IP and remote production are transforming how live sports coverage reaches fans worldwide. Recognising the potential of both, broadcast production and equipment rental company Kaleidoscope Production and Services (KPS Studios) helped facilitate the first remote production of the Durand Cup, one of India’s biggest annual football tournaments, last summer.
Since then, it’s continued to refine its multi-camera IP and remote production pipeline to deliver the fast-paced action of several other live sports events to fans across the Asia Pacific region. To ensure low-latency viewer experiences in multiple languages across a range of destinations and device types, the company built AJA’s IP video solution Bridge Live and 16-channel openGear audio embedder/disembedder OG-12G-AMA into its workflow.
One of Asia’s most storied football events, the Durand Cup is an annual national tournament that includes teams from the I-League, Indian League, and the Indian Armed Forces. With no room for error, KPS Studios pulled out all the stops in planning the production. It assembled a team of more than 150 crew, including producers, directors, camera operators, sound engineers, and broadcast engineers, spread across six tournament venues throughout India.
Leveraging multiple cameras in each venue, KPS Studios transmitted HD feeds to a master control room in Kolkata, where its team processed the footage, and added in slow-motion replays, graphics, and commentary. Then, it distributed the feeds to Sony TV via traditional broadcast, streaming apps Sony LIV and SSEN for over-the-top (OTT) delivery, and social platforms. By using Bridge Live, the KPS team was able to easily move between SRT (secure reliable transport) and H.265 and support low-latency streaming demands.
Rajiv Mehra, KPS Studios technical and managing director, explained: “Since Bridge Live supports low-latency signal processing, conversion, and transmission over long distances, were able to transmit live footage from each venue to the control room in our production facility in milliseconds and using less bandwidth, given the efficiency of H.265.”
He continued: “At the same time, we could transcode high quality signals for television broadcast and streaming. Bridge Live is an affordable, reliable solution that delivers incredible encoding, decoding and transcoding performance, plus it’s easy to use, which made integrating it into our workflow simple.”
Given the team had to produce the feed for distribution in multiple languages, they also used AJA’s 16-channel OG-12G-AMA openGear analog audio embedder/disembedder card. Mehra said: “OG-12G-AMA is our go-to. It’s easy to use, provides cost-efficient, high-quality analogue audio embedding capabilities, and is compatible with our other equipment.”
He added: “We can embed eight channels of audio with OG-12G-AMA, whereas most other solutions on the market only support four, which is increasingly important as we’re tasked with embedding more languages into an SDI feed. I also love the openGear form factor because it provides us with a flexible, scalable, plug-and-play solution for our signal processing needs that we can easily integrate into our pipeline, and with less cabling and less boxes.”
Mehra tapped AJA Distributor ARK InfoSolutions to ensure seamless integration of Bridge Live and OG-12G-AMA into KPS Studios’ workflow. Mehra noted: “Delivering high-quality live sports content with efficiency and reliability is paramount to our operations, and ARK Infosolutions has been an invaluable partner in this journey. They’ve provided exceptional service and support, and enabled us to achieve low-latency, high-quality remote production, making them a trusted ally in our continued innovation in live sports broadcasting.”
KPS Studios’ work on the Durand Cup only marked the beginning of its IP video journey. This is especially true, as the company plans to expand its cloud-based and remote production capabilities in the coming years. As it does, Mehra and the team will continue to prioritise technologies and workflows that will help the company deliver high-quality live sports content.
Mehra concluded: “Remote production is clearly the future and can provide tremendous cost savings, while also reducing a production’s carbon footprint. And 4K workflow adoption is on the rise, which means SMPTE ST 2110 IP video will soon become necessary. While we’re transmitting today in HD, we understand we’ll need to move to 4K, and coaxial cable can’t provide the bandwidth like an IP network can. We’re actively exploring how we can build SMPTE 2110 into our pipeline this year.”