World Cup 2010: Alfacam Hits South Africa with Riedel MediorNet System in Tow

Belgium-based international TV broadcast and OB truck provider Alfacam equipped five HD OB trucks that will be used for the FIFA Football World Cup 2010 with a comprehensive MediorNet installation from Riedel Communications. MediorNet is a fiber based real-time signal distribution and routing solution for HD/SD video, audio, intercom, and data that also includes software based processing features.

Alfacam is in charge of the world feed production at the venues in Johannesburg, Pretoria, Durban, and Port Elizabeth. Besides this production, Alfacam is responsible for the unilateral signal for ARD/ZDF, the German public broadcaster. Alfacam will send eight OB trucks, 80 cameras, and about 35 technicians to South Africa for ARD/ZDF. Alfacam was assigned for about 45% of the “host feeds” of the World Cup and will deploy in total 170 cameras and 155 technicians.

“With our task, to process the stadium’s cameras, the world feed of the games and to provide the feed for the German broadcast of the event, it is important that we can absolutely rely on the technology we use,” says Rene Alles, Project Manager at Alfacam Deutschland. “MediorNet gives us all we need for this exciting broadcast operation while saving a lot of equipment such as de-embedders, framestores and such, which we would have needed with other solution”,

The MediorNet mainframes link Alfacam’s trucks with the technical operation centers (TOC) in the stadiums, delivering 16 HD-SDI signals including the world feed to the trucks and four back from the OB van to the TOC. MediorNet’s integrated CWDM multiplexing provides maximum fiber efficiency and allows transporting all HD signals bi-directional via one single mode dual fiber link. MediorNet’s integrated Embedding/De-Embedding feature de-embeds the audio and delivers the signals via MADI to the trucks’ LAWO audio consoles. As the video and audio streams come from various asynchronous sources Alfacam also makes use of MediorNet’s Framestore feature, which synchronizes the video signals to the truck’s internal clock, while the audio signals are synchronized via MediorNet’s Sample Rate Converter (SRC). After editing, the final HD video and audio stream is sent back to the TOC, from where it is forwarded to the IBC for the world broadcast of the event.