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[Wednesday at NAB]
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Sports Forum to Preview 2008 Beijing Olympics
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by Robin Berger,
~ April 16, 2008
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TV TECHNOLOGY
The format of the second Sports Technology Forum will completely replace 2007’s debut, which featured a broad technology approach, to concentrate on one topic of interest: this summer’s Olympic Games in Beijing.
“It will be the largest sporting event ever produced in HDTV,” said host Ken Kerschbaumer, director of information and editorial services, SportsVideo Group. “Nice crisp, clean 20-minute in-depth discussions about how technology is being applied in the workflow,” he said is on the agenda to help the audience decipher which applications fill their needs.
The forum will begin this morning, 9 a.m.–5 p.m. Although the audience sweet spot will inevitably be sports broadcast professionals and technology leaders, Kerschbaumer said he would love “all stations, production facilities and post-production facilities to see how these new products are being applied in a really high-pressure environment.”
HUB AND HIGHLIGHTS
The Olympics International Broadcast Center (IBC) hub will be the topic of the kickoff session, “Making the Leap: Transitioning the International Broadcast Center to HD.” Moderated by Peter Angell, principal at Infront Sports and Media consultancy, it will feature input from NBC Olympics, the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., Apple, Ascent Media, EVS and Sony.
Hugo Gaggioni, vice president and chief technology officer at the Broadcast and Production Systems Division of Sony Electronics, will discuss the use of new additions to its XDCAM HD Professional Disc system family, which will be introduced at the NAB Show and debut at the Olympics, as well as other Sony technologies used by Japanese broadcaster NHK.
According to Sony, its new PDW-700 camcorder, equipped with three new 2/3-inch Power HADFX progressive CCDs, can produce a resolution of 1920x1080 effective pixels. The camcorder also has a 14-bit A/D converter and advanced digital signal processing, and features dual HD/SD-SDI outputs, a composite/HD-Y output and a pool-feed input (HD/SD-SDI and composite) option.
The forum’s closing session is “Inside NBC’s Highlights Factory,” a large-scale, fully integrated system developed by the NBC Olympics engineering team to pump out clips used on broadband streaming and TV production. Expected to be up and running this summer, it will comprise numerous server installations in Beijing, China and New York City.
Reports contend that the Highlights Factory’s fully digital process workflow can support up to 40 simultaneous ingest feeds and generate high- and low-resolution media content along with associated metadata, while its encoders simultaneously stream up to 40 live sports events to viewers.
NBC Olympics’ technology partners included Omneon Systems and IDS (USA), Blue Order (Germany), MOG Solutions (Portugal), Cyradis Technology (Canada), ScheduAll and Anystream (USA) and Castify Networks (France).
VENUES AND LOCAL COVERAGE
In between the IBC and Highlights Factory sessions, the forum will discuss logistics at the venues — specifically, the systems that connect them and mobile units that service them — as well as the role of local TV stations in the event coverage.
At “Virtual Beijing: Inside the Venues,” 10:45 a.m.–12:30 p.m., the particulars of the communications systems will be given by Marc Schneider, multi-sport international event project manager at Riedel Communications.
After lunch, the mobile side of the equation will include spokesmen from Thomson, Visions and the Euro Media Group in “Goin’ Mobile: Olympic Mobile Production and Flypack Systems at the Summer Games.”
The local coverage angle will be discussed by representatives from Hearst-Argyle and three U.S. stations in “Road Trip! Local TV Stations and the Olympics,” 2:30–3:30 p.m.
“The key for the stations is finding the local angles on the international event and managing the logistics,” said moderator Harry Jessell, editor, TV Newsday. He said the panel would “explore ways that individual stations and station groups with multiple NBC affiliates hope to capitalize on the bi-annual phenomenon.”
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