NEP Australia Production Hubs To Rely on EVS XT4K Servers for Replay Operations

NEP Australia is set to open what promises to be the most interesting new facilities in the business next March. The new IP-based production hubs in Sydney and Melbourne will allow production teams at the facilities to produce events from across Australia, and EVS XT4K live-production servers will play an important part.

Fox Sports Australia will rely on NEP Australia’s production hubs for event production beginning next March.

The hubs will be used by Fox Sports Australia for remote production of more than 500 events at nearly 30 venues each year. The XT4K servers will be implemented into the NEP production hubs to provide full replay solutions within this new connected IP-based production model.

The XT4K was chosen by NEP Australia because of the IP-focused nature of the overall project. Fox Sports Australia, when using the production hubs, will have control of nearly 100 live channels being ingested into the hubs for a total of 36 dedicated replay channels. EVS’s live-production servers will be in place alongside Lawo’s VSM broadcast-control and -monitoring system, Sony video switcher and cameras, and NEP’s Grand Central tool for real-time IP and device monitoring.

“We chose to implement EVS’s live-production servers inside these unique, state-of-the-art production hubs because of the flexibility they provide an IP-focused live workflow like this,” says Marc Segar, director of technology, NEP Australia. “This is a new kind of infrastructure, the scale of which we haven’t seen before. So to have technology from industry leaders like EVS is important to help us deliver the reliability we need in this workflow.”

The network and its two production hubs will be used by Fox Sports Australia to produce live programming for the likes of the National Rugby League (NRL) and Australian Football League (AFL) and will be fully operational as part of the live-production network by March.

“The deployment of this network for live production is a major milestone in the broadcast industry’s adoption of IP-driven infrastructures, and EVS is proud to be included alongside the other highly trusted technology partners becoming a part of it,” says EVS CEO Muriel De Lathouwer. “The benefits of IP within live productions are clear, and the inclusion of our latest XT4K servers in this project validates EVS’s IP4Live strategy, which we launched in 2015 to deliver a smart and cost-effective transition from SDI to IP for the industry. As a result of this pioneering approach, our IP-enabled solutions uniquely combine the heritage of our technologies’ industry-leading speed and reliability with the latest advancements in connectivity that give users better operational performance and extended creative capabilities.”