Ireland's RT celebrates the close of the Olympic Games with extensive coverage success and first live remote production By Heather McLean, Editor
Monday, August 9, 2021 - 18:34
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RT 's Jacqui Hurley, presenter, and David Gillick, Olympian and presenter, bringing the news to viewers at home from the roof of the Decks shopping centre in Tokyo
Irish broadcaster, RT has just completed work on the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, producing over 270 hours of Tokyo 2020 coverage on TV channel, RT 2, and 408 hours of live coverage across the RT Sport website and the RTE News app, to help celebrate the achievements of the largest Irish Olympic contingent of athletes in the country's history.
In addition, the Irish broadcaster carried out its first remote production for a live event. We had a remote presentation position for a live show for the first time ever, for the overnight programme, says Cliona O'Leary, deputy head of TV sport at RT .
Speaking to SVG Europe from Dublin, she continues: The workflow to have a remote presentation in Tokyo and control room in Dublin is a big innovation for us, notes O'Leary. This was conceived by our execs Mark McKenna [TV producer] and Kevin Corcoran [executive producer], and facilitated by Tom Nugent, RT 's technical lead in Tokyo, and others in RT .
Remote production first
Our remote production was a first for us and it was very successful, continues O'Leary. We sub-let our presentation studio in Tokyo from the BBC and they gave us space, power and fibre connectivity. We also had a two-way with David Gillick, Olympian, who worked as our resident expert across all sports and he was our reporter on the athletics as well.
When we were covering other sports David was on the roof our open air studio on the roof of Decks shopping centre in Odaiba, Tokyo with Jacqui [Hurley, presenter] or Clare [McNamara, sports journalist], and when the athletics was on, he was in-situ at the Olympic Stadium in our permanent Mixed Zone position there. Tom and the technical team set up a two-way with David so he could converse with Jacqui or Clare live. This was a wired internet connection serviced by OBS.
Also we had two gold medals - Fintan McCarthy and Paul O'Donovan in rowing and Kellie Harrington in boxing - so when they were in action, we had live SMUs in their homes in Ireland and we could bring those pictures to the IBC where they could speak to our presenters on the roof into the live programme.
RT 's Clare McNamara, sports journalist, interviewing gold medal winning Irish boxer, Kellie Harrington, in the Athletes Village in Tokyo
Nugent set up the remote studio for live presentation from the roof of Decks, which had to be set up fresh every day due to the changeable weather in Tokyo. O'Leary continues. We put in the camera, audio and set design. The weather was the most challenging aspect of this; it was exposed on the roof to high winds, rain and extreme heat and sunshine. Every day our team had to de-rig and re-rig. We had a pop up tent [3m x 3m] to protect our presenter during programme time. But on three occasions the weather wasn't great, so Paula [Fahy, RT Sport resource and commissions manager] and Tom moved the presentation position into our office in the IBC.
John Freeney was our cameraperson in the Decks presentation position, which had a backdrop of the Rainbow Bridge. This was our position for our live, Tokyo 2020: Through the Night, programme.
She continues: Our camera team were Mark Ronahan, Cormac Duffy, Neilus Dennehy, Padraig Treacy, and Ken Fogarty. They used LiveU to bring interviews back in HD. The frame rate is different in Japan to Europe; it's 59 versus 50. We filmed and set back our interviews in our 50 frame rate.
Protecting presenters and athletes alike was this little marquee, loaned to RTE by friends from BBC Sport
Challenging rights deal
This year, much like BBC Sport, RT has been more limited in what it can show due to Discovery's rights deal with the International Olympic Committee (IOC). O'Leary comments: We bought linear rights to the Olympics through Discovery. We are taking all of the feeds from OBS through the multi offering and we have DX feeds coming into our office in the IBC in Tokyo, which we switch to on occasion over there when we have an Irish athlete competing that is not on the multis.
O'Leary goes on: In the past we had far more extensive rights than we have currently, so we've no digital rights this year. That has made it challenging because we've got the biggest Irish [athlete] team ever; we had 119 athletes across, I think, 19 sports and to try and cover all of that with clashes [between events running simultaneously], has been difficult. But to be fair to Discovery they did give us an allowance which allows us to go for 10 hours on Player when there was a clash, so we could get to show the Irish in action live on our digital channel when we were on linear, because you can only go on one linear channel with coverage.
However, she adds: We're probably not bringing as much basketball and soccer to the audience that they would have been used to with the amount of coverage that we would have had in the past [because of the new rights deal]. However, our linear coverage hasn't reduced; our linear coverage is up from 220 to 270 hours. So it's more just our digital coverage that has been massively impacted, but [conversely] we wouldn't have had the audience for digital as much really, so it's not impacting, and we're not getting the criticism that the BBC has gotten, but it is challenging to try and cover all of the Irish action live.
Gold medal winners for Ireland, Men's Lightweight Double Sculls Rowing with Paul O'Donovan and Fintan McCarthy, at the IBC in Tokyo with RT
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Ireland's RT celebrates the close of the Olympic Games with extensive coverage success and first live remote production By Heather McLean, Editor 
