LONDON—ITV Studios, the production arm of the U.K.'s largest commercial broadcaster, has deployed the Cuez live production platform to manage three back-to-back live shows from a single platform, handling live rundown and studio automation.

ITV runs three back-to-back daytime magazine, talk and lifestyle shows, “This Morning,” “Loose Women” and “Lorraine,” from the same London studio. They share a single technical crew but have different hosts, branding and graphics, and their own editorial styles.

To produce these shows, ITV Studios needed a solution to unify the three shows while handling every production role from producers building rundowns to gallery operators managing playout.

The Cuez platform allowed ITV Studios to handle the entire creative process from a single environment and employ a leaner crew, ITV Studios Executive Director Barry Thomas said. “Our production teams range in technical ability, yet suddenly they all use the same newsroom system and that's really unique,” Thomas said. “Other systems don't offer this sort of full capability.”

Adam Scott, ITV Studios gallery playout operator, added: “Using one application, we were able to play multiple graphics systems and VT playout systems together very easily. This results in the crew having a clearer view of the show, and less margin for error when transitions between programs run to minutes.”

Production team members said the Cuez platform is easy to adopt.

“From the minute I started, I noticed it was much easier to use than other systems I've used in the past,” Producer Jonathan Hughes said. “It’s really user-friendly. Once you've had just a little bit of a play-around with it, you’re completely across it. Last-minute changes are critical for all three programs.

“Cuez Rundown keeps everyone in sync,” he added. “You type something in the control room and this instantly gets on set. The live synchronization is exactly what we needed. Those changes also reach the camera operators in real time. They’ve replaced their bundles of printed rundowns with a modern iPad attached to each camera, displaying the synced Cuez Rundown.”

Thomas added: “Being able to have one universal tool that we can communicate in, and see exactly what is happening next, is a real game changer for creatives and directors.”

Cuez is a cloud-based platform for news programs and live entertainment programs that connects with and controls content creation devices via API or MOS. Its three main elements are Storydesk, Rundown and Automator.

For more on Cuez, watch the video below.

LONDON—QuickLink has released new details about the remote production technologies it has been providing ITV Studios’ popular series “Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway.”

"Saturday Night Takeaway" is an ambitious, family-oriented entertainment program spanning seven weeks of live shows per season. The technically complex program is a mixture of live and prerecorded entertainment, with game-show influenced segments and regular surprise interactivity with viewers, including with children facing health challenges and their families. ITV Studios’ Lifted Entertainment produces over 500 hours of television for U.K. audiences each year, including ”Saturday Night Takeaway.”

With the series averaging 5 million to 9 million viewers per episode, “Saturday Night Takeaway” is broadcast live on U.K. network ITV1 in a primetime weekend slot. The show typically includes numerous remote connections to surprise members of the public across several segments in each show.

For the show’s remote production, laptops were initially used with either video capture cards or webcams.

To fine-tune audio and video signals coming in remotely and to improve picture and sound quality, Lifted turned to QuickLink for an end-to-end solution using QuickLink StudioEdge with StudioCall. This simplified the complexity of the remote production work in the show and removed the need to use laptops and capture cards.

“Using QuickLink hardware both out on location and in the studio enabled us to have a true end-to-end solution,” David Williams, technical director for Lifted Entertainment, said. “Monitoring and managing all connections from the QuickLink web UI enabled us to quickly troubleshoot issues and ensure every item went smoothly, from ‘Ring My Bell’ to ‘Singalong Live.’ ”

“QuickLink is the perfect solution for our hugely demanding remote production environment,” Leon Langdale, technical producer at Lifted, added. “There is no other program on television with the size and scale that ‘Saturday Night Takeaway’ has. The technical demands of the format grow each series, and we simply couldn’t make it without a key partner in QuickLink.”

More information is available here.

LONDON—ITV Studios Daytime will use Avid Maestro graphics when it moves to its new home in White City in April.

The broadcaster is moving to west London for five years while the South Bank location is redeveloped.

ITV Studios Daytime creates more than 1,500 hours of live broadcasts every year and will now employ Avid Maestro graphics across “Good Morning Britain,” “Lorraine,” “This Morning,” and “Loose Women.”

The Avid Maestro graphics solution allows broadcasters to create 3D real-time graphics, video clips, augmented reality and live feeds—across multiple high-resolution, non-standard studio displays, as well as the studio space itself, from a single interface. 

Avid's Maestro | News and Maestro | Designer will be integrated into ITV Studios Daytime’s workflow.

“For daytime broadcasting, graphics add a critical layer to the narrative of topical content, especially when we’re producing a wide variety of magazine-style stories,” said Tim Guilder, technology manager at ITV Daytime. 

“As we move to our temporary home at Television Centre, incorporating an extensive toolkit of new Avid Maestro graphics solutions into our existing Avid infrastructure gives our graphics teams more creative freedom and the ability to integrate graphics directly into our live studio productions faster and more efficiently.

This story first appeared on TVT's sister publication TVB Europe.