Swiss sports service provider Sportradar is bringing the 240 matches of Austria’s second-division football league in the 2018/19 season to broadcast and OTT viewers worldwide using LiveU technology.
The company’s subsidiary Sportradar Media Services has opted for LiveU LU600 HEVC units alongside the associated LiveU central management platform and LiveU MultiPoint solution for content sharing and distribution. The technology has been supplied by LiveU’s Austrian partner ETAS High-Tech Systems.
Sportradar Media Services is the A/V production arm of Sportradar, providing contribution, production and distribution services for both online and linear broadcast TV. It operates the Laola1.tv international sports channel and OTT platform.
“In 2018, Sportradar won the exclusive rights to the Austrian Football Second League. In order to be able to provide the level of coverage, dynamism and flexibility that we wanted, at a cost-effective price point, we looked at cellular bonding,” said Christoph Reiermann, production manager, broadcast, at Sportradar. “We tested many different systems and found that LiveU was the most capable of delivering a very stable signal with great image quality even at low latency. ETAS has also provided strong support.”
All production crews are equipped with LU600 HEVC units. Up to eight simultaneous feeds are transmitted to the LiveU servers in Sportradar’s master control room (MCR) where the feeds are then further processed: live commentary is added, content is encoded for live streaming as well as handed over to playout for linear TV.
While all matches are available live online on Laola1.tv at least 30 matches are shown exclusively on Laola1TV (OTT and linear TV) and another 30 matches are broadcast on Austrian TV.
Sportradar Media Services is also using LiveU MultiPoint to easily share feeds with other content takers around the world. MultiPoint integrates into users’ daily workflows, allowing them to share incoming live feeds with multiple end-points from within the same LiveU central interface they work with.
