Popular home-baked football show produced with VCS central playout component

The
central playout component of Arnd Zeigler’s cross-media live show,
“Zeiglers wunderbare Welt des Fussballs” (Zeigler’s wonderful world
of football), is the dira! Cartplayer video application supplied by VCS. This
self-operated application for the presenter, which can also be employed by
production control as an insertion tool, is used in the broadcast of this new
WDR television program. It went on air on August 13th and is now transmitted
every Sunday at 12.15 am on TV and at the same time on the Bremen Vier radio
channel.

Arnd
Zeigler, who presents the show, which he makes for football fans and is
broadcast live from his flat in

Bremen,
describes it as follows: “The whole program is genuine – that’s the show’s
concept. It really is transmitted live from my lounge, not from some studio or
other. I’m a football supporter and I enjoy talking to like-minded fans; I’m
not somebody who’s been shoehorned into the role and only feigns an interest in
football. My aim in the early hours is to create a convivial atmosphere;
although the heat of the battle has died down, the show still captures the
immediacy of Saturday’s matches.”

In order
to satisfy these aspirations, WDR opted in favour of the VCS Cartplayer video
application. Some new technical features were built into the application for
the show’s live call-ins. The system can, for example, insert any chosen video
item whenever required and, in a hybrid mode, insert audio clips from a
standard IT server. Besides this innovation, the application can delegate
various signals from the video mixer. Among other things, this enables the
presenter to select any one of the four studio cameras at any time. Additional
items can also be fed into the system for immediate playout from the editorial
desk.

Editorial
content is imported by direct file-based input into the VCS system from the
Quantel editor by way of another VCS application, namely dira! Highlander,
which is a content management system. The program is prepared at three
editorial desks in

Cologne.
Once it has been planned, the show (metadata and content) is transferred to the
on-air system in

Bremen.

The on-air
server is a standard IT system. A newly developed variant of the Cartplayer
video application is used for the broadcast. It plays out the video files via
the standard IT server in the Quicktime format. The audio files can be imported
into the system in either the mp3 or the WAV format.