First Football Division in Denmark Adopts Remote Production

Broadcast Solutions has built for DMC Production a new remote production facility, located in a shopping centre in Copenhagen, designed to provide remote coverage of all professional top-flight football in Denmark.

As part of the change of ownership of the broadcasting rights to TV2 and Viaplay, Superligaen A/S, the body responsible for football, made the decision to internalise all content creation, including production of more than 800 matches per year. To do this, it partnered with DMC Production to create its own broadcast division, Matchday Production. In addition to giving the league greater creative and operational control, new commercial opportunities opened up to exploit the value of matches.

To meet Matchday's high expectations, DMC drew on its extensive experience in remote sports production to develop a new production facility. As part of the involvement of fans in the project, the centre is located in a very public place, inside a shopping centre in Copenhagen. Broadcast Solutions had already collaborated with DMC on other projects, so for this occasion they commissioned the realization of the production facilities.

The center has Four large-scale control roomswith Capacity for up to 40 cameras, built around the Kahuna mixer Grass Valley. In addition to the main control rooms, there are five smaller controls, usually for one or two people. Broadcast Solutions also built four mobile units and four flypacks for the on-site installations, including camera control Grass Valley LDX 98 and audio mixers Lawo.

In Copenhagen there is a large network of servers EVS to provide live capture and slow-motion replays. The asset management uses Framelight X of Grass Valley. The entire infrastructure, including the Culm and SDI routers Riedel, is managed by Hi Human Interface, the innovative control solution for media infrastructures developed by Broadcast Solutions.

The wide availability of fibre throughout Denmark allows all signals to be routed from the stadiums to Copenhagen using SMPTE ST2110 IP Streams for the highest quality. Riedel Mediornet it takes care of the conversion between incoming and outgoing signals and the internal SDI architecture.

Increased productivity

Paul Henriksen Heitmann, CEO of DMC Production, says, "With the rare opportunity to have a blank sheet of paper to design both workflows and facilities, we have been able to take full advantage of all the benefits of remote production. Staff working in a familiar environment perform better and are more productive, allowing us to cover many more matches than could be shown with outdated models."

"The fact that we house the entire production in a single site also brings other advantages," continues Henriksen Heitmann. "VAR referees have their own workspace in our centre, with access to all the contents and signs of the building. And by having nine control rooms, when they are available we can conduct live training exercises, allowing potential managers and operators to practice in a real match with the full set of signals – this is a really important investment in the future."

Antti Laurila, CEO of Broadcast Solutions Nordic, acknowledges that "it has been a difficult project, due to its size and the tight deadlines. We had to design the entire hybrid infrastructure, using the best components, and install it around the construction site to create the space in the mall."

"From the laying of the first cable to the date set for the broadcast – the start of the 24/25 season – we only had three or four months," explains Laurila. Matchday brought together DMC's expertise and love of the Superligaen game, and with that enthusiasm we were able to deliver facilities that offer tremendous production capacity, support and resilience."