Nevion, responsible for the contribution of the 17 stadiums of the Italian Serie A with its IBC

The Italian telecommunications service provider EI Towers has been in charge of enabling the connection of 17 stadiums of the Italian Serie A football league with a new International Broadcast Center (IBC) located in Lissone (Milan, Italy) using technology from Nevion (Sony Group).

In the Serie A participate 20 teams that dispute a total of 380 parties. The new contribution solution was necessary to provide the Secure and reliable transport of 16 3G-SDI and 1 UHD video streams (along with audio and data) from each stadium to the IBC, where the virtualizations and graphics, and then distributed to rights holders in Italy and abroad, and streams are also provided to the Video Assisted Refereeing (VAR) unit. The project, supplied by Nevion and his Italian partner CVI, which includes both products and services (delivery, design, remote configuration, support), was delivered in just four months and is already in operation for the season 2021-2022.

Production at the stadium is carried out in mobile units using an SDI infrastructure, while both SDI and IP equipment are used in the IBC. For the central IP infrastructure at the IBC, EI Towers chose to use SMPTE ST 2022-6 for signs 3G-SDI y SMPTE ST 2110 for signs UHD. Software Defined Media Nodes Nevion Virtuosos they manage the SDI transport of video, audio and data over the transport stream (TS) over the WAN with 1+1 redundancy, encoding the video signal with JPEG 2000 for transportation, and providing adaptation SMPTE ST 2022-6 at the IBC. Similarly, the media orchestration platform Nevion VideoIPath is used for control connections with all stadiums with bandwidth management. To streamline this process, Nevion Professional Services developed a special software panel interface to make it easy to connect all signals in a stadium with the touch of a button.

Piercarlo Invernizzi, CTO of EI Towers, considers that Nevion was the partner perfect to undertake this project in such a short time: "We needed reliable partners who delivered, and Nevion, together with CVE, delivered for the contribution part of this project. The solution has worked successfully throughout the season." On the other hand, Hans Hasselbach, CCO of Nevion, is pleased to have managed to undertake such a complex project in a very short time: "Over the years, we have supplied many contribution solutions for some of the highest level sporting events and leagues around the world. However, these projects usually require many months, and sometimes years, of planning, whereas in this case we had to be up and running in just 4 months, with no room for failure. The fact that this project was a success despite the tight schedule is a testament to the close and positive collaboration that “It was created between EI Towers, CVE and us, as well as the quality of our products.”