Telstra & Fox Sport To Trial High Speed Football Production

Fox Sport, Telstra, TV ProductionTelstra will today announce that they have cut a deal with 29 stadiums to deliver content to centralised Fox Sports production hubs in Sydney and Melbourne.

The move is set to save Fox Sports which is owned by News Corporation millions of dollars in production costs, while also delivering improved production capability.

Currently Fox Sport uses outside production (OB) units with currently cost up to $15M each, they also must be carted between grounds and set up.

By installing high speed 100 gigabits per second fibre Telstra’s new Distributed Production Network Division can deliver vision right to the production hubs.

The agreement includes all major rectangular and oval stadiums across Australia, including the SCG, MCG, WACA Oval, GABBA, Etihad, Adelaide Oval, Suncorp Stadium, Allianz, ANZ Stadium and AAMI Park.

How it works is simple, instead of feeds from the cameras being fed to a production unit based next to the grounds the camera feeds along with the audio channels are fed directly into the new production hubs.

Trials will begin later this year, with expectations the new production capability will be fully operational for the 2018 NRL and AFL seasons.

Head of Telstra Broadcast Services, Trevor Boal, said the new production system had cost benefits as well as employee benefits.

“It’s a very tough industry to work in because of the hours, travel form venue to venue, it’s very taxing … they’ll be a direct beneficiary of this model, they’ll be in a centralised facility,” Mr Boal told The Australian Financial Review.

“What we expect to see in the industry, because the cost of production is less, we’ll see more money being pumped into other forms of production, other tiers of sport, where it has historically been too expensive to produce, can be considered with this new model.

Fox Sports director of operations and digital Les Wigan said Telstra, Fox Sports and NEP Australia – another production partner – were leading the way for the broadcast production model of the future.

“These new hubs will allow us to cover multiple sports from a centralised, revolutionary facility that will deliver the highest-quality broadcast to sports fans around the country,” he said.

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David Richards

David Richards has been writing about technology for more than 30 years. A former Fleet Street journalist, he wrote the Award Winning Series on the Federated Ships Painters + Dockers Union for the Bulletin that led to a Royal Commission. He is also a Logie Winner for Outstanding Contribution To TV Journalism with a story called The Werribee Affair. In 1997, he built the largest Australian technology media company and prior to that the third largest PR company that became the foundation company for Ogilvy PR. Today he writes about technology and the impact on both business and consumers.