Sky Sports director of cricket Bryan Henderson talks to Broadcast Sport editor Jake Bickerton about the launch of The Hundred cricket tournament, which begins next month.

The Hundred aims to bring a new audience to cricket with simple-to-understand rules, fast-paced game play and building the format around an entertainment-first approach.

Henderson explains why The Hundred is different to what’s gone before, and then provides great insight into Sky Sports’ plans for its coverage of the new cricket format.

Sky has been involved in The Hundred since the early stages of the development of the format and has devised five pillars that underpin how it will present and produce content from The Hundred. These are:

1. Cricket is for everybody

Henderson explains all these pillars in detail in this podcast, focusing on how they have influenced Sky Sports’ approach to the production and broadcast of the series.

He also covers the rights deal that sees Sky become the host broadcaster and showing all games, with the BBC also airing 18 live matches from the tournament.

Ron Chakraborty, lead executive, major events at BBC Sport talks to Broadcast Tech and Broadcast Sport editor Jake Bickerton about the BBC's new virtual studio at the club, which will be its main presentation space at Wimbledon 2021. He also talks about Covid-19 enforced changes to the broadcaster's camera positions as well as its production setup at Wimbledon, to ensure social distancing of production staff. Chakraborty also covers the BBC's expansion of UHD 4K content from Wimbledon, to cater for increased demand from the public for high-resolution sports.

BT Sport COO, Jamie Hindhaugh and BT Sport director of mobile strategy, Matt Stagg talk to Broadcast Sport editor Jake Bickerton about the broadcaster's Innovate 21 competition.

Innovate 21 is the latest in a series of large-scale competitions run by BT Sport seeking ideas for forward-thinking new sports broadcast experiences. The previous incarnations of Innovate have resulted in BT Sport teaming up with two products – Sceenic (which won the 2018 BT Infinity Lab competition), and Seenit (the winner of the 2016 BT Infinity Lab competition). Sceenic has worked with BT Sport to support last year’s launch of Watch Together on the BT Sport App, and Seenit has enabled fans to send in short video reports and comments from stadia around the country as part of BT Sport’s Premier League Tonight show.

Innovate 21 is looking for entrepreneurs, creatives and start-ups to pitch products and services that will play a significant role in BT Sport’s broadcasts and productions.

Mike Cronk, vice president of advanced technology for Grass Valley talks to Broadcast Tech editor Jake Bickerton about how to make the transition to the cloud as straightforward and cost-effective as possible for media companies.

The bandwidth and technical requirements for media companies has made the move to cloud-based working more challenging than many other industries, and there’s also latency issues that come into play too.

To address these issues, minimise latency, and enable true live cloud production, Grass Valley recently launched a cloud product that’s been specially designed for the production and broadcast industries – the Agile Media Processing Platform (AMPP).

It has also created something it calls the GV Media Universe that is attempting to bring the industry together to work on the next generation of cloud-based services.

Cronk explains all this technology and talks about how it’s been used to enable seamless live high-quality cloud production on 20+ camera events, including the EA Sports FIFA 2021 European qualifiers.

For this event, the camera feeds originated in the UK, the signals were processed in a data centre on the East coast of the US, and the vision mixer was 3,000 miles away in California.

David Ross, CEO of Ross Video, talks to Broadcast Tech editor Jake Bickerton about how Ross Video has addressed the many challenges of the pandemic.

The Canadian company offers a plethora of products and services in more than 100 countries that are used by television networks, sports teams and stadiums, esports producers, live events and production companies.

A big focus for Ross during Covid-19 has been on its Ross Mobile Production division, which provides OB and studio services, predominantly for sports and esports. 

As soon as the pandemic hit, it started utilising robots on-set to reduce the amount of staff required, and created a fully decentralised production environment that enables production/gallery staff to work in isolation from any location, including their homes.

During the podcast, David also talks about the pros and cons of cloud working and his concerns about cloud security, and being able to work at higher resolutions such as 4K UHD in the cloud.

He also covers the fragmentation of content; the growth of esports; the automation of sports production; his predictions for 2021; and how Ross Video chooses which innovations it will focus on and bring to the market.

Jamie Hindhaugh, COO at BT Sport and Sam Kemp, marketing technology director at EE join Broadcast Tech editor Jake Bickerton to talk about an innovative new set of features on the BT Sport app called the Match Day Experience. It's a collection of complementary tools that enhance live matches with a series of immersive features. These include AR insights and behind-the-scenes stadium tours, a 'Watch Together' function, and a 360-degree 8K pitch view so you can watch a high quality image of the game from any angle of your choice. The real-time AR graphical insights offered by the Match Day Experience include team line-ups and formations; in-game stats and graphics augmented on the pitch; a mini-map tracking the positions of all players for a tactical viewpoint; player names; player speeds; and tracers marking the path of shots.

Broadcast Tech editor Jake Bickerton talks with Daniel New, operations manager, BBC Global News; Byron Wijayawardena, strategic development manager, UK and Ireland, Adobe; and Ben Foakes, founder, Base Media Cloud, about how to create virtualised Adobe editing workstations to enable news editors to work from any location.

BBC Breakfast editor Richard 'Fredi' Frediani has been in his role for a year. And what a year it's been. It's fair to say coping with the pandemic and its impact on the 20 year old BBC show has been a key challenge he wasn't predicting when he took up the role.

The programme is famously built around the red sofa, with guests dropping into the studio each day. With this no longer possible as lockdown hit, the whole look and feel of BBC Breakfast had to change, almost overnight. The changes were sweeping and affected everything going on in front of and behind the camera.

This podcast explains what happened next, and how the show adapted to enable it to continue producing three hours of television every morning. Standing still was not an option, with Zoom, Skype and Facetime suddenly becoming a central part of the production.

The podcast also covers how BBC Breakfast has managed to continue doing outside broadcasts, including the live broadcast of Captain Tom walking his 100th lap, which went out exclusively on BBC Breakfast.

This episode of Broadcast Tech Talks is with Greg Rochford, IT manager at Little Dot Studios and Michael Clayton, sales account executive at BASE Media Cloud.

They talk with Broadcast Tech editor Jake Bickerton about how they worked together to transition Little Dot Studios to the cloud. It's a journey that began five years ago, and has paid dividends during lockdown with everyone able to seamlessly work and access all production assets from any location.

Little Dot has 1.4PB of data (and counting) in the cloud on accelerated secure cloud storage. An Iconik smart media management platform plugs into this cloud storage, and when new content is added it's automatically scanned, transcoded and made into proxies, ready for editors to work on.

The setup is discussed during this podcast, as well as why Little Dot Studios still needs a big London office despite the cloud enabling all its staff to work remotely.

Sunset+Vine chairman Jeff Foulser talks to Broadcast Sport editor Jake Bickerton about the sports production company's successful bid to become the host broadcaster of the Commonwealth Games 2022 in Birmingham. Sunset+Vine will produce more than 2,000 hours of coverage from the games; a 12-part documentary series leading up to the games; and coverage of the opening and closing ceremonies. It is also creating a Host Broadcast Training Initiative to give under-represented groups in and around the Birmingham area the opportunity to receive training to work with the Sunset+Vine team on the Commonwealth Games.