| By: Kevin Hilton, European Correspondent | Published: October 7, 2009 |
Norway is the happiest place in the world, according to a survey by the United Nations. While the mayor of Oslo attributes this to the countryside and eating lots of fish, two new premium sport channels have probably made the country’s sports fans even happier.
Viasat Sport and Viasat Football are produced and played out by Mediatec Broadcast, which is transmitting the two channels from a new area at its facility in Oslo. This system is based on EVS servers, Final Cut Pro editing workstations, and Snell Morpheus automation.
Mediatec Broadcast has an established relationship with Viasat, part of Swedish media operation Modern Times Group (MTG), having handled the playout of Viasat SportN for nearly four years. The channel was rebranded as Viasat Football this year, and Mediatec installed new facilities for it and the all-new Viasat Sport.
Among the sports events produced by Mediatec for broadcast across Norway on Viasat Football and free-to-air channel Viasat 4 are the UEFA Champions League and Europa League, both of which are now in full swing. Presentation is from a studio within Mediatec’s production centre.
Viasat Football also shows coverage of French Ligue 1 and the English Championship, as well as relaying club channels Chelsea TV and MUTV (Manchester United). Viasat Sport is more general, offering motor sports, tennis, golf, basketball, water sport, and the NFL and NHL, as well as football.
The new playout area features EVS HD/SD XT[2] servers to receive and transmit material for both Viasat Sport and Viasat Football. This, along with control of metadata and production footage, is managed through a combination of the EVS IPDirector program and Morpheus automation.
Packages for live analysis and highlights are assembled using the EVS MulticamLSM system. The servers are on a Hybrid network, with an XNet[2] hub system handling footage across the production chain. A Gigabit Ethernet network is used to send and receive files to and from a 20-TB Apple Xsan, known as the MediaBank, which is connected to the Final Cut server.
Arne Stenstadvold, technical manager for Mediatec Broadcast, says the priority was to find systems that would work with an existing Final Cut server SAN.
His colleague, Technical Operations Manager Eirik Nakken, adds, “The fact that EVS technology can handle the media management that is connected to our Final Cut Pro system allows content to be shared between production, postproduction, and archiving in a very efficient way.”
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