Deltacast Scores for 2010 World Cup Qualifying

By Kevin Hilton

The qualifying rounds for the 2010 World Cup continue, with most of the competing nations playing the second of two matches in under a week in their effort to get to the finals in South Africa. Among them is Belgium, which won 2-0 against Armenia on Saturday Oct. 11 and takes on Spain on Wednesday Oct. 15, with broadcaster RTL-TVI using live graphics and replay technology for statistics and judging off-side decisions.

Deltacast’s Delta-sport and Delta-stat systems have already been used by RTL-TVI for covering Belgium’s qualifier against Armenia and the Standard Liege-Everton UEFA Cup clash. On Oct. 4, Italian production and graphics group EBD (European Broadcast Development), having seen the systems at IBC 2008, began using Delta-sport for Sky Italia’s HD coverage of Italian Series A football.

Belgium-based Deltacast has manufactured OEM video boards for 24 years but moved into finished systems for sports TV five years ago. Among its products are Delta-stat, a PC-based animation and statistics generator, and Delta-sport, a virtual-graphics system that does not require cameras to be fitted with a special sensor. This is used to superimpose lines and circles over the picture of the pitch to show offside and free-kick positions, as well as for virtual advertising.

Deltacast sales manager Marco Pezzin says the company’s products were designed for live transmission and did not compete with a specific analysis system like Red Bee Media’s Piero, which is also being used by EBD in Italy.

This coexistence of technologies is repeated in Portugal, where Sport TV, like Sky Italia, is working in HD. Portuguese developer wTVision is providing on-air graphics for Sport TV, based on the Orad platform, but is additionally supplying virtual graphics using Deltacast products.

Other European users of Deltacast systems include Setanta Sports in England and Scotland, Kanal D and Antena 1 of Romania, France Televisions, Iceland’s 365 Media, and another Belgian broadcaster, Belgacom TV.

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