Eurovision Sport Enables Enhanced European Athletics Indoor Championships 2021 Coverage With New Live Cloud-Based Technology

Eurovision Sport enables enhanced European Athletics Indoor Championships 2021 coverage with new live cloud-based technology By Heather McLean, Editor

Monday, March 22, 2021 - 15:19

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Mavis Live utilises the power of the cloud to enable remote virtualised live production, now catering for both progressive and interlaced workflows. The new interlaced version was first used at the European Athletics Indoor Championships 2021

Host broadcaster Eurovision Sport recently covered the European Athletics Indoor Championships 2021 with a new cloud-based system for several broadcasters, designed to enable them to easily tailor and differentiate their live output.

Mavis Live, which virtualises the live production workflow, was developed by Mavis Broadcast. The latest iteration of this system was launched for the EBU and Eurovision Sport at the athletics championship held from 4 to 7 March 2021 at the Arena Toru , Poland.

The cloud-based solution allowed three broadcasters who participated in the EBU trial - France T l visions, RTE and SVT to produce unilateral programming to complement the integrated feed. To do this, the Eurovision Sport team presented multiple isolated feeds from the venue through an SRT hybrid cloud platform to a number of Mavis Live instances in the cloud, giving control to broadcasters to make their own tailored output.

It's a sort of a new spin on that host broadcast feed, because actually you're putting the control into the hand of the broadcaster, to be able to compliment that world feed with additional feeds

The original iteration of Mavis Live was designed for digital output, but the pandemic changed those plans. The team has reengineered the technology over the last six to nine months to work in a broadcast model, so we can actually ingest interlaced and produce interlaced, in a way that we can go into someone's MCR, Patrick Holroyd, Mavis Broadcast CEO and co-founder, states. The [European Athletics Indoor Championships 2021] was the first time we rolled out that more broadcast flavour of the system, which was running on an interlaced traditional pipeline, notes Holroyd.

An end-to-end solution, Mavis Live utilises the power of the cloud to enable remote virtualised live production, now catering for both progressive and interlaced workflows. Boasting a full broadcast feature set, the inbuilt functionality includes vision and audio mixing, instant replay and talkback.

The France T l visions operator of Mavis Live at the European Athletics Indoor Championships 2021 picked up the system and began using it intuitively within minutes

Creating additional programming

On how the relationship with the EBU began, Holroyd says when Mavis Broadcast ran a BETA programme for Mavis Live early in 2021, the EBU came forward to help test the system. He continues: That relationship grew. Their need was to help compliment the services that they are giving to their broadcast members. They have a number of broadcasters who obviously can't be on site at the moment because of all the restrictions, and perhaps in the future they don't want to go on site. So [the EBU's] vision was to in addition to providing them with the integrated feed, the world feed that was getting produced and every broadcaster was taking to give them the capability to create their own additional programming around that.

Adds Phil Watten, CTO and co-founder at Mavis Broadcast: The way we did that was that onsite [at the European Athletics Indoor Championships] the EBU had a number of feeds that they were producing. They presented us [with] four separate feeds, one of which was the integrated, and the other three were field. We took those four feeds and put them into three different instances of Mavis for three different broadcasters, effectively giving each broadcaster the capability to be able to cut away from the integrated feed and help tell their narrative, their story; follow their own athletes, etc. So it's a sort of a new spin on that host broadcast feed, because actually you're putting the control into the hand of the broadcaster, to be able to compliment that world feed with additional feeds.

Of France T l visions, RTE and SVT, the three broadcasters that used Mavis Live during the event, the French broadcaster used the system significantly and broadcast its output on its digital channels, while Irish RTE and Swedish SVT used the system as part of internal tests.

One of the things that the French broadcaster did was there was a French athlete in the main event on the integrated feed and they did a picture in picture because there was also a French athlete in the triple jump. So that's kind of how you can start to tell the story in parallel, Watten notes.

Adds Franck Choquard, head of content and platforms at Eurovision Sport: Thanks to the great support of the Mavis team, we can begin to open up the potential of live cloud production for EBU Members and federations' platforms.

Mavis Broadcast is now in discussions with the EBU about how to take the trial of Mavis Live forward for EBU members

Moving forward end to end

Now Mavis Broadcast is in discussion with the EBU about how to take the relationship forward, specifically by enabling Mavis Broadcast to take control of the entire feed production workflow to be able to reduce latency on the system to six to seven frames, using an underlying piece of technology developed by the company.

Mavis Broadcast intends to use Mavis Live Streaming Protocol (MLSP), which means all content is connected in a Mavis-controlled ecosystem through the cloud, from and to the various end points, therefore removing latency from the workflow and ensuring more control and reliability for end users.

All the kit in the system from apps and interfaces, to a small encoder that clips to the back of

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