Long-standing EVS customer ESPN STAR Sports (ESS) has announced that it has upgraded its EVS systems for the London Olympic Games. The Singapore-based broadcaster, which operates 25 branded television networks throughout Asia covering 24 countries, is gearing up for its first Olympic Games broadcast across 22 countries. It will rely on its upgraded EVS systems to process more than 170 hours of footage a day and deliver more than 3,800 hours of comprehensive coverage of the Games across cable and satellite television platforms.
ESS has upgraded two XT2 servers to EVS’ new XT3 servers in a six-channel SD/HD configuration for recording and playout in its control room. The upgrade was prompted by ESS’ migration to Panasonic AVC-Intra as its primary studio production HD format, and in anticipation of supporting Sony XDCam HD422.
“This is the first time that the IOC has awarded the rights to a pay-TV platform across the region and it’s testament to ESPN STAR Sports’ commitment of providing the best coverage possible to sports fans across Asia,” said Colin Sheriff, vice president, operations & technology, ESPN STAR Sports. “As well as needing to upgrade our servers, we also needed to ensure we had the fastest and most reliable systems for the London 2012 Olympic Games. “EVS’ XT3 servers deliver the performance and reliability we need for covering global events while supporting our new HD production format.”
In addition to the two XT3 servers, two new EVS IPDirector suites of video production management applications will provide complete content control—from ingest and logging to playlist roll out—in conjunction with EVS remote controllers BePlay and MPlay. ESS has also invested in an EVS XF2 removable hard drive for back-up storage with support for both SATA and IDE connections, and XTAccess for media interchange with its existing HD and SD systems.
