How We Help Deliver a Seamless Live Sports Experience

Live sports production leaves no room for interruption. From contribution and distribution to IP production, remote workflows and software-defined deployment, every part of the chain needs to work together to ensure the viewer never misses the moment that matters. Over more than a decade, we have developed our monitoring technology around this principle: giving production teams the visibility, flexibility and confidence they need to identify problems before they affect the audience.

The takeaway?

A seamless live sports experience is not created at a single point in the production chain. It depends on continuous visibility across the entire workflow, combined with the ability to detect, understand and resolve issues before they reach the viewer. Technology may be complex; the experience for the audience should never be.

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We have been pushing for IP since before most of the industry had even heard the term, and our technology has been a fundamental feature of practically every major global live sports production of the last decade. This started in the field of contribution and distribution, where our compressed probes – including our flagship VB330 – help ensure uninterrupted delivery. As our monitoring ecosystem has evolved, we have added features crucial to live sports broadcasting year after year. Take SCTE-35 ad insertion monitoring, for instance: something fundamental to live sports, where the ability to validate performance and demonstrate compliance to advertisers is central.

But our role in the recent rise of IP production has been even more transformative. With the development of our VB440, we have replaced the need for multiple rack units of dedicated hardware, providing dozens of best-in-class tools for production specialists across all fields, whether camera shaders, audio engineers or network specialists. Up to eight simultaneous users can access these tools and create a custom assembly of readouts on their Canvas workspace, accessible from any HTML5 browser, from anywhere in the world. That means a colourist in London, an audio engineer in Sydney and a network technician in Oslo can all work on the same live production simultaneously, using just an iPad if they wish. The operational implications for truck roll costs, energy consumption and crew movement are substantial.

This year, the introduction of software-defined deployment – particularly through our integration into NEP Platform – adds even greater flexibility. The VB440 can now be instantiated on shared COTS compute, scaled up or down according to production demands, and terminated when the event ends. With NEP also playing a pivotal role in the delivery of global sports broadcasting, our alliance further strengthens the role our technology will play in the upcoming summer of sports.

And that is particularly true given the new features we have integrated this year. Our AV sync feature – which uses physically embedded markers as a ‘first line’ of validation – ensures that commentary and environmental audio match the action every time. With audio monitoring of up to 64 channels, engineers can also ensure the right language is reaching the right market across dozens of commentaries. We have now extended this further with Multi-Service AV Sync, allowing productions using multiple redundant input sources to avoid single points of failure while ensuring that, if and when they need to switch between sources, there is no lag, no glitch and no risk of viewers missing that decisive goal.

Because ultimately, that is what our technology is about: giving production and engineering teams the visibility and confidence they need to deliver a seamless viewer experience, even in the challenging world of live and remote production.