Broadcast Tech Talks

Everything you need to know about virtual production, with Final Pixel

Virtual production experts Final Pixel join Broadcast Tech editor Jake Bickerton to provide invaluable insight into the burgeoning world of virtual production. Final Pixel's Monica Hinden, Chris McKenna and Michael McKenna talk in-depth about what virtual production offers producers; the long list of advantages for filmmaking in an LED Volume stage; and the planning and approach required to maximise the potential of virtual production. The Final Pixel team bring to life the world of virtual production through real-life examples, showcasing where they have worked with a wide range of clients across a variety of genres to create fully immersive environments that make great use of real-time, in-camera VFX. 

How virtual production is bringing the news to life at Al Arabiya

Fadi Radi, director of creative at Al Arabiya News Channel, talks to Broadcast Tech editor Jake Bickerton about how an ambitious mix of state-of-the-art virtual studios and virtual production sets are being used to visualise the week's biggest news stories.

Every week, Al Arabiya creates a new eye-catching virtual set, immersing the viewer in a virtual world related to the topic under discussion.

The environments created in these extended reality (XR) sets are whatever the editorial requires, with the presenter seamlessly embedded into the scene.

So far, they have included the Amazon rain forest, an underwater scene, a space scene, immersive 360-degree views of Afghanistan and Iran, and the blood stream.

The quick-turnaround sets are created using a combination of Unreal engine and Vizrt for tracking the camera movement in real-time.

Vizrt chief technology officer Gerhard Lang also joins the podcast to explain how Vizrt works in partnership with Al Arabiya News Channel to enable the broadcaster to fulfill its editorial vision.

How sports production is heading to the cloud

Gareth Capon, CEO of 'video production, editing and publishing in the cloud' platform Grabyo talks to Broadcast Tech editor Jake Bickerton about how the sports production sector is transitioning to cloud-based working. Capon talks about how Grabyo evolved from a sole focus on live video clipping to full-scale live production in the cloud, with its product range now including tools for packaging and streaming live broadcasts, post-production editing and live clipping and distribution. He also reveals what he believes to be the future of live video production, with flexible, lightweight browser-based tools becoming the norm across all forms of sports production.

Crafting a new model for the post-production house of the future

Cara Kotschy, the former managing director of leading post-production house Fifty Fifty talks to Broadcast Tech editor Jake Bickerton about her decision to quit her role last year and how she’s been busy creating a new model for the post-production house of the future. Kotschy was only 28-years old when she became MD of current Broadcast Post-Production House of the Year, Fifty Fifty, and spent a decade in the role before she stepped down, to the surprise of the post-production community. Following a number of consultancy roles, Kotschy has spent her time devising a new type of post-production facility, which is dedicated to becoming best-of-breeds in a specific niche service, offers fully flexible working, recruits a diverse workforce from all areas of the community, and is based on a co-operative business model. She explains her vision and her timescales for rolling out her new take on the post-production facility during this enlightening episode of the Broadcast Tech Talks podcast series.

The Hundred: How Sky Sports will cover the new fast-paced cricket format

Sky Sports director of cricket Bryan Henderson talks to Broadcast Sport editor Jake Bickerton about the launch of The Hundred cricket tournament, which begins next month.

The Hundred aims to bring a new audience to cricket with simple-to-understand rules, fast-paced game play and building the format around an entertainment-first approach.

Henderson explains why The Hundred is different to what’s gone before, and then provides great insight into Sky Sports’ plans for its coverage of the new cricket format.

Sky has been involved in The Hundred since the early stages of the development of the format and has devised five pillars that underpin how it will present and produce content from The Hundred. These are:

1. Cricket is for everybody
2. Sport-led entertainment
3. Who’s winning?
4. Closer to the players
5. Force for good

Henderson explains all these pillars in detail in this podcast, focusing on how they have influenced Sky Sports’ approach to the production and broadcast of the series.

