Ten out of Ten

In an exclusive interview with BroadcastPro Middle East, Melvin Saldanha, VP of Engineering at Ten Sports shares details of the network’s switch to High Definition and highlights some of the unique technical aspects of the project

Dubai-based Ten Sports, which owns the rights to several premium sports content from across the world, recently launched Ten HD as part of its efforts to offer a better audio-visual experience to its viewers in the Indian subcontinent, where it has a huge following. Although the plan to launch HD has been in the pipeline for a long time, it wasn’t until the end of last year, that Ten Sports secured the budget as well as the downlink permissions in India to plan, design, procure, install, test, commission and run a full-fledged playout operation.

“Ten Sports has always offered the best sports content in India,” says Melvin Saldanha, VP of engineering, MEP & MIS of Ten Sports.

“Our premium content includes the UEFA  Champions League, Europa League, Italian serie A, South Africa,  Pakistan, Sri Lanka, West Indies and Zimbabwe cricket board rights, WWE shows, Tour De’France and Moto GP. Our prime objective, therefore, has been to showcase the HD experience to sports fans across the subcontinent on Ten HD.”

The project proved a challenge for Saldanha and his team as the HD project was entirely done in-house. With a two-month deadline to go on air on a tight budget, Saldanha and his team had a tough task ahead.

“This project was solely undertaken by the in-house engineering team. We had to work long hours to ensure timely completion of the project within two months. It was not easy as we had critical system upgrades on live on-air systems on the SD setup,” adds Saldanha.

Key equipment installed as part of this project includes the Miranda Nvision Router with NV9000 Router controller, Evertz EMC master control, VizRT graphics for on-air branding, Axon Synapse modules, Harmonic Electra 8000 Encoders, Harris Predator32 multi-viewers, D-Series automation and Nexio 3801 video servers.

“We had to be careful with our selections because while we wanted the best technology implemented, we also had to ensure that our operations team could quickly familiarise themselves with the kit to maintain operational efficiency. We wanted to continue our relationship with Harris and selected Nexio 3801s to be installed for HD playout with a widely-accepted XDCAM format integrating with the existing automation D-series. Deploying the N-Vision router has ensured that we have future-proofed our workflow by ensuring that 3G is part of the build. Axon made certain we had the right glue in place. Our creative team is also quite upbeat about the addition of Virzrt to our HD line up. The entire build integrated seamlessly and we had very few issues post integration,” says Saldanha.

Ten Sports also lauds the support received from the suppliers, who ensured “timely delivery of the kit and extended their expertise where required”.

When asked if the HD rollout was as simple as switching on a button at Ten Sports, Saldanha defends the operation saying that any such migration requires a lot more attention to detail even if the channel has a fairly robust engineering infrastructure in place.

“HD offers significantly better resolution than conventional standard definition video signals with significant advantage in terms of colour fidelity, smoother motion, and richer audio quality. However 80% of our archives are in the 4:3 aspect ratio and this content would definitely not be on our transmission chain since our policy was to stick to true HD content rather than up converting any SD archive. This did mean we had to source our archive at a cost but we were ready to absorb the extra cost to ensure that we remained committed to offering the best HD experience,” explains Saldanha.

“Every broadcast channel offers only a limited bandwidth on satellite for transport of information. Clearly, with HD, the channel also has to look at better capacity. In this case, we utilised the existing bandwidth on satellite efficiently with our current infrastructure which supports MPEG4 – DVB-S2 technology. This meant we had the ability to compress data into smaller packets with the advantage of effectiveness and accuracy over standard MPEG2. At the same time, we could utilise 30% greater efficiency and higher scope for signal compression offered by DVB-S2. We added the enhanced higher order modulation technique of 8 Phase shift keying (8PSK) which complemented MPEG4-DVB-S2 with the end result being superior quality video and audio transmission with optimised bandwidth utilisation.”

Perhaps one of the biggest issues with this project has been maintaining the operational workflow and efficiency, says Saldanha.

“While designing new systems for HD, ease of operational workflow was sustained to match our experienced operational manpower. Our promo workflow, prior to HD, was completely tape-based. There was a need to change this and HD was the perfect platform where a change could have evolved and adjusted quickly. I wanted to maintain quality as the majority of the content gets recorded on our Nexio server off satellite, thereby, reducing unnecessary digitisation of HD, creating generations and loss. We preferred XDCam HD 4:2:2 @ 50 mbits as our house format for HD, integrating seamlessly with the Velocity edit suites. The goal was to maintain this format throughout the chain without any  unnecessary transcodes.

“Harris gateways made certain we could deliver this format to Final Cut Studio promo suites wrapping the files as QuickTime and making editing at 10 bit 1080i HD at full resolution of 1920 X 1080 possible. We introduced NET Apps FAS2020 storage, which provided us the capacity as well as the bandwidth required for our HD workflow connecting all of the Final Cut suites working off the storage simultaneously with efficient performance and without any drop frames. File-based editing for promo creation ensured eliminating the process of dumping of content on the expensive HDCAM tapes. We have a traditional IT solution that is being incorporated into our broadcast domain with exceptionally satisfactory results,” adds Saldanha.

Adobe Creative Suite (CS5) powered on HP Z-800 workstations guaranteed Ten Sports had the right tools to create cutting-edge graphics for channel branding and idents.

“These workstations are fully supported and optimised for use with CS5 which makes it a graphic designer’s much preferred kit these days,” adds Saldanha.

“This system is completely future proofed and can be utilised to playout a few additional HD channels besides adding HD studios to its inventory if required. It would just be a matter of securing additional software licences should we choose to switch to 3G,” adds Saldanha.

Ten Sports is also in the process of upgrading its archive to a state-of-the-art solution, although further details are under wraps now. The present archive is managed by Storage Tek L700s, which are nearing their EOL (end of life), and cannot be scaled for recent requirements with the addition of HD.

“We will replace this kit with a futuristic archive solution that utilises the latest LTO-5 tape and drive technology to sustain our current and long-term future needs. We will also introduce a layer of disk storage in front of the tape archive to hold enough content to sustain majority of transfers to and from the archive adding a layer of protection to the tapes as they will be accessed less frequently. I also intend to introduce a low-res workflow as part of the migration,” adds Saldanha.

The legacy SD setup was built over nine years and this was left untouched while the new systems were designed to scale and to accommodate any additions in future.

“We managed to launch a full-fledged HD channel within record time and budgets bringing a true 1080i experience to our viewers in the subcontinent.”