Infront Italy – part of Swiss-based international sports marketing group Infront Sports & Media – is contracted by the Italian football leagues (Lega Nazionale Professionisti Serie A and Lega Nazionale Professionisti Serie B) to provide domestic media outlets with highlights for news purposes in compliance with the Italian law.
Broadcasters can select interesting action during a live match stream, and will receive that content rapidly from Infront’s central production and archiving workflow system for their personalised editing.
Thanks to Harris Broadcast technology, Infront provides Italian mobile phone network operators with live football video content for distribution to their subscribers.
Through a media gateway connected to the system, the Infront editors can create goal clips directly on the timeline of the NLE (non-linear editor) during the live event. The clips are sent to the mobile telecom operators for immediate distribution to end users.
Finally, to exploit archive rights both inside and outside of Italy, Infront has created and manages an indexed HD digital archive of Italian league football, which is remotely accessible by broadcasters, production companies, football club TV channels and event sponsors.
Quick workflow
Infront Italy’s business requirement was to have soccer action available for viewing on a mobile device three minutes after it took place, allowing the mobile platform to charge for this service. The Harris workflow, based on intelligent media asset management (MAM) systems and super-fast video servers, enables this to take place.
The solution deployed by system integrator Prevideo at Infront Italy is built around Harris Broadcast’s Invenio digital asset management core. The system integrates a number of Harris technologies such as NEXIO AMP video server and storage units, a large Platinum router with a 512 x 1024 video matrix and 6800+ fibre technology; as well as third-party IPV Curator low bit-rate video technology and EMC Isilon storage.
The tight integration of the Invenio digital asset management with the NEXIO AMP video servers not only allows Infront to record content into a central storage facility, but also allows the live logging and editing of content in high or low resolution as the game is being recorded.
The system includes 14 record ports, all offering scheduled live ingest through Invenio Capture as well as live proxy logging. Invenio Insight allows users to view the live content being recorded and to add metadata to clips.
Simultaneously, low-resolution files are created by the third-party IPV Curator system, which is integrated into NEXIO. Curator streams files out of the NEXIO SAN and makes them accessible for annotation to low-res clients or transcodes them for mobile phone distribution.
Thirty Final Cut Pro editors are connected to NEXIO and provide direct access to content on the NEXIO SAN as it is being recorded.
At the end of each day, games, clips and edits recorded on the NEXIO AMP servers are stored and archived on an Isilon near-line disc storage system.
screen africa magazine – march 2013
