Top end technology brings Sky Sports to viewers

Sky Sports subscribers, millions of homes and nearly 40,000 clubs and sport bars now also access the UEFA Champions league.
Six matches are covered on Tuesday nights and all eight go out live on Wednesdays, with viewers choosing the game to watch through an interactive menu. Sky Digital's technology allows it to broadcast all eight games and produce handsome highlights packages of each and every one of them, all at the same time. Up to eight games are played simultaneously in different stadiums around Europe and all are linked to Sky's studio centre.
An EVS SuperSplit mosaic multi-viewer is used to create a menu channel presenting all events on a single screen, together with full quality graphics. The Sky-digital viewer moves a pre-selection across the screen during which the audio follows that selection instantly. The viewer can call any match into full screen at any time. Highlights packages are also important to the success of this project and are made available pre-match, during halftime and post-match.
Each stadium feed coming into the Isleworth studios is managed by a producer/operator team who utilise an LSM-XT for highlights editing during the live broadcasts and for playout of pre-produced sequences. A total of 10 LSM-XT's are available, all of which are SDTI networked (EVS SportNet) so that content can be shared in real time. The task of the LSM crews prior to the match is to turn around the arrivals of the teams and insert them into the live programme with only a slight time delay. The five minute highlights edits which are made during the actual match, applying split audio editing with different audio and video dissolve durations to make maximum use of the live ambient audio, are aired at half time, immediately after a commercial break that is also activated from the LSM-XT operators.
Each operator/producer team is also building a highlights edit with commentary/analysis during the live transmission. These are more difficult and would normally require the use of fully equipped edit suites, which would still not allow the editors to be ready so quickly.
Now, these commentary edits are played out within 5 - 10 minutes after the end of a game. The workflow of this production process is nonlinear and entirely tapeless.
(GB)