Quicklink facilitates remote production of 'Saturday Night Takeaway'

QuickLink has been instrumental in facilitating the challenges of remote production of the popular show 'Saturday Night Takeaway' ITV Studios.

ITV has chosen QuickLink StudioEdge con StudioCall so that remote production is not only easier, but also of the highest quality.

The show's production company is ITV Studios subsidiary Lifted Entertainment. It produces some of the most successful unscripted television shows in the world. Every year it broadcasts more than 500 hours of television to the British public, from Saturday Night Takeaway de Ant & Dec, The Voice, Countdown y University Challenge.

Saturday Night Takeaway is a hugely ambitious family entertainment program spanning seven weeks of live programming per season. This award-winning and technically complex program is a mix of live and pre-recorded entertainment, with game-influenced segments and regular surprise interactivity with viewers, including children with health problems and their families.

At the remote end, which could be literally anywhere in the country, laptops with video capture cards or webcams were initially used. To carry the remote segments of Saturday Night Takeaway At the next level, Lifted Entertainment needed a way to adjust incoming audio and video signals remotely to improve picture and sound quality.

StudioEdge con StudioCall

Lifted improved production by introducing QuickLink to remote sites for an end-to-end solution. This eliminated the need for laptops and capture cards. At the central location, QuickLink StudioEdge allows ITV to receive Teams, Zoom and other popular video calling services, but ITV opted to use StudioCall, a feature built into StudioEdge for its ease of use benefits.

“Using QuickLink hardware both on location and in the studio has allowed us to have a truly comprehensive solution,” he says. David Williams, technical director of Lifted Entertainment. “Monitoring and managing all connections from the QuickLink web user interface allowed us to quickly troubleshoot issues and ensure every element was running smoothly, from Ring My Bell to Singalong Live.”

Leon Langdale, technical producer, adds that "QuickLink is the perfect solution for our demanding remote production environment. There is no other show on television with the size and scale of Saturday Night Takeaway. The technical demands of the format grow with each series, and we simply couldn't do it without a key partner like QuickLink."

With an average of five to nine million viewers per installment, Saturday Night Takeaway It is broadcast live throughout the country in prime time during the weekend. The program usually includes numerous remote connections throughout the country to surprise the audience in various segments of each program. QuickLink technology makes this aspect of the program much easier to produce than before.