…in the production center of Lissone
Contributing signals from stadiums to production center with Sony/Nevion.
EI Towers in its historic headquarters in Lissone, near Milan, has been hosting for about a year and in a dedicated building, the new Lega Serie A television production center which brings together many of the best broadcast technologies on the market today.
The idea was to centralize and bring all production in-house, so as to achieve total control over the entire production chain.
A significant step forward from a technical point of view came with the decision to make the signal available, from the 2021 season, also in 1080p.
Since then, all productions have been carried out with a progressive signal which from the stadiums is transported centrally on optical fiber to the new Production Centre, built in the IBC headquarters in Lissone at the technical partner EI Towers.
The stadiums involved in this “revolution” were 17 until last year while today they have become 18 and all the transport of the signals was created with the technologies provided by CVE, Communication Video Engineering, a well-known company in the Broadcast sector for its great competence and experience, underlined, precisely in the course of the just finished 2022, by its 40th birthday of presence in this sector.
The entire installation was created in close partnership with Sony-Nevion, which supplied most of the transport technology, and the engineering of EI Towers.
Luca Catalano CEO of CVE underlines:
“CVE provided all the technology installed in each stadium and in the center of Lissone, together with the associated services of project management, technical support for the definition and installation of the solution, set-up and configuration of the system, operational training, babysitting and 24/7 operational support.
This was done both in the content contribution segment and also in the production part of the television product in the center of Lissone.
With regard to coding, the Sony-Nevion “Virtuoso” model encoder with JPEG2000 video compressor was chosen, and used in completely redundant mode, i.e. everything has been duplicated and redundant to ensure maximum transport reliability for such precious content like that of live football in our league.
From each stadium, thanks to several Virtuoso machines, 16 HD 3G signals in Jpeg2000 format are sent out. 4 signals arriving from the IBC in the Lissone production center are then returned to each stadium, again in HD 3G.
In addition, a UHD signal also leaves from each stadium towards the production center in Lissone.
The production, from each stage, can thus be carried out in HD and in UHD and, at the IBC centre, the whole section for receiving the contribution of the 3G and UHD signals takes place in the same way on the Sony-Nevion Virtuoso decoders.
This has allowed EI Towers to have a plant that is already ready and prepared to implement the new remote production procedures that everyone is discussing in the sector.
Thus, all the activities necessary for the production of the television product, activities that until yesterday were carried out locally in each stadium, today could easily be transported to the production center in Lissone”.
The layout of the contribution to Lissone
These remote production procedures already today provide for the possibility of managing the signals coming from the stadiums arriving in Lissone on optical fiber and here all the useful processes are carried out, in fact, the collective and subjective virtualisations are inserted and also the graphics for the various different markets for the “soccer” product.
All the signals then re-bounce for national distribution through fiber connections to DAZN and SKY Italia or to RAI and Mediaset for the “highlight packages”.
Signals are also produced for international distribution throughout the world, covering up to 5 geographical areas (Italy, Europe without Italy, America, Asia, MENA and Africa) with differentiated “branding”.
The signals that leave the stadiums are “clean” and all the graphics and the so-called “virtual mats” are inserted in Lissone.
All the signals then return to the ob-vans for monitoring, including the highlights that are edited at the end of the first half and at the end of the match, useful for immediately providing a summary of the game itself, and also in the live feed still produced at the stadiums.
Luca Catalano comments:
“The installation times for this important system were very tight: only three effective months, and it was a great challenge: we started in May and we had to race because the championship would start again in August.
CVE is still currently active with technical and operational support activities on all “installed broadcast” at the Lissone site, having created a specific technical/operational support team for the plant built at EI Towers which guarantees maximum support for all technical and operational activities in the IBC centre.
Massimo Lovato PM project engineer provides some more details.
“Together with Nevion, a Sony company, CVE designed the entire signal transport solution in Lissone and Nevion consequently prepared the equipment to the specific requests.
Then we performed and completed all the installation, activation and commissioning phases.
The needs of the EI Towers customer were first gathered and the solution was designed and engineered together with Nevion.
Then, in record time, we moved on to commissioning, configuration, and training, all activities carried out by CVE technicians.
All Sony/Nevion Virtuoso devices, both for the encoding and decoding sections, are governed by a central software, or control system, known as “VideoiPath”: a real SDN controller that allows the entire orchestration of the system.
Each device operates both in HD and in UHD and in all the stadiums where the matches are played some Utah Scientific matrices have also been installed in a mirror image for the management of signal sorting and assignments.
Imagine Communication devices were also used in the production center for the processing and routing of audio/video streams in IP (in the 2022 standard) within the production center”.
All the signals converge in the MCR of Lissone, managed by EI Towers, where all the sorting and assignment of the various signals to the different functional areas of the center takes place.
The off-field commentary of each game is also made in the centre.
Also here, the signal is passed on to those who insert the graphics and those who insert the virtual mats.
Once the whole process is completed, the signal is distributed to the various international rights takers and returned to the stadium for monitoring.
Here the OB-van takes care of the direction and the replays for the creation of the live stream of the match”.
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