Premier Arts Festival Makes On-Air and Online Debut with TVU Remote Production System

The annual Grec 2020 is a month-long cultural and arts festival that uses different locales throughout the city for an exhibition of music, dance, art, and theatre.
 
With roughly 50 shows for live broadcast, producers at betevé searched for a technical partner that would help solve their technical challenges and specify a cost-effective remote production solution that would allow them to cover multiple live shoots from varying locales while producing from the station’s studio.

betevé turned to a premier technical and production service provider, Sobatech Group SL, for guidance.”Sobatech developed an innovative set up that addressed all social distancing requirements in a cost-effective package,” said Jordi Colom, Technical Director, betevé. “It’s based on TVU RPS which consists of an encoder and decoder that provides frame accurate, multi-channel remote production over public Internet - using our existing studio and staff. We’re effectively reducing costs and the number of staff required on location while providing high quality transmission from locations throughout the city.”

The COVID-19 pandemic presented new challenges for festival organizers - from closed theatres and shuttered shows to socially distant TV production requirements. “Given all the physical restrictions, we had to find entirely new ways to engage audiences at-home,” said Xavier Soler, Sobatech Group Manager, Sobatech Group SL, “For the first time, the majority of the performances are broadcast and streamed live; and all remote video production is done by small crews safely. People who’d never been to an event before or live far from Barcelona are engaging online or watching live.”

Sobatech is providing a reduced crew of camera operators and video engineers on site at each location. A small OB van with several studio and PTZ cameras records the video locally at each event and encodes it using the TVU RPS transmitter. The TVU RPS transmitter sends IP video from the remote location to a TVU RPS receiver at betevé’s Studio 1 - the host studio. A small betevé staff produces the live broadcast from Studio 1. The TVU RPS receiver decodes the synchronized SDI outputs and broadcasts them on betevé and streams to the network’s web site.

“With its low latency and real-time two-way communication, TVU RPS allows the betevé and Sobatech teams to communicate as though they’re producing in real-time, together in Studio 1,” said Rafael Castillo, General Manager/Vice President of Europe and Latin America. “TVU RPS was designed from the start for remote production in a collaborative environment with multiple cameras. This production model allows for perfect multi-channel synchronization to any centralized production studio, which is well suited for today’s social distancing requirements.” 

About TVU RPS
TVU RPS interface provides control over all aspects of transmission, including bit-rate and latency, and gives previews of all six channels. TVU RPS also provides up to two low-latency return video feeds sent from the studio back out to the field. VLAN tunnels on RPS decoders enable communication between the studio and the field over a private network, so that it feels like everyone is in the same building.

About TVU Networks
TVU Networks is a global organization with more than 3,000 customers using its IP and cloud-based workflow solutions across multiple industries including news, entertainment media, sports, corporate, streaming, houses of worship and government. Through the use of AI and automation driven technology, TVU helps broadcasters realize an efficient metadata and story-centric workflow through its TVU MediaMind platform for live video content acquisition, indexing, production, distribution and management. The company has been on the forefront of developing the tools needed to revolutionize and streamline the Media Supply Chain. TVU is a critical part of the operations of many major media companies worldwide and is a Technology and Engineering Emmy® Award winner.