A MILLION FEET of broadcast cable. 100 or so cameras. 1,350 people. No tape. All for 17 days of sliding, gliding, jumping and skating.
The broadcast (or, more accurately, broadcasts) of the 21st Winter Olympic Games from Vancouver and Whistler will be groundbreaking. With every single second of competition to be shown somewhere (12 TV stations or online), it’s been a monumental undertaking for the broadcast consortium led by CTVglobemedia.
Nineteen tractor-trailer loads of gear travelled before Christmas from Toronto, where the broadcast team went through full rehearsals in a warehouse in October, to Vancouver. And now a crack team of about 200 is nearly done assembling it in the International Broadcast Centre.
“We have more equipment for a 17-day event than any other studio has in Canada,” said the consortium’s EVP broadcasting, Rick Chisholm, in an interview from Vancouver with Cartt.ca this week, a month prior to the opening ceremony. “Nobody has any experience doing it this way because we’ve entered totally into the digital world.”
All told, the consortium, whose other major partner is Rogers Communications but also includes French language broadcaster V and Aboriginal ’caster APTN, will consume 40,000 square feet of space in the IBC, spread over three floors. It will boast seven control rooms, six studios and 22 edit suites to feed 12 networks. There’s another control room and studio in Whistler, too, but the main studio for the Games is just about complete (the look of which is still a secret for now). “We will begin lighting it this afternoon,” he said, adding: “It’s pretty busy out here.”
At the time of the interview, he was taking part in a seminar going on from Toronto show producers and other segment producers, taking questions.
“It’s all about communication,” he said. And technology. There would be no way to show the entire games on every platform if tape were still in heavy use. “You can not put the amount of content we are going to put on the air without the technology that we have because you just can’t pass around tapes that well,” explained Chisholm.
The centrepiece of all the new technology, though is the Harris One solution, an all-in-one system that delivers graphics, servers and editing, networking, processing, branding and test and measurement equipment, as well as bringing together highly integrated products that enable advanced media workflows.
“It allows us to ingest and record 32 things simultaneously,” said director of engineering Curtis Skinner, edit on the fly, sending it out via 27 playout channels. Low resolution proxies are created for everything so that any employee with a computer can all up any bit of video for use in whatever it is they are producing.
“If Sidney Crosby scores a goal or whatever, anybody on their computer can search the Crosby goal and a minute or two after it happens, anyone can see it on their computer and tag it for later editing,” he added.
For the viewer, replays and game highlights will come quicker and with everything in HD and 5.1 surround sound, it’ll all look and sound superb.
When it comes to transmission of the content, the consortium is using fibre (OC-48 with 2.5 Gbps bandwidth), but backed up three times along with satellite back-up from Telesat. The five primary signals (CTV, V, TSN, Rogers Sportsnet and RDS) are being combined into a single stream using MPEG4, which is then sent back to the home networks in Toronto/Montreal.
Getting the gear connected was complex but it’s nearly done. “We’ve spent a lot of time and energy integrating all our products together,” notes Skinner. Now, “the top challenge is we have all the equipment in place and it’s almost all hooked up and ready to go, and you have to match the equipment with the people,” explained Chisholm (pictured). The rest of the employees (talent, producers, communications folks and so on) arrive between the 1st and 5th of February “and on the 12th, we go live.”
“We need to get them working as a production team as fast as we possibly can,” added Chisholm.
And that means, guess what, as much communication as possible, even among strangers – and even among those who usually work for TSN and Rogers Sportsnet in competition, but for 17 days in February will be working side-by-side as a unit.
“Sharing, sharing, sharing,” notes Chisholm. “No one is an island unto themselves… you can’t hold something for your pack later. You share everything,” he added.
Having all the rights to the entire Games in Canada, has been a huge job to mobilize, explained Chisholm. “It sounded really nice two-and-a-half years ago when we all saw the contract for the first time, but to actually make it all work and to find the most efficient way of doing it so we’re not working in silos, but in tandem, it’s challenging,” he said.
“You can never communicate too much.”
