Summer Games 2016: Gaining a Competitive Edge With Remote Production

With the explosion of mobile devices and platforms on which to watch sports content, whether on the go or in the home, broadcasters’ delivery of compelling content to millions of fans around the world has evolved significantly over the past few years.

There’s no doubt viewers’ hunger for instant access to high-quality content has changed the game for broadcasters as they compete to attract and retain viewers during major sporting events. But how do they balance the books to counter the extra costs associated with creating and delivering more engaging content?

Matching the London legacy

It’s been four years since the London games were dubbed ‘the most digital games in history’. With the next one just around the corner, we look at how technological advancements in remote media production can help broadcasters to win gold in the viewership and productivity race.

For the 2016 games, taking place in 32 venues in Rio de Janeiro, plus five soccer co-host cities — Belo Horizonte, Brasília, Manaus, Salvador and São Paulo — the amount of multicamera content being generated is likely to run into petabytes.

With this phenomenal amount of content coming into the International Broadcast Center (IBC), production teams need an efficient media production workflow to manage, edit and create packages for distribution across multiple platforms to ensure viewers stay up to speed with all the action.

Avid is all about collaboration

There’s no greater test for collaborative workflows than a two-week summer multisport extravaganza. With production teams dispersed at different venues, capturing the action hundreds of miles away from the broadcast center, the use of innovative remote media production solutions can bring production tools to the field – enabling the fast turnaround, delivery and broadcast of compelling content to multiple platforms.

Over the past year, we’ve seen many of our customers — from broadcasters to production companies — use our innovative remote working solutions, Avid MediaCentral | UX and Avid Media Composer | Cloud, to bring stories to air faster and more efficiently.

MediaCentral | UX, the cloud-based, web front end to the Avid MediaCentral Platform, enables editorial teams to use one application to collaborate in new ways and publish to multiple platforms. Journalists have the freedom to write scripts, view and edit video, record voiceovers, add and preview graphics, search across multiple systems simultaneously, send stories straight to air, and publish to social media platforms or a news organization’s website — and they can do all of this regardless of their location.

With Media Composer | Cloud, multiple remote Media Composer editors can connect to the home facility, regardless of their location, enabling them to collaborate with teams to create better stories from where they’re actually happening in the field. Editors, reporters and videographers can ingest, edit and move media fluidly between the story site and the main facility, enabling the editor to be in the field capturing and editing more stories instead of bound by the facility walls.

As the summer games are ongoing, we’re excited to see how broadcasters around the globe take on the challenge of topping the digital experience of London 2012. Powered by innovative remote media collaboration tools, we’re sure they’ll have us tuning in across every platform.