South Africa’s SuperSport OB1 Van Incorporates L-S-B’s VSM

As part of a continual renewal effort, South African sports broadcaster SuperSport built a new HD-capable OB van. As the overall control system, the company selected VSM to be implemented during the building process of OB 1. The truck can handle up to 24 cameras, five QBall cameras, and two sprint cameras. OB 1 has been modernized in the UK and started its first production in May last year.

VSM works as the main routing and Tally system with additional control over Axon cards and embedded output cards of the Snell Sirius router (576×576). Working on two redundant servers VSM makes use of 25 VSM hardware panels providing a virtualization of signals to make the work for the operators as simple as possible.

The goal of the implementation of VSM was to reduce setup time and to make production workflows more flexible. VSM’s capability to save and load workflow configurations as snapshots and simple labelling for devices are huge benefits for operators and EICs. VSM allows the user to directly combine the control parameters of the broadcast system into custom and workflow optimized user interfaces thus bringing simplicity and speed to operators.