He also covers the rights deal that sees Sky become the host broadcaster and showing all games, with the BBC also airing 18 live matches from the tournament.

BBC at Wimbledon 2021: New virtual studio, new camera positions and Covid-safe production changes

Ron Chakraborty, lead executive, major events at BBC Sport talks to Broadcast Tech and Broadcast Sport editor Jake Bickerton about the BBC's new virtual studio at the club, which will be its main presentation space at Wimbledon 2021. He also talks about Covid-19 enforced changes to the broadcaster's camera positions as well as its production setup at Wimbledon, to ensure social distancing of production staff. Chakraborty also covers the BBC's expansion of UHD 4K content from Wimbledon, to cater for increased demand from the public for high-resolution sports.

How to showcase your sports tech innovations to BT Sport at Innovate 21

BT Sport COO, Jamie Hindhaugh and BT Sport director of mobile strategy, Matt Stagg talk to Broadcast Sport editor Jake Bickerton about the broadcaster's Innovate 21 competition.

Innovate 21 is the latest in a series of large-scale competitions run by BT Sport seeking ideas for forward-thinking new sports broadcast experiences. The previous incarnations of Innovate have resulted in BT Sport teaming up with two products – Sceenic (which won the 2018 BT Infinity Lab competition), and Seenit (the winner of the 2016 BT Infinity Lab competition). Sceenic has worked with BT Sport to support last year’s launch of Watch Together on the BT Sport App, and Seenit has enabled fans to send in short video reports and comments from stadia around the country as part of BT Sport’s Premier League Tonight show.

Innovate 21 is looking for entrepreneurs, creatives and start-ups to pitch products and services that will play a significant role in BT Sport’s broadcasts and productions.

How to do 20+ camera live productions in the cloud

Mike Cronk, vice president of advanced technology for Grass Valley talks to Broadcast Tech editor Jake Bickerton about how to make the transition to the cloud as straightforward and cost-effective as possible for media companies.

The bandwidth and technical requirements for media companies has made the move to cloud-based working more challenging than many other industries, and there’s also latency issues that come into play too.

To address these issues, minimise latency, and enable true live cloud production, Grass Valley recently launched a cloud product that’s been specially designed for the production and broadcast industries – the Agile Media Processing Platform (AMPP).

It has also created something it calls the GV Media Universe that is attempting to bring the industry together to work on the next generation of cloud-based services.

Cronk explains all this technology and talks about how it’s been used to enable seamless live high-quality cloud production on 20+ camera events, including the EA Sports FIFA 2021 European qualifiers.

For this event, the camera feeds originated in the UK, the signals were processed in a data centre on the East coast of the US, and the vision mixer was 3,000 miles away in California.

David Ross, CEO of Ross Video talks tech innovation during Covid-19

David Ross, CEO of Ross Video, talks to Broadcast Tech editor Jake Bickerton about how Ross Video has addressed the many challenges of the pandemic.

The Canadian company offers a plethora of products and services in more than 100 countries that are used by television networks, sports teams and stadiums, esports producers, live events and production companies.

A big focus for Ross during Covid-19 has been on its Ross Mobile Production division, which provides OB and studio services, predominantly for sports and esports. 

As soon as the pandemic hit, it started utilising robots on-set to reduce the amount of staff required, and created a fully decentralised production environment that enables production/gallery staff to work in isolation from any location, including their homes.

During the podcast, David also talks about the pros and cons of cloud working and his concerns about cloud security, and being able to work at higher resolutions such as 4K UHD in the cloud.

He also covers the fragmentation of content; the growth of esports; the automation of sports production; his predictions for 2021; and how Ross Video chooses which innovations it will focus on and bring to the market.

