Liverpool Football Club Expands Streaming Operations

By Kevin Hilton
With Internet streaming an increasingly important part of sports coverage, the in-house television channel of leading English Premier League football club
Liverpool
is expanding that side of its operations. Liverpool FC.TV has bought a ViewCast Niagara 6116 SDI encoder, which will allow higher-quality video to be streamed direct from SDI feeds.
Liverpool’s broadcast division was founded in 2000 as a joint project of the club and commercial broadcaster ITV. Its Website is among the most visited of football-club home pages, and, since 2001, Liverpool FC.TV has been using ViewCast Osprey cards as the core of its Webcasting operation. The Niagara 6116, supplied by ViewCast’s UK distributor, ATG Broadcast, is a single-channel analogue/digital processor.
Liverpool FC.TV has the exclusive rights to Webcast most of the club’s preseason games, and Matthew Quinn, systems coordinator of Liverpool FC.TV, says the intention is to provide live broadcasts, online news, interviews, features, and documentaries from Anfield, Melwood [the team’s training ground], and the recently completed LFC TV broadcast studio.