Scandinavian Nations Deliver World Cup Impact With Minimal Footprint

Denmark is the only Scandanavian country to play in the 2010 World Cup and TV2 Norway is at the center of an operation at the IBC that is supporting all Nordic countries.

“There are eight TV signals sent from here to the Nordic countries, two are HD and six are HD, and they are delivered over rented lines from the EBU,” says Henrik Fredericksen, TV2 Norway, production executive.

The nations that are being served by the Scandinavian operations include Finland, SVT and TV4 in Sweden TV2 and TV3 in Norway, and DR and Channel Nine in Denmark.

There are two parts to the operation: one is delivering unilateral feeds of the matches but the operation also delivers ENG material over the eight channels.

There is a small-scale master control operation in the IBC, with two EVS browsing stations that can pull material of off the FIFAMAX video server. ENG crews from the different broadcasters can then sit in the facility and edit together feature packages and stories that can be transmitted home via the EBU circuits. One line to the Nordic nations is dedicated to the FIFAMAX.

Fredericksen says the FIFAMAX server is important for smaller broadcasters like those from Scandinavia. “We can’t be at the hotel when teams like Portugal arrive or they do interviews so FIFAMAX is important to help us make our feature stories,” he says.

He also says the Smart Jog file transmission system is important, allowing ENG crews to quickly send video back to the IBC from the field and then, in turn, to Scandinavia.

“We can send two minutes of material in 10 minutes and be on the air with uncompressed SD material or convert it to the Avid system,” says Fredericksen.

And viewers are tuning in. Denmark’s first match, on a Monday afternoon in Denmark, drew more than 1 million viewers from a country of 5.5 million people.

“Streaming of the game at work was huge,” he adds.

In addition, public viewing areas are popular. One area next to a World Cup studio that was built in Copenhagen’s historic harbor drew 15,000 fans for a large screen viewing.

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