FISU – Gravity Media

Following the activities carried out for the Winter World University Games held in Lake Placid in January 2023, EMG Italy continued its collaboration with FISU by also orchestrating the distribution of international signals for the Summer World University Games.

At the heart of the coverage activities for the event, which saw 6,500 athletes from 113 nations around the world competing to win the 269 gold medals up for grabs, was the innovative control room, or Master Control Room, inside the Cologno Monzese production center, designed and built to cover the needs of FISU in addition to the traffic generated for the national market. This concentration of latest-generation technologies for the management and sorting of television signal distribution was created by EMG Italy, a benchmark in global connectivity solutions.

Double signals

The first important difference to point out in this edition was the provision of the service by EMG Italy with double the number of signals received from the FISU World University Games production site in Chengdu, with a greater number, therefore, of equipment involved.

The international rights holders who received and redistributed the signals on their respective territories were also significantly higher in number than in the previous edition. Overall, 8 incoming and 16 outgoing streaming flows were managed, for a total of more than a hundred outputs to the takers, with 2 Gbps connectivity.

Coordinating Operations

Irene Migliorini followed the coordination of the operational production on this project for EMG Italy from Friday 28 July to Tuesday 8 August, while the technical coordination was carried out by Luca Bertoldi and Daniele Blandini, with the supervision of CTO Francesco Donato.

“My work was of an organizational nature”, says Irene Migliorini, “following the coordination and planning of all the operations during this 31st summer edition of the Universiade in Chengdu, China. In our office, a person appointed by FISU had the task of managing the booking of all the rights holders, therefore receiving the requests of the various international broadcasters, which were personalized based on the content that they had to receive and retransmit. After this information gathering, I came into play, with the task of passing precise requests to the technical department and the operators in charge of the MRC: they were the real interpreters, responsible for opening and closing the necessary channels at the right time”.

FISU TV, the official FISU live streaming channel

This great event dedicated to youth sports, in fact very similar to the Olympics, involved a series of important competitions, which took place over eleven days and awarded 269 titles.

All the live television broadcasts of the competitions were visible in streaming on the FISU.tv channel and on the channels of the respective takers worldwide. The numerous competitions involved the television coverage of various disciplines, including: Archery, water polo, basketball, judo, shooting, rifle and pistol, taekwondo poomsae, men’s WUSHU Nanquan, women’s Nandao, men’s taijijian, tennis, table tennis, rhythmic gymnastics, artistic gymnastics, volleyball, badminton, diving, swimming, synchronized swimming, 400m athletics, shot put, decathlon, triple jump, pole vault, hurdles, fencing.

In China and in each “venue” where the various competitions were held, a production team created a complete television program that was then sent to the central IBC (International Broadcasting Centre). From there, all the always-on signals, eight program signal feeds plus two backups, were transported to the Cologno Monzese production center of EMG Italy and the aforementioned MCR.

The television producer on the field in China created a total stream schedule of his program already complete with graphics and shared it, indicating perfectly the incoming content that obviously varied according to the various sports and according to the times. The same stream schedule was shared with the international rights holders, so that they could choose which content to request and then consequently use it in their broadcasts. In the EMG Italy production center, the huge and dedicated Master Control Room then received all the feeds and sorted them according to needs, acting as a signal distribution center.

News Access

Another service guaranteed by the EMG Italy production center in Cologno involved the creation of international news: a dedicated editor, within the production center, worked in a special editing suite on Adobe Premiere, supported by two other EVS operators (appointed by FISU). Apart from this section dedicated to news that required deferred editing, everything was done live and all the feeds were live.

New coders

“Compared to the previous winter edition of the university games,” says Daniele Blandini, MCR operator for EMG Italy, “where the feeds of the competitions were arriving from the United States, the signals arriving from China in this summer edition were coded according to new procedures, so as to further avoid any possible reception issues. Also in this edition all the signals were managed by Eurovision in HD and EMG Italy distributed about 400 hours of live programs in total, spread over 165 events, for an average coverage of 18 hours daily. Compared to Lake Placid, which saw the reception of 4 live feed signals, for this edition in China the signals received in feed increased significantly, even doubled to eight (plus 4 backups)”.

International takers and a dedicated team

The takers, or rights holders, have also grown in number and among them: Discovery, SES / EVS, Olympic Channel, ELTA (Taipei), TVRI (Indonesia), CBC (Azerbaijan), JOJ (Slovakia), TRT (Turkey), IRIB (Iran).

For the sorting of all the signals, EMG Italy involved over 10 professionals working in the MCR on the various shifts, with the producer Irene Migliorini assisted by Simone Marino, Luca Bertoldi as IT and Broadcast manager, Enrica Busin as MCR manager, and Daniele Blandini as MCR supervisor. The recording was carried out in two modes, on EVS and on the Synegy software, creating two complete pairs.

New deliveries

“From a technical point of view,” says Francesco Donato, CTO of EMG Italy, “we created the event using exactly double the resources compared to the winter edition: while in the previous event in Lake Placid the number of signals was exactly half, for Chengdu we controlled 8 input signals (8+2) and distributed 8 output signals plus another 8 backup signals to the takers worldwide. The distribution was done with multiple protocols; first of all the SRT, which proved to be very robust and efficient, consolidating a new distribution method on public band, which was very successful, certified by all the takers who did not report any problems.
This solution, which we preferred also given the success of the previous edition, has become a habit for us. In addition to the SRT, we also carried out the delivery on other protocols, using RTMP to satisfy some requests and also delivered via fiber, therefore following different directions to distribute the program signals. We also had an additional connection available to other providers with a possible distribution via satellite, which but it was not used. In practice, the great effort compared to the previous edition, in addition to what has already been underlined, namely the number of signals involved and the number of hours of product delivered, concerned the constant monitoring of all the processes over a 24-hour period for all the days of the event”.

Other technological plus

At the Cologno Monzese center, EMG Italy hosted FISU personnel who created the entire News Access feed. So the work was carried out both in reception and retransmission but also on the front of the preparation of the packages for the News Access, which, during the previous winter games, had not been requested. A cloud platform was also powered to guarantee possible remote editing: connected via SRT protocol, it allowed various takers to access and package highlights and services.

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

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.”