ITV Sport enhances live Rugby World Cup coverage with LiveU

ITV Sport expands use of LiveU at tournament to increase viewer participation and disaster recovery

ITV Sport, the UK's leading sports producer for the ITV network, has turned to LiveU to deliver a better spectator experience at the 2019 Rugby World Cup (RWC) and as a tertiary solution for disaster recovery (DR), with backup copies of satellite and fiber signals.

ITV Sport is using portable HEVC LU600 units across the country across three teams, each providing a range of additional material beyond match coverage. These roving teams, with embedded reporters, send their material directly to ITV Sport in the UK for live editing and reporting. This allows the producer to focus on the content without having to worry about how the material gets back to the UK. Additionally, highlight presentation links are also sometimes fed via LiveU.

Roger Pearce, technical director of sports at ITV Sport Productions, says: "We have used LiveU with our reporting teams for several years successfully to improve coverage. At this year's RWC we have two separate jobs for LiveU: live/stored/sent material from our reporting teams and DR material from our presentation and midwifery studios."

Pearce explains that the idea of ​​using it as a traditional contribution route only came to the fore when looking for low-cost options to provide high-quality DR feeds that were completely different to normal fiber and satellite delivery. After testing using the existing LiveU infrastructure, it proved to be a simple and cost-effective solution, according to Pearce.

The configuration of LiveU DR is twofold. ITV Sport has deployed a LU600 active external antenna y LiveU Xtender (first time in Japan) for tertiary backup directly to your playout provider Red Bee Media in the UK. Secondly, in the ITV Sport Engine Room, a receptor LU600 and another Xtender can be used to send a signal from there to your playout provider in case they cannot use traditional links.

Pearce adds: "The DR broadcast workflow is important to us as it provides a usable feed at a reasonable cost. For events like the RWC where failure is not an option, it is a valuable tool to ensure we deliver our coverage reliably to the viewer. For our roving teams, LiveU gives them the freedom to roam, and flexibility to quickly get material on air. The opportunity to use LiveU to provide cost-effective contribution feeds has been a great success and we look forward to their future developments.”

LiveU's UK partner, Garland Partners, assisted ITV Sport by upgrading their units to full international specifications and provided a set of cellular data from the Japanese local access operator's SIM cards for the entire tournament. Garland also supplied an additional database of UK SIM cards for the UK Maidstone Xtender.

Paul Shepherd, regional sales director at LiveU, was very happy to "support ITV Sport at this Rugby World Cup. We are starting to see greater use of our technology for disaster recovery and it is especially exciting to see it being used for a high reliability requirement at such an important sporting event."