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.
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