28 August 2012 Football on tv is a serious thing in Italy! Some … pages ago [Link] we described Santa Giulia headquarters of satellite broadcaster SKY Italia which along with Mediaset and national network RAI are the broadcasters holding all football rights. There are still many interesting things to discover from each of said broadcasters and all external production services involved which are used to personalized the host broadcasters' images.
But going back again to SKY, we all certainly remember Santa Giulia, Milan TV Production Centre, the 2 buildings, one completely devoted to all tech areas, the receiving antennas on the terrace, the main control room, the signal distribution main centre and play out, the mixing rooms, and all the editing suites. The other building gathers all managerial offices including -among many- the one of Mr Riccardo Botta, Head of Sport Production & Operations SKY, and the one of Marco Pistoni, Sky Sports Channels Director.
Both report more interesting details on this complex subscription tv structure. Mr Botta says: “Sky has another headquarter in Rome where the editorial offices of SKY TG24 are; the two production platforms who create news and sports programming are bound to a high speed data network so none has to record autonomously the football match feed. Actually the 2 editorial offices may retrieve a low resolution version of all the video, say to review the available contents, and only afterwards they request the needed materials in high quality. In practical terms this means that the several feeds are directly received by the 2 central operating production centers (Rome and Milan) and any center may also receive finished materials, for instance a series of post-produced and finished highlights, with no need to start all over again from raw feeds. It is really difficult to say how many production personnel is engaged in the Milan production centre every weekend for every football match, because after following a football Serie A event some operators often follows other productions like Premier League, Bundesliga, Liga Spagnola, Golf, Tennis.
Every weekend for football matches and signal delivery SKY employs four or five satellites with a centralized management of bookings and precise agreements on satellite segments. But especially for Serie A matches our trend is to use fibre optics links because of the many more opportunities they offer.”
Marco Pistoni Sky Sports Channels Director, reports some interesting figures: “Around 1700 football matches per year, of which 380 Serie A, 125 of Uefa Champions League, 470 of Serie B, more than 600 matches among Liga, Premiere League and Bundesliga, besides the 600 of “Coppa”. And a curiosity: among commentators chosen by editorial manager Fabio Guadagnini, we often see the proposal of many football players at the end of their career who offer themselves; this is a sign of a high perception of our job.”
The company chosen by the Lega Calcio as host broadcaster for Italian football is Infront and they rely on OB-Van service providers called “services”, among which SBP Rome, Professional Show Padova, Beta News Napoli, Global Production Torino, Tech Roma, Telerecord Firenze, Telecinema, Roma, Etabeta, Roma, Opera Foggia, NVP Catania, Wireteam Ravenna. Talking about latest trends concerning mobile production vehicles, one small anonymous (!) sneaking curiosity is that many companies -as those mentioned- use very large vehicles for football events; but especially for Serie B and other “minor” football events of the next season there is a very recent and growing trend which is requiring smaller OB-Vans, but nevertheless fully HD and slow motion- highlights equipped. We are probably seeing new vehicles being added to the market fleets soon. In other words, it seems some well known economic crisis is forcing the market to reduce the dimensions of some vehicles engaged in sports production which must provide the same services as ever, with the same quality and completeness but at a fraction of today's budget.
