1st August 2012. From 2008 onwards, Milan and district Santa Giulia is the headquarter of SKY Italia, the subscription tv operator via satellite in Italy. It's a huge complex styled by Australian architects Byron Harford Associates and Urbam Studio Milan, housing a technological pole of 960 km of fibre optics, and some 800 km of data transfer cables and some 600 km of electrical cabling.
Two main buildings, the former, building #1, has a roof terrace on which all satellite dishes are placed and gathers all technical areas. At ground floor we find eight production studios, with different areas rnging from 50 to 600 sqm, all supplied with HD equipments and differently organized: for example the only one permanently authorized to gather public is the largest one and for instance is the one used by SKY to shoot also for the Sunday program “Sky Calcio Show” conducted by Ilaria D'Amico, while in another smaller studio area all equipments are remote controlled and used for all daily programs of Sky Sport 24 HD, one of the 3 all news sports channels airing round the clock.
At first floor are gathered all audio-video galleries for the studios underneath; while at second floor we find all sports production areas, with an ingest area, another centralized for contents output and some 30 editing HD suites all networked and connected to a central storage. This areas also gather the editorial offices in which each journalist using his desktop may review every centrally stored content and edit it to create new stories. The third floor is dedicated to the Media Asset Management area and technical assistance labs. Going up to the fourth floor, here the video master control is placed, the key point heart of the whole production centre where all electronic signals are addressed, routed, exchanged, re-directed and distributed, plus the Playout area and T.O.C. Technical Operating Centre. These areas host at least one thousand equipments racks and occupy an area of around 2200 sqm.
Building #2 concentrates all administrative offices and management areas which are placed at ground floor along with the restaurant. At second floor the office of Riccardo Botta, Head of Sport Production & Operations Sky Italia, who tells us something on football signals arriving here in Santa Giulia. “Both satellite and fibre tv signals arriving from the several stadiums scattered in Italy and abroad are gathered here in the Main Control Room which first of all checks quality. Due to the importance of some matches, some events travel both on fibre and on satellite contemporarily. All signals are here aligned and certified to our standards and immediately afterwards every signal is routed to right destination ready for use. For football matches the addresses are, the playout for live broadcast to subscribers, for the studios engaged with live transmissions like “Sky in campo” and “Sky Calcio Show”. The Mixing Rooms also receive such signals: here all audio channels quality is optimized and especially the Dolby 5.1 needs careful handling. Also the editing areas receive the AV signals in order to prepare post produced highlights usually used at end of part one and end of the match; used on the linear platform and also on the interactive one, these files produced by the editing suites are requested by the subscribers pressing their green button on the remote control and used also within our productions, for instance “Il treno dei goal” (the goal train) aired at 7,30.”
