The International Federation of University Sports chooses EMG Italy for the live distribution of its upcoming events

di Roberto Landini

Founded in 1949, FISU, the International Federation of University Sports, was created to spread the values of sport in the university world. The belief that health and well-being are closely related to the practice of sport has inspired so far students who tomorrow will be active members of our global society. The occasion of these sporting and educational events is also to provide the opportunity to connect and exchange experiences with other students from all over the world, in an environment that is both collaborative and competitive, as life teaches us.

The winter edition of the FISU World University Games once called the Universiade, took place in America in Lake Placid, New York State, and involved over 2500 athletes, coaches, judges and referees from 50 countries for 11 days. 12 sports are on the field in this event which combines high-level sports with educational and cultural moments on 10 different sites and almost 100 competitions and exhibitions.

A collaborative project

EMG Italy has designed and implemented an innovative Master Control Room inside the Cologno Monzese production centre, entirely dedicated to FISU, in technical-operational collaboration with SES, a leader in global connectivity solutions, and EVS for the international distribution of signals. The new Master Control Room is in fact at the forefront in terms of technical configuration; thanks to these partnerships, it allows the control and distribution of live channel streaming and also the management and creation of content on a cloud platform for rights holders and takers from all over the world.

“We are very pleased with the results of this project,” says Dominique Curchod, Head of Television at FISU, “when you are responsible for distributing an event, you tend to favour security over technological evolution: moving from a full satellite to an entirely SRT one was a complex challenge. Three factors drove us to go ahead: first of all, the SRT system has more advantageous costs than the satellite; then, after using the RTMP system for almost six years, we have verified and tested the stability of the public Internet around the world, especially the crucial points of the outgoing and incoming connections. Finally, the existing technology at EMG Italy, which has also been in operation for several years, and the conditions offered were more than enough to convince us”.

Lake Placid, FISU World University Games 2023

Starting from the various sites of the Lake Placid event where the various sporting competitions were held, four international host broadcasting feeds and related backup feeds were "packaged" and then sent via the Internet via SRT protocol to the production center by EMG Italy. The operations centre on the outskirts of Milan and the dedicated MCR, therefore, acted as a hub for the reception and subsequent distribution of all signals to Europe, the countries of East Asia, China, South America, Africa and Oceania.

“On this occasion”, says Luca Bertoldi, Technical Department Manager of EMG Italy for the FISU project, “we were asked to manage 4 redundant program signals, together with 4 other backup feeds, but we are suitably oversized and therefore ready to handle even many more. All the signals have travelled from the US production up to us on the public internet, through two different service providers and through the SRT protocol which carries signals in H264 and H265. All this has allowed us to receive an excellent low-latency compressed stream that we have easily conveyed over the internet. We chose the SRT protocol because it was created to convey quality feeds on the public internet and in this case, it would have been impossible for us to use dedicated fibre optic lines directly from Lake Placid. Otherwise, we would have had to use satellite links with certainly higher costs”.

Live distribution and content management

The EMG Italy production centre has a series of master control rooms of different sizes given its specialization in the management of television signals: the configuration flexibility makes it possible to manage contributions and distribute them in any television signal and makes it practically ideal for all sporting events. On the occasion of the FISU Games, the four signals arriving from the USA convey images of four different disciplines taking place at the same time and enter a matrix which allows switching them in order to decide what to broadcast. An hour before the broadcast, the MCR receives some special alignment signals that allow to verify the synchronism between the audio and video and to be ready for the next broadcast.

The signal is also recorded simultaneously on EVS MediaHub devices which make it possible to upload live video streams to the cloud. These contributions are made instantly available to rights-holding takers as the signals themselves are recorded, while the 'Near Live' mode allows editing stations to package the highlights without delay. EMG Italy's MCR directly provides for the delivery and distribution of the "live" signals and, again using the SRT protocol, allows you to reach multiple destinations simultaneously by relying on a cloud platform.

“More in detail”, continues Luca Bertoldi, “the 4 signals arriving from Lake Placid enter 4 SRT decoder receivers which take care of the conversion towards SDI, then they continue in the matrix and at the same time they are displayed on multiview screens. This visual check allows one to choose which signals to send to the two main destinations: one is the delivery platform to EVS MediaHub, created using a special encoder, where SES has supplied the system that allows sending streaming flows to the EVS platform; the other destination is delivery to the takers which is managed through various coding systems: a first main coding generates a flow, thanks to the encoders, which allow the signal to be delivered to a cloud platform. From here the signal is forwarded to all destinations and without limiting the number of flows we can send. Therefore, the choice of cloud operation is linked to scalability which in this case becomes practically infinite. If we had had to carry out the distribution directly from the production centre, it would have been essential to have sufficient bandwidth to manage all the flows and dedicate many high-performance encoders. The cloud platform allows us to generate a main and a backup stream which we then distribute to all takers, while still maintaining control over every single connection.Such an operation allows us to have a dedicated profile for each taker user, with its own IP address and with the same encryption".

A versatile Master Control Room

The MCR that EMG Italy has dedicated to FISU has been designed and perfected precisely to be versatile and easily adaptable to every need that will arise in the live events organized by the Federation in the coming years. In addition to already being complete with distributed coordination systems useful in real-time interactions with event venues, it can be easily integrated with commentary booths for localization in various languages, and in-situ workstations for highlight editing, which in this case they weren't necessary. “Furthermore, distribution on the public internet” concludes Luca Bertoldi, “allows the entire process of managing contributions and distribution to be more efficient. The SRT we chose is an open source standard protocol that allows creating low latency video streams with good error correction.”

© 2023 EMG Italy – RobertoLandini presspool pressoffice