LONDON—QuickLink has released new details about the remote production technologies it has been providing ITV Studios’ popular series “Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway.”
"Saturday Night Takeaway" is an ambitious, family-oriented entertainment program spanning seven weeks of live shows per season. The technically complex program is a mixture of live and prerecorded entertainment, with game-show influenced segments and regular surprise interactivity with viewers, including with children facing health challenges and their families. ITV Studios’ Lifted Entertainment produces over 500 hours of television for U.K. audiences each year, including ”Saturday Night Takeaway.”
With the series averaging 5 million to 9 million viewers per episode, “Saturday Night Takeaway” is broadcast live on U.K. network ITV1 in a primetime weekend slot. The show typically includes numerous remote connections to surprise members of the public across several segments in each show.
For the show’s remote production, laptops were initially used with either video capture cards or webcams.
To fine-tune audio and video signals coming in remotely and to improve picture and sound quality, Lifted turned to QuickLink for an end-to-end solution using QuickLink StudioEdge with StudioCall. This simplified the complexity of the remote production work in the show and removed the need to use laptops and capture cards.
“Using QuickLink hardware both out on location and in the studio enabled us to have a true end-to-end solution,” David Williams, technical director for Lifted Entertainment, said. “Monitoring and managing all connections from the QuickLink web UI enabled us to quickly troubleshoot issues and ensure every item went smoothly, from ‘Ring My Bell’ to ‘Singalong Live.’ ”
“QuickLink is the perfect solution for our hugely demanding remote production environment,” Leon Langdale, technical producer at Lifted, added. “There is no other program on television with the size and scale that ‘Saturday Night Takeaway’ has. The technical demands of the format grow each series, and we simply couldn’t make it without a key partner in QuickLink.”
More information is available here.
