How to showcase your sports tech innovations to BT Sport at Innovate 21

05/25/21 • 13 min

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.

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 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.

Previous Episode

How to do 20+ camera live productions in the cloud

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.

Next Episode

BBC at Wimbledon 2021: New virtual studio, new camera positions and Covid-safe production changes

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.