our job to make sure that we point out to our clients what the advantages are of all the options that that are under the NEP roof, and then arm them with the experience that we've garnered by being the only centralised production producer at large scale in in the world.

On the subject of trucks, in the US, NEP is rolling out Supershooter 6 this month, enabled with IP and TFC (the abbreviation given to the control system used throughout NEP's ecosystem). Supershooter 5, released in May, was the first fully IP mobile unit to be powered by TFC. Meanwhile, mobile units Supershooter 1, TS2, Supershooter 29, EN1 and NCPXI are slated for upgrades in 2022.

Sullivan says that NEP is around a third to halfway towards realising the company's vision of creating a complete global production ecosystem.

We are already doing projects and solutions for customers that are connecting physical and mobile units through this production control layer on a regional basis, mostly in Australia and in Europe. For example, we provided the Extreme E coverage last year in Europe, based out of our new UK facility which is less than a year old.

That is completely connected with our Hilversum operation [in the Netherlands], which is one of our original centralised production hubs. And between the two of them, in real time, they were producing everything, not just from the capture, but to the VR overlays, and graphics and telemetrics.

With technical hubs in Australia, the US, Norway, Netherlands and Singapore, NEP says that in 2021, it supported more than 4,600 centralised productions. That included 2,000 by US-headquartered subsidiary VISTA Worldlink, 1,200 in Australia, 882 in the Netherlands, 465 in Norway, 123 in India, approximately ten in Singapore and six in the UK.

VISTA Worldlink (pictured, below) was acquired by NEP in March last year. With VISTA providing workflow solutions and connectivity, predominantly for tier two, three and four sports, with a couple of tier one clients, the aim of the deal was to bolster NEP's centralised workflow offering.

Werteen says the business is now perfectly integrated into NEP's broadcast team. The focus that we've had on sharing information from around the globe, on the specialties that exist within ea

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