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Formula 1™ is one of the highest profile, most glamorous and technologically advanced sports. It’s also one of the most challenging live television productions to pull off, especially given the amount of equipment that has to be shipped, installed, rigged and packed away again at each circuit for a full race broadcast.
With shipping costs rising and the broadcast industry needing to deliver more for less, Sky Sports wanted to reduce the operational costs of producing a full season of F1™. To achieve this, they needed to cut the amount of kit transported for each race while at the same time ensuring the quality of the content produced remained high.
Keen to address this growing challenge, Sky Sports commissioned Gravity Media to design a lighter, more flexible and efficient solution to replace the ‘flyaway’ unit it had used during its first three years of covering F1™.
The result of the collaboration was OBPod, a flyaway consisting of six interconnecting pods, all built on the standard air freight PMC rectangular pallet footprint to simplify logistics. Each pod housed a different part of the production workflow. Every element, including equipment and furniture, was scrutinised to make sure it could deliver the highest production values and withstand the rigours of international shipping while remaining as lightweight as possible.
To give the production crew the best working environment possible, coachbuilder A Smith Great Bentley developed pods with expandable sides to deliver a larger overall footprint within a circuit’s TV compound.
Thanks to the flexible design of OBPod, the innovation didn’t stop there. Gravity Media streamlined OBPod even further after the first F1 season to accommodate the live productions of each race from sister broadcasters Sky Italia and Sky Deutschland into the same set-up. By doing this, the broadcasters made additional savings on the amount of infrastructure and equipment required. It also meant they could leave all of the technology requirements and management to Gravity Media and focus purely on the creative aspects of the production.
As part of the new set-up, Sky UK, Sky Italia and Sky Deutschland now have their own dedicated pods housing individual production galleries. The EVS replay and edit pods have been combined into one new server pod while the audio and MCR pods have been upgraded so that all three broadcasters can use them. There is also a storage pod incorporated into the layout.
Keith Lane, former director of operations at Sky Sports who oversaw the project, said: “Gearhouse has taken everything within our previous flyaway pod and refined it to deliver a lighter, yet more flexible and future-proof solution without compromising on performance or functionality. This has been an ambitious, yet ultimately rewarding project, both financially and from an engineering and systems integration point of view.”
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