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Simple Scalable Live Sports Production With SimplyLive
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Meeting the requirements for simple, scalable and rapidly deployable live sports production systems is a challenge that Riedel’s SimplyLive Production Suite is ready to beat.
The arrival of internet-based content delivery has transformed expectations for live sports production. College sports, niche sports, and local leagues can all now create a web-based delivery channel with ease and consumers can access it across a wide range of devices. That consumption is increasingly part of the live, in-venue consumer experience, linked to and expanding the role of the arena big screens in some settings. Concentrated niche audiences create valuable targeted advertising revenue opportunities both live and online. As a consequence, the desire to increase production values to compete with tier 1 sports aesthetics have increased significantly in recent years.
That same proliferation of delivery channels has also created an increasingly valuable second screen for higher tier sports organizations, where behind the scenes fan engagement is becoming big business. This creates a requirement for smaller scale live production and/or re-purposing workflows alongside the main production.
As the monetary value of sports has increased so has the performance expectation from athletes, and this has driven a significant rise in demand for video based coaching tools. The same flexible multi-camera review technology underpins video assisted referee systems and as this becomes part of the consumer expectation in tier 1 sports, so it is becoming an expectation across more sports and settings.
For many organizations, addressing these challenges is a difficult conundrum. Achieving all of these goals is multi-faceted, it is part technology, part operational and of course part financial. In US college sports for example, students are a key operational resource in live production – it is part of their educational experience. Any live production system that is to be operated by students needs to be intuitive, with a familiar operational interface that matches the world of tablets and smart phones. In the hands of more experienced specialist operators the same platform needs to have the capacity to incorporate more familiar hardware control surfaces.
The underlying technology needs to be easy to deploy, immediately robust, adaptable to different approaches to systems design, flexible, scalable and suitable for remote workflows. The financial challenges are obvious, trying to equip for a wide range of applications on limited budgets and deployable as either CapEx or Opex according to preference.
One Solution To Many Challenges
It seems like a big ask for any single technology platform to be able to meet all of these challenges but the SimplyLive Production Suite does. Of course we would say that, we created the system, but it is not an empty promise.
SimplyLive started as a software based multi-camera production system designed to enable a single user to run a live sports broadcast. It can still do this very elegantly with switching, replay and graphics in a single integrated system, but it has grown over the years to become a suite of software applications and compute resource options that now includes;
- ‘ViBox All In One’ production.
- ‘ViBox Slo Mo’ live replay.
- ‘RefBox’ multi-camera video review (suitable for both coaching and VAR)
- ‘BMR’ ingest & ISO record & archive.
- ‘Venue Gateway’ remote contribution encoder-decoder.
Other add-ons enable remote commentator positions; web based remote production interfaces and web based remote production applications.
It is a software first ecosystem, a suite of applications that can be purchased with perpetual licenses or annual licenses that bring scalability and a clear expansion path. The software is of course based on a compute resource (which we will come back to in a minute), but a single resource can be used to run different software according to need – so a single system can be used for coaching review during the week, and live production on game day.
A single compute instance supports up to three connected operators, so one user can run production, supported by two replay operators. For larger scale productions, multiple compute resources can be combined to build bigger systems with more operators – replay can be scaled to handle dozens of HD cameras. The system supports remote operation, so can be specified to enable operators at multiple locations to work within a single environment. The software first approach truly yields flexibility and configurability that meets the diverse needs of a wide range of users.
“It’s been such a huge benefit to get into these clips quickly and easily and post them to social media. Being able to create clips without ripping them from our YouTube stream - instead, it’s a clean feed with no bug or anything — is very big with the way the social media team at the Savannah Bananas turns around content.”Griffin Ellis, Broadcast Engineer. Savannah Bananas.
Flexible Simple Operation
From an operational perspective the entire SimplyLive suite is based on flexible touch screen user interfaces with operational features that are consistent across the entire suite, to help users move quickly between applications. The entire UI design philosophy is centered on ease of use, making professional grade features and performance accessible to a wider range of operators… whilst simultaneously providing tools that will be immediately familiar to specialist broadcast operators. A Slo Mo Remote Control dedicated hardware control surface is also available to provide immediately comfortable tactile control for those specialist operators.
Hardware, COTS or Cloud?
Specifying any new or expanding broadcast production system should start with an appraisal of requirements. Riedel and its partner network have a long-standing track record of exemplary pre- and post-sale advice and support, and the conversation starts with right sizing compute resource to meet perceived current and future requirements.
The SimplyLive Production Suite can be specified with Riedel’s own SimplyLive hardware platform, or for use with approved third-party COTS compute resource or for deployment on appropriately specified AWS or Google public cloud compute resource. In more complex systems these can be combined. Which is right for any given application can only come from detailed consultation to determine the right balance of features, performance, scale and cost.
Riedel ViBox hardware units have been tightly specified to meet the requirements of live video production and as you would expect there are a range of options, from a single source ‘Mini’ server right up to very high density systems that can for example handle 16 channels of HD and six channels of UHD replay in a single unit. The units are ruggedized and ready for flight cased deployment.
“The ability to deploy RefBox across multiple venues with minimal setup time has significantly enhanced our game day operations. We can literally roll it out, plug it in, and turn it on, and it’s ready to go, taking just 10 minutes to verify all inputs are correct, with all configurations handled server-side and no user setup required.”Shawn DeWeerd, Video Engineer. University of Notre Dame.
Wider Integration
Given the wide range of applications and operational environments under consideration here, production systems need to be simple to deploy and straightforward to integrate with wider production studio or OB systems. The SimplyLive ecosystem supports SDI, SRT and NDI. These three formats offer the necessary connectivity and format support to create simple systems that can be rapidly deployed with point-to-point connectivity, simple user-friendly IP network infrastructure and for remote contribution and production applications.
The newly released ‘SimplyLive Connect’ is a RestAPI which enables the use of Broadcast Controller systems to access, control and monitor SimplyLive systems as devices within a wider ecosystem. If users wish to use their own third party control hardware this is also now facilitated by a new gRPC API that allows others to control the SimplyLive applications.
“The ease of use and flexibility of this system have been game-changing for our team. We’re now able to deliver superior-quality content more efficiently with a leaner team, resulting in significant time and cost savings.”Arthur Brousmiche, CEO of Art’istic Production.
Remote Operation
For many production applications simplicity and ease of deployment is key, but the system can also handle more complex settings. There are two basic approaches to remote operation. Having operators located remotely from compute resource (whether that is cloud or hardware) is achieved with a web UI gateway that uses a managed connection to stream the GUI to a remote computer and handle KVM control messages from the operator. Admin level remote log in is supported for central administrative configuration of one or more systems.
The system can easily be specified for Remote Production workflows where the compute resources and operators are in one location and the cameras etc are at a remote venue. Here we would recommend the Venue Gateway, which is a stand-alone hardware, bi-directional, SDI-SRT encoder/decoder for remote production contribution with its own multiviewer for remote or on-site monitoring.
SimplyLive is what Riedel do - simple scalable broadcast production technology.