With Proximus supplying the TV network, Lawo the IP Remote technology, SIA its TV facilities and NEP Belgium & Videohouse the expertise in the field, a new benchmark for football broadcasting in Belgium has been set.

SiA, the production company within the Proximus group, selected Lawo to provide the IP Remote Production infrastructure that will support the broadcast of all games played in the Jupiler Pro League League – Belgium’s second Football League.

Begun in August 2016, all matches are now transmitted live using the Lawo infrastructure. The set-up uses three flightcases that travel around the country to connect all cameras, microphones and commentary boxes in the stadia to the Remote IP Production infrastructure in two MCRs in Brussels. They are capable of producing two matches simultaneously in two languages.

With the combination of several V__remote4 that connect to the stadia, Lawo Nova73 audio routers and Lawo’s powerful VSM Broadcast Control and Monitoring System, Proximus has the most advanced and flexible IP Remote Production set-up in Belgium.

To ensure fail-safe operation in a live production situation, the IP Remote Production set-up makes use of a combination of the latest network, IP and control innovations from Lawo. The two MCRs in Brussels and the flight cases located in the stadia interconnect via a network connection provided by Proximus. The control and the management of the complete IP-based production infrastructure is secured by the VSM System.

Each of the MCRs has two V__remote4 connecting it to the stadium. Every MCR can be connected to any stadium using VSM panels, which take care of all video and audio routing inside the MCR, as well as the audio and video streams between Brussels and the stadia. The SDI signals from all V__remote4 in Brussels are connected to the video router whereas the Madi signals from the V__remote4 are connected to the Nova73 audio router, installed in Brussels.

At the other end, the three further flightcases use V__remote4 units, connected to a Cisco switch in the case and three A__line Audio-to-IP interfaces. The camera streams between the stageboxes and the MCR are sent using J2K. With each flightcase, eight camera streams are sent to Brussels, two returns are received, 32 audio channels are sent to the MCR, and 16 audio channels are received from Brussels. Lawo’s VSM Broadcast Control and Monitoring System controls all devices both in Brussels and in the flightcases – two Lawo mc256 audio consoles, a Miranda multiviewer system, Kahuna vision mixers and all V__remote4 as well as A__line boxes.

In order to handle the amount of content, Proximus provides 1GB network connections in every stadium with QoS. Locally in Brussels, these network connections are received with a main and backup 10GB trunk between the ‘stadium’ network chain and the switches in the MCR.

The VSM system plays a very important role in this set-up – it not only controls the respective hardware in use but also controls the streams and bandwidth. The whole system is configured as “auto recover”, which means that every time a flightcase is connected to the network and to the studio, certain parameters are being set automatically. Whenever units are lost in the MCR in Brussels, e.g. A/V, the routing is automatically swapped in the router’s client to keep the connection through other devices and using other streams. Using the Auto Recover mode within the network, setting up the flight cases and connecting them to the MCR becomes easy and fast. Another important result of using this method is to provide a failsafe connection and stream distribution.

‘We are incredibly proud of the fantastic achievement of the team – two months from start to live is just amazing,’ says Skynet iMotion Activities MD, Massimo D’Amario. ‘The IP Remote Production technology used here is an example of how Proximus and SiA leverage innovative technologies to better serve Proximus customers. The technology enables Proximus and SiA to optimize the full production cycle of the live games. It also provides higher value productions thanks to a higher utilisation of fixed assets and synergies in production crews. We are now looking to extend this to the Jupiler Pro League, Belgium’s first division football competition.”

‘IP Remote Production definitely will be the future of broadcasting in a certain production segment,’ says NEP Belgium MD, Timo Koch. ‘As the worldwide leader in sports production, NEP supports its clients in whichever format is appropriate for their specific production. In partnership with Lawo, we deploy the best technology to deliver these football matches.”

 ‘Remote Production gives a lot of new opportunities for broadcasters,’ adds Videohouse Belgium MD, Dirk Theunis. ‘It is challenging in many ways: technically the most important ones are the reliable IP-connection, encoding with the lowest delay and a well-designed communication system between the local crew in the control room and the remote crew in the stadium. To solve all these issues, we – NEP and Videohouse – teamed up with Proximus and Lawo. The experienced crew did the rest.’