CCTV Sports Head 14th FINA World Championships Production with EVS Technology

CCTV Sports was the host broadcaster for the 14th FINA World Championships in Shanghai, an international aquatic sports competition. As the principal sports broadcaster in China, CCTV Sports has the widest audience demographic range and 80% plus market share. In its new role as host broadcaster of the FINA 2011 Championships, CCTV Sports was engaged in delivering technologically superior and distinguishing coverage of all competitive events. To achieve this, the high definition standard was adopted in an ambitious production plan.

Having taken part in earlier productions of international feeds for the Olympics, the Asian Games and a number of prominent National Games, CCTV Sports consists of experienced production and technical teams who guarantee a complete and smooth coverage of the entire event.

CCTV opted for EVS technologies as the main system for OB and IBC operations during its host broadcasting operation activities.

In total, 15 XT2 servers were equipped in four OB vans for slo-mo replays, live edits, clips and highlights creations of swimming, synchronized swimming, diving, water polo and open water swimming. Three OBs were located just outside three venues in the Oriental Sports Centre which included the Indoor Stadium, Outdoor Diving Pool and Natatorium. One OB van was located on the Jinshan City Beach.

For IBC infrastructures, EVS provided CCTV with two HD XT2+ (6-channel) production servers with extended external storage offering a capacity of 15TB for the ingest of five incoming feeds and 300 hours HD content of uninterrupted recording. IBC content management was ensured by nine IPDirector workstations offering advanced media ingest, logging, browsing, exchange and playout control. The integrated solution was used for ingesting content, media storage and exchange with media rights licensees, as well as CCTV fast turnaround production of highlight packages. The setup allowed CCTV production teams to transfer clips and rough edits with Apple FCP editors for the production of daily summaries. Once completed, the 52-minute summary was immediately shared with the entire production team on the EVS central media server accessible via EVS' GigE media sharing network.

Olivier Heurteaux, EVS General Sales Manager Asia & Pacific comments that EVS is "proud to have met the expectations of CCTV which was looking for a reliable way to improve production turnaround, while guaranteeing the utmost level of quality." He continues that "media sharing and content management is EVS' top priority. It offers a new generation of tools combining the best of IT & broadcasting to meet these challenges."

"China is a key market for EVS. CCTV has achieved the top level of production in terms of infrastructure and operations and we are keen to be the part of their development" concludes Heurteaux.

Guo Yang, Vice Section Chief OB Office of CCTV comments: "Support from a facility supplier played an important role in the success of this project." "In this case," he continued, "EVS machines have made things much easier as well as stable. We are currently very satisfied."