BT Sport goes far from Porto for UEFA Champions League final

Jamie Hindhaugh, broadcasting director, uses the analogy to describe the plans for the 2021 Champions League final, which were thrown into the air when the British government’s Covid-related travel ban torpedoed the hosts of the game in Istanbul.

“The biggest challenge for the final and all our Champions League coverage this season has been the travel restrictions, the late warnings and the lack of clarity, which has made it very difficult,” he told IBC365.

UEFA finally decided to move a draw between Chelsea and Manchester City to Porto in Britain’s green list country Portugal.

Most of the planning was done, but it is not as straight forward as moving from one place to another 3000 km away. It’s a different country, a different connection and a different setup, says Hindhaugh.

One element that did not change was UEFA’s host broadcasting supply from Mediapro, which BT Sport has worked with many times before. The Barcelona-based construction team has produced and distributed the world feed for the last two Champions League finals.

“When Porto was announced, it was not clear whether Portugal’s borders would be open,” Hindhaugh said. “If fans were not allowed to travel, it was important to us that we did not send a presentation team either. With a limited number of fans allowed on the ground (6000 tickets per team), we have decided to send a press team. ”

Still, it is a stripped-down crew that has traveled to Porto mainly to support on-air talent led by Gary Lineker and BT’s match commentators.

“We have been producing large areas in the last year of at least 70 Premier League matches, so it has become normal,” said BT Sport chief engineer Andy Beale. – The challenge is that forwarding of feeds from Porto is over a much longer distance with greater connection challenges. Still, you realize how much of a step we have taken in 12 months. ”

Host food and one-sided presentation
Mediapro produces a dual HDR 4K feed and HD SDR feed that BT Sport expands with eight camera positions. These include three cameras on the presentation platform with Lineker and experts. On both ports there is a Sony HDC-4300 with zoom that allows BT Sports match director control of some close-ups, especially during pre-match warm-up and post-match analysis, and also to pick up VIPs in the crowd (Manchester City fan Noel Gallagher expected to be designated).

There are also two reporter cameras (4300s with smaller lenses) for side interviews and two Sony F55s that carry prime lenses behind and to the side of each target for cinematic beauty shots in edits and highlight packages. F55 camera operators will also be tasked with capturing fan response.

A timeline car will be on site, which mainly facilitates the connection of all the signals. In the truck, the feeds are coded in HEVC. One encoder runs native 4K and another five return the individual 1080p 50 ISOs. All are routed over dual 1Gig fiber connections from the premises to BT’s Stratford studio along with VoIP and talkback. BT Sports’ director, producer, VT ops and graphics ops manage production in Stratford and send it to the air.

This external template is now paired for the course of the broadcaster who has performed hundreds of such operations in the last 12 months.

“The last time we did a full OB from the Champions League in 2019, we sent 200 people,” said Hindhaugh. “This week we are sending 43. The rest of the crew is in London. The world is changing, and we have proven that you do not have to chew up air miles by sending crews to arenas. Actually, we can do the job as well, if not better, remotely. ”

He explains: “In the studio, we have access to all our tools and the archive, so that we can respond to a story very quickly. For example, if a player has an injury similar to a previous one, we can search the archive, extract a relevant clip and make it part of the editorial board. There really is no editorial compromise, and there are great benefits. “

This includes the health of the crew, who under normal circumstances for a large OB had to arrive on site hours before kick-off after enduring a lengthy navigation of safety.

“We’ve seen how much more relaxed production people work in a remote world,” Hindhaugh says. “The pace and stress level of our production teams who do not have to worry about getting to the site on time, plus the comfort of having more space to work in, is a big step forward.”

YouTube viewers get HFR
BT’s coverage includes a 4K HDR Dolby audio version for its Ultimate platform and a standard HD SDR for BT Sport 1 HD. HDR distribution is PQ since the power is mainly received by mobile devices and smart TVs over the internet, not via STB.

As before, the broadcaster will share the live feed for free to the audience on YouTube. This time the experience will be in high frame rate.

“Every year we collaborate with YouTube, we’ve increased the quality,” says Beale. “We want to push 50p onto YouTube, and they will code on planes in the cloud and send 60p. The difference in quality is fantastic … the motion picture is brilliant.”

BT Sport also has camera teams at fan parks in Manchester and London, as well as in two club-related pubs for colors.

“We have to recognize that there are still a very limited number of fans who can travel, so we want to bring that color into our programming all the way through,” Hindhaugh said. “It’s the biggest game on the calendar. The only thing we are careful about is that when there are only two British teams in the final, there is more polarization in the audience. But this is the season’s excellent game. ”

The last time two English Premier League clubs fought against it was in the final, when Liverpool beat Spurs in 2019, showing figures for BT Sport’s broadcast over digital and linear topped 11.3 million, the highest number BT Sport has ever had across all channels.

BT Sport has the rights to air the Champions League until 2024 in a three-year deal worth more than £ 1.2 billion.

To ensure that no one misses a kick, the broadcaster has a triple lock redundancy. Apart from two-fiber routes, as a third layer of redundancy, there will be two encoders running a lower bit rate that squeezes into two 27 MHz satellite transponders for the return of the eight presentation streams plus comm. UEFA has arranged separate match feed relays via satellite.

“If there’s a catastrophic ground connection failure, we still have access,” Beale said. “We have more belts and harnesses on this thing than you can imagine.”

There are inevitably some small compromises. While Istanbul’s Atatürk Olympic Stadium was fully equipped with fiber, the same was not possible in two weeks at FC Porto’s Estádio do Dragão. That means less than the normal compliment to cameras (from 40 to around 30). Flight clearance was not possible for a helicopter, and BT Sports’ dedicated VR truck was unable to travel.

360 fans will not be disappointed, as BT is able to take UEFA’s own live VR feed and make it available via the BT app.

Remove distributed permanent production
“Remote control is our standard way of working now,” says Hindhaugh. “We will always adapt and refine it. There are always options depending on the on-site connection, but the benefits are great. We have opportunities to improve production and achieve sustainability goals. The most important thing is that we have maintained the quality of our output by UHD HDR. Remote control is how we build our workflows going forward. ”

In fact, BT Sport has only made three non-external OBs in the last year. Two of them were from boxing sites without connection and required two trucks instead of one to accommodate social distancing, and the third was a conscious choice to try out some new technology that could not be done in any other way.

BT Sport is currently equipping its Stratford facility with an IP core as the next step in the transition to cloud.

“We look at the cloud all the time,” Beale says. For a live tier 1 event or as a software broadcaster, the tools are not yet rich enough. If I tried to produce a tier 3 event where I had sufficient internet connection on site, then the cloud comes to the fore. But in live cloud production series, I have seen that they tend to be about cutting images, which in my opinion is the easy part. The challenging part is always the control team, tally and comms, sound mix and IFBs and clean feeds that need to catch up on changing videos. These are all applications with a relatively low bit rate when it comes to getting in and out of the cloud, but no one has built these solutions. ”

He adds: “We first worked with ST-2110 suppliers back in 2016, nothing has really changed in that room in five years. Interop in 2110 is bad, and the business benefits are not there, but if you compare the development of cloud technology in the same period, it is clear that it will not be long before we see some of our productions move into that space. ” Sports Beezer