26 July 2012. Exactly one month ahead of the official opening in the Salone d'Onore of CONI in Roma - it was publicly presented “Casa Italia” for the Olympic Games in London 2012.
Six floors and 29 different spaces for events in over 6 thousand sqm, in a building near the City, Big Ben, Westminster Abbey and London Eye.
The area is created within "The Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre, inaugurated by The Queen in 1986, managed by a British governmental agency and 3 out of 6 floors will be open to the public. The area is 10 km away from the Olympic Village and will host Italian art exhibitions, enogastronomic restaurants and music. Here Italian medals will be celebrated and the Paralympic Committee will manage the last 3 floors while the other 6 and ground floor will be available for the “Italian mission” during the Games. The Lounge of Casa Italia will also be the place from which live images will be broadcast by rights holder SKY Italy TV. On the 4th floor, RAI, Mediaset and La7 galleries will be hosted.
This is also where RAI, the Italian National Broadcaster, will operate its distributed production system. The hearth of this system is based on equipment designed by BLT, a well known Italian company. This is the first time that RAI opts for a new remote workflow setup at an Olympics: instead of having all operators, production servers and editors gathered within the Olympic TV production centre “IBC”, RAI installed one BLT TECA system in the IBC and another at Casa Italia.
The two BLT TECA media servers, with live slow motion and highlight creation capabilities, are networked by means of a high speed data connection. In this way audio and video materials, together with their metadata, may seamlessly travel between the two 10KM away studio locations.
The workflow consists of an operator located in the IBC centre who takes care of material ingestion from live feeds, clip marking and logging into the main BLT TECA. All captured material will also be immediately available to the remote location at Casa Italia - the venue where all Italian athletes gather. Here the editors may access the other BLT TECA through their NLE workstations, browse and select all relevant footage, edit and prepare them for daily tv programs, news, interviews, in deep analysis and so forth.
RAI has been using the BLT TECA system for several years and building a growing detailed sport archive with all the historical editions of the Olympic Games, Athletics, swimming, and other relevant sport championships. The scalable architecture and powerful metadata creation capabilities of BLT TECA allow to store several hundred thousands of clips: an incredible gold mine, available in real time with few clicks.
The BLT TECA media server configuration consists of a main station installed at IBC which has 8 simultaneous channels: 4 used as live ingestion feeds and 4 as playout channels.
The remote system at Casa Italia features 2 input channels for local ingestion, 2 playout channels and network connections. Both systems are based on BLT hardware platform and dedicated software.
Emiliano Rossi, new BLT operation manager, commented: “We are extremely pleased that RAI will rely once again on BLT equipment: it is since Sydney2000 that our technology has been playing a key role in such important (and mission critical) sport events. Every event is an opportunity for us to improve; for the London 2012 Summer Games we managed to introduce the remote production workflow.”
