IMG Media Norway is responsible for more than 3,000 hours of live trotting race competition broadcasting. Mediability is now helping them get even faster on the home stretch.
Being responsible for all of Rikstoto’s trotting race broadcasts in Norway, IMG Media Norway is dependent on having an extremely good workflow with no time-consuming obstacles during production.
Showing highlights seconds after the action happened
Today’s sports broadcasters are expected to be able to show highlights from competitions more or less immediately after the action has taken place – so-called instant replay.
Trotting races are action packed, and there is always something which the viewers would like to recap, like a photo finish between two or more horses.
“That’s when it is crucial to have extremely fast access to recordings and simple routines for marking start and end points in the video,” explains Kim Gaardvik, product manager at Mediability.
Making the process simpler and faster
To make this process even better and more seamless, production company IMG Media Norway has got help from Mediability which has acted as the system integrator of the LiveTouch solution.
“This is a product from the British company formerly known as Snell Advanced Media (SAM), now Grass Valley, which turns important tasks like editing and instant playback into even faster and simpler processes,” says Gaardvik.
3,300 hours of trotting race competition
“We produce all of Rikstotot’s transmissions in Norway across many different platforms,” explains Trond Larsen, head of technical operations at IMG Media Norway.
“We produce broadcasts for VGTV, Facebook and NRK. Rikstoto also has its own channel, broadcasting 3,300 hours a year across cable, satellite and online. We are talking a lot of production here, and we need to have the best possible workflow.”
Looking for new solutions
Like many other production companies, IMG Media Norway has been using Belgian EVS Broadcast Equipment for processes like storage, playlist creation and instant playback.
Yet they came to a point where they wanted to do things which were not possible to solve with the equipment they were using.
“Mediability understood our need. They worked closely both with us and with producer SAM in England, in order to tailor-make a LiveTouch solution for us,” says Larsen.
Saves time with everything in one “box”
The biggest advantage with the new solution is that all production is now happening on only one single server.
”All of the material comes into the server from the racecourse cameras, and you can edit directly from that same server. This gives us a considerably faster response time,” explains Trond Larsen.
The importance of a close cooperation
Mediability spent much time carefully analysing what IMG Media Norway wanted to achieve by finding a new solution for their live production.
“The fact that we have been able to offer a tailor-made solution for IMG shows how important it is to have a close cooperation with both the provider and with our customers,” says Kim Gaardvik at Mediability.
The new system is live from February 2017.
IMG Media Norway is part of the international media group IMG, which delivers a range of services to the world of sports – including the sale of rights, producing media content and staging major sports events.
Mediability Norway AS is a provider of products, solutions and support to the broadcast and media sector, and forms part of the Scandinavian Mediability group with offices in Bergen, Oslo, Stavanger, Trondheim, Copenhagen, Aalborg and Stockholm.
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