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Now that the World Cup heads into its final week how are things going? There’s been very little fine tuning necessary so the biggest satisfaction is that we’ve been right from the beginning. Access control issues at the stadiums are always a bit difficult, especially during the first event, and we’ve been able to make access control more consistent from one venue to the next. How about on the broadcast side? On the broadcasting side it’s gone fairly smoothly. There are some broadcasters who want a more aggressive production style and others who want a conservative production. There are two European broadcasters that are more conservative and want the broadcast to stay on the wide shot, in principal, as long as the ball is in play. But we want to give our directors more freedom to make the coverage more lively. We set up some guidelines and about 98% of the time those guidelines have been respected. After the first three or four days criticism from those who wanted conservative productions, with less replays, has stopped. With 500 broadcasters it’s impossible to produce every feed the way everyone would like. But we’ve taken every effort to help them customize the feeds. I heard of some technical problems that occurred during the Italy vs. Australia match. Can you discuss what happened? We lost power at the OB van in Kaiserslautern for the first 45 seconds, actually 49 seconds, and that was our responsibility as an operator accidentally shut it down and it took a bit to restart it. But later during that match there was a problem when a backup fiber connection between Scotland and Shetland was lost and then the main fiber was lost. Those broadcasters who were saving cost by not taking our satellite feed [as another backup] lost the signal. (Ed. Note: it took 90 minutes for the signal to return, impacting both North American and Chinese broadcasters but ESPN has the satellite backup). But in Germany we had zero failures with the fiber between the stadiums and the IBC. Speaking of fiber, I’ve heard some talk that South Africa won’t have a solid fiber infrastructure in place in time for the 2010 World Cup. Is that true? We need to investigate and find out what the reality is in South Africa. It’s our understanding that one of the telecom companies put out a plea to the government and it’s clear the government will make major amounts of money available. We’ll decide with FIFA whether we use fiber or satellite and what the best possible mix will be in South Africa. First we need to find out how we’ll bring the feeds into the IBC from the stadiums and then how to set up the outgoing feed for broadcasters. What have you learned from the current coverage? We’ll have an organized debriefing with the broadcasters regarding some of the new services and feeds we introduced. But we’ve learned that bringing in ‘dream teams’ to produce the matches gave us one consistent production and we absolutely trust in that principal. We also learned that going HD was a good decision. We have between 30 and 40 broadcasters who will broadcast at least one game in HD. Another lesson is we might need a specific feed that is designed for giant screen viewing in public spaces for 2010. In many cases the screens aren’t that giant and if you’re watching from 30 meters away it can look like watching video on a cellphone. How would you create that feed? Camera one is responsible for the wide shots and we would add another camera next to it that would have a tighter shot that would be sent to large screens. © Copyright 2006-2007 sportsvideogroup |
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