NEP Australia, Fox Sports Deliver World’s First Live-to-Air Uncompressed HD At-Home Production Using SMPTE 2110

The Hyundai A-League match held at Brisbane’s Suncorp Stadium was produced and directed 920 kms away

NEP Australia has delivered the world’s first live-to-air, uncompressed HD at-home production using SMPTE 2110 in conjunction with Fox Sports, Australia’s leading sports broadcaster. Thursday night’s FOX SPORTS broadcast of the Hyundai A-League match between Brisbane and Perth held at Brisbane’s Suncorp Stadium was produced and directed 920 kms away in Eveleigh (Sydney) using NEP’s new permanent centralised production facility, The Andrews Hub.

NEP Australia delivered the world’s first live-to-air, uncompressed HD at-home production using SMPTE 2110 in conjunction with Fox Sports.

Live uncompressed HD signals from 10 Sony HDC 4300 4K/HD cameras at the venue – including high frame rate cameras – were sent to Sydney via NEP’s new countrywide Distributed Production Network (DPN), with a fully redundant network at 50Gbs.

A comprehensive HD video conferencing system enabled the ‘split’ production environment in which all program production staff – including the director, vision switcher, audio director, graphics and replay operators – were based at the Andrews Hub Sydney control room.

The final program was then delivered to FOX SPORTS via IP for broadcast.

NEP Australia’s Director of Technology, Marc Segar, says: “This is a milestone for the broadcasting industry and ushers in a completely new way of bringing live television to air. Never before has a broadcaster received a program ready to put to air via uncompressed video and SMPTE 2110 transmitted over such a long distance in a 100 per cent internet protocol (IP) facility. Thursday night’s event proves that broadcast technical professionals can now work across many locations using modern communication tools to maintain a team approach – regardless of distance. We thank our FOX SPORTS colleagues for sharing our vision of the future of live event broadcasting and look forward to delivering their tier-one ball sports in this way from now on.”

FOX SPORTS Australia’s Head of Technology, Steve Edwards, says: “Our partners at NEP have done a great job not only in building these world class, state of the art, all-IP facilities, but also in working with our production and technical teams to enable the next generation of sports broadcast production. Their willingness to embrace the newest IP technologies and emerging IP broadcast standards has been the key to success so far.”

Thursday night’s Hyundai A-League match marks the start of NEP’s plans to cover up to seven concurrent events from its centralised Andrews Hubs at Sydney (Eveleigh) and Melbourne (Southbank), beginning in early February 2018 with the start of the AFL and NRL seasons.