INTRODUCTION

Sport coverage on radio is popular, but has specific requirements: people do other things while listening to radio, so any enhancements to the audio experience must respect this.

Visual Radio allows to transmit pictures alongside the audio. However, there’s a clear distinction from video content: this visualisation is not meant for watching but for occasional glancing and generally the slides stays for 10-20 seconds and can be repeated.

Producing images is new for radio but we can already see radio stations providing CD covers, illustrations of the show that is on air or sometimes non program associated information such as weather, general road traffic status, etc.

Eurovision is already covering many sport events for television thanks to the partnership they have with many sport federations. So came the idea to explore possibilities for radio.

After a first test on Swimming championship in Barcelona with some EBU broadcasters in 2013, a real world live coverage was provided on European Championships in Zurich in 2014 and also for Skiing Championships in Vail in 2015.

The challenge is to produce content in an easy and low cost way because broadcasters cannot afford growing their production team for these visual elements.

GLOBAL INFRASTRUCTURE

Figure 1 shows the big picture of the workflow and infrastructure put in place.

Here’s a brief description of the functional elements of the workflow:

• Data Gateway: This is the content ingest, receiving the information sources and storing the data in a database.

• Data Processor: This block is in charge of processing ingested content to filter and extract the data and prepare them for production

• Content Manager: this is the actual slides production platform running on the workstation of the person controlling the visual production. It receives pre-processed data that it applies in slides templates. The output of the content manager is images in various format.

• Data Dispatch: delivery of the produced content on the different platforms of the participating broadcasters. DAB slideshow, RadioDNS/RadioVIS

• WebSocket Edge: this elements translates RadioDNS/RadioVIS for the use on web widgets to be integrated in webpages of broadcasters.

All these elements consist of instances on Amazon Cloud Service and are connected using RabbitMQ open messaging communication.

This choice was motivated by the time and budget constraint of the project and the greater flexibility offered by this kind of platform.

For example the content manager instance could be run from various locations depending on the time of the day.

CONTENT INGEST AND PROCESSING

Sport data

All sport events have organisations in charge of the timing and results management. Swisstiming is one of the major companies providing timing information. They accepted to make a partnership on this project by providing live raw data during the event covered.

These data consist of name of competition going on, athletes ID, intermediate and final times, global result lists with lots of other information, all this sent as text via FTP.

Standards exist for some sports such as the Olympic Data Feed (ODF) that is a XML format defined for athletics and that was used for the case of Athletics Championships in Zürich in 2014.

For sports like skiing or swimming, these data can be processed in a linear way as competitions happen but for athletics, many competitions happens at the same time and car must be taken to filter out the data.

This was the difficult part of the project to handle the data, extract information, map it to the correct athletes and completion, manage the exceptions or errors to avoid wrong or incomplete results to be displayed.

DOWNLOAD THE FULL TECH PAPER BELOW