BT Sport and EE's new Match Day Experience (with Jamie Hindhaugh and Sam Kemp)

Jamie Hindhaugh, COO at BT Sport and Sam Kemp, marketing technology director at EE join Broadcast Tech editor Jake Bickerton to talk about an innovative new set of features on the BT Sport app called the Match Day Experience. It's a collection of complementary tools that enhance live matches with a series of immersive features. These include AR insights and behind-the-scenes stadium tours, a 'Watch Together' function, and a 360-degree 8K pitch view so you can watch a high quality image of the game from any angle of your choice. The real-time AR graphical insights offered by the Match Day Experience include team line-ups and formations; in-game stats and graphics augmented on the pitch; a mini-map tracking the positions of all players for a tactical viewpoint; player names; player speeds; and tracers marking the path of shots.

Creating virtualised Adobe editing workstations with Adobe, Base Media Cloud and BBC Global News

Broadcast Tech editor Jake Bickerton talks with Daniel New, operations manager, BBC Global News; Byron Wijayawardena, strategic development manager, UK and Ireland, Adobe; and Ben Foakes, founder, Base Media Cloud, about how to create virtualised Adobe editing workstations to enable news editors to work from any location.

BBC Breakfast editor Richard 'Fredi' Frediani on how covid changes have impacted the BBC staple

BBC Breakfast editor Richard 'Fredi' Frediani has been in his role for a year. And what a year it's been. It's fair to say coping with the pandemic and its impact on the 20 year old BBC show has been a key challenge he wasn't predicting when he took up the role.

The programme is famously built around the red sofa, with guests dropping into the studio each day. With this no longer possible as lockdown hit, the whole look and feel of BBC Breakfast had to change, almost overnight. The changes were sweeping and affected everything going on in front of and behind the camera.

This podcast explains what happened next, and how the show adapted to enable it to continue producing three hours of television every morning. Standing still was not an option, with Zoom, Skype and Facetime suddenly becoming a central part of the production.

The podcast also covers how BBC Breakfast has managed to continue doing outside broadcasts, including the live broadcast of Captain Tom walking his 100th lap, which went out exclusively on BBC Breakfast.

Little Dot Studios and BASE Media Cloud on maximising the potential of cloud working

This episode of Broadcast Tech Talks is with Greg Rochford, IT manager at Little Dot Studios and Michael Clayton, sales account executive at BASE Media Cloud.

They talk with Broadcast Tech editor Jake Bickerton about how they worked together to transition Little Dot Studios to the cloud. It's a journey that began five years ago, and has paid dividends during lockdown with everyone able to seamlessly work and access all production assets from any location.

Little Dot has 1.4PB of data (and counting) in the cloud on accelerated secure cloud storage. An Iconik smart media management platform plugs into this cloud storage, and when new content is added it's automatically scanned, transcoded and made into proxies, ready for editors to work on.

The setup is discussed during this podcast, as well as why Little Dot Studios still needs a big London office despite the cloud enabling all its staff to work remotely.

Sunset+Vine's Jeff Foulser on becoming the host broadcaster of the Commonwealth Games 2022 in Birmingham

Sunset+Vine chairman Jeff Foulser talks to Broadcast Sport editor Jake Bickerton about the sports production company's successful bid to become the host broadcaster of the Commonwealth Games 2022 in Birmingham. Sunset+Vine will produce more than 2,000 hours of coverage from the games; a 12-part documentary series leading up to the games; and coverage of the opening and closing ceremonies. It is also creating a Host Broadcast Training Initiative to give under-represented groups in and around the Birmingham area the opportunity to receive training to work with the Sunset+Vine team on the Commonwealth Games.

Jigsaw24 talks about remote audio post-production, working in Dolby Atmos and the benefits of network audio

Jigsaw 24 head of audio Matt Ward is joined by pro audio consultant Saxon on this Broadcast Tech Talks recording with Broadcast Tech editor Jake Bickerton. Together, they talk about the current trends in audio post-production, including a rapid move to enable remote audio post-production, including ADR/voiceover recording remotely, and making Dolby Atmos immersive mixes at home. The conversation also covers the cost-saving and practical benefits of network audio in post-production.