Broadcast Solutions, one of Europe’s largest media systems integration groups, has built a remarkable new remote production facility, housed in a shopping mall in Copenhagen for DMC Production. The facility is crafted to provide excellent remote coverage of all top-flight professional football in Denmark.
As part of a change in rights-holder broadcaster to TV2 and Viaplay, Superligaen A/S, the body responsible for football, took the bold decision to bring all content creation in house, including the production of more than 800 matches a year. To do this they partnered with DMC Production to form their own broadcast arm, Matchday Production. As well as empowering the league with more creative and operational control, it opened up a whole wealth of new commercial opportunities for exploiting the value in the games.
To meet the high expectations of Matchday, DMC drew on its extensive experience in remote sport production to develop a new production centre. As part of the fan engagement aspect of the project, the centre is in a very public location, within a shopping mall in Copenhagen. Broadcast Solutions has collaborated with DMC on a number of other projects, and was brought in to implement the production facilities.
The centre has four large-scale control rooms, with capacity for up to 40 cameras, built around the Grass Valley Kahuna switcher. As well as the main control rooms, there are five smaller galleries, typically for one or two person operation. Broadcast Solutions also built four vehicles and four flypacks for the on-site facilities, including control for the Grass Valley LDX 98 cameras and Lawo audio mixers.
In Copenhagen there is an extensive EVS server network to provide live capture and slo-mo replays. Asset management uses Framelight X from Grass Valley. The whole infrastructure, including Cisco IP switches and Riedel SDI routers, is managed by hi human interface, the innovative control solution for media infrastructures developed by Broadcast Solutions.
The extensive availability of fibre across Denmark means that all signals are routed from the stadiums to Copenhagen using SMPTE ST2110 IP streams for maximum quality. Riedel Mediornet provides the conversion between incoming and outgoing feeds and the internal SDI architecture.
“With the rare chance of a blank sheet of paper to design both workflows and facilities, we have been able to deliver fully on all the benefits of remote production,” said Paul Henriksen Heitmann, CEO of DMC Production. “Staff working in familiar surroundings perform better and are more productive, allowing us to cover far more games than could possibly be shown using old-fashioned models.
“Housing all production in one centre also brings other benefits,” Henriksen Heitmann continued. “VAR referees have their own dedicated workspaces in our centre, with access to all the content and signals in the building. And by having nine control rooms, when available we can run live training exercises, allowing potential directors and operators to practice on a real game with the full set of feeds – that is a really important investment in the future.”
Antti Laurila, managing director of Broadcast Solutions Nordic, said “This was a challenging project, because of the scale and because of the tight timeline. We had to design the complete hybrid infrastructure, using best of breed components, and install it all around the building work to create the space in the shopping mall.
“From the first cable being laid to the fixed on-air date – the start of the 24/25 season – we had only three or four months,” Laurila explained. “Matchday brought together the expertise of DMC and the love of the game of Superligaen, and with that enthusiasm we were able to deliver a facility which provides a huge amount of production capability, support and resilience.”
The first game covered by Matchday, opening the season, was between AGF Aarhus and current champions Midtjylland, on 19 July 2024.