OTTAWA—Launched on New Year’s Day 2019, GOLFTV is a 12-year partnership between Discovery and the PGA TOUR to bring PGA TOUR-branded OTT video streaming to golf fans beyond the U.S. borders. The new network is now available in more than 200 markets and territories online via www.golf.tv; as well as smartphones, tablets and smart TVs in eight languages.

GOLFTV offers live golf tournament coverage and on-demand replays across multiple digital platforms, plus golf-related content exclusive to GOLFTV. Some recorded content is available to free registered users as part of a trial subscription. (GOLFTV is designed to be an international service and not available in the U.S, due to the sports focus of its group, Discovery, Inc. and the PGA TOUR’s existing broadcast arrangements.)

“When we launched, GOLFTV’s goal was to be the global streaming service for golf coverage,” said Tommy O’Hare, GOLFTV’s senior vice president of Product & Content Operations. “But it is already growing to be so much more.”

NO SMALL ACHIEVEMENT

GOLFTV now streams tournaments from the European Tour and the Ladies European Tour in addition to the PGA TOUR. It has also signed up Tiger Woods to serve as an exclusive content creator; including behind-the-scenes access to Tiger before and after PGA events, plus a video instructional series. (After Woods won the Masters, he gave an exclusive interview to GOLFTV.)

Currently GOLFTV’s ability to provide complete tournament coverage varies across markets, due to existing PGA TOUR rights’ agreements. Right now about 20 markets have access to full live coverage of the PGA TOUR, including Japan, Canada, Hong Kong, and some countries in Europe and Asia. More countries will gain full access as these exiting agreements expire. In all GOLFTV markets, the service provides live PGA TOUR Live coverage of Feature Groups and Feature Holes, which sit before the traditional TV window.

These limits notwithstanding, going from zero to global service is no small achievement for GOLFTV. But all these wins are not enough: GOLFTV’s long-term goal to be globally synonymous with “all things golf.”

“We want to touch upon every part of the golfer’s journey, whether they want to watch it, read about it, get into it, play it, or get better at it,” said Vishal Parikh, GOLFTV’s vice president of Product. “We want to power people’s passion for golf by building a premium destination for all golf fans and players across all digital platforms.”

This includes everything from watching the pros play, to improving the fans’ own golf games via instructional videos, and even tracking their golf balls on the course using GPS. (Discovery bought Golf Digest magazine in May; a move that will allow it to share on demand content—such as exclusive content with players—with Golf Digest subscribers and digital audiences in the U.S.)

SPANNING THE GLOBE

Offering both free VOD and paid live/VOD content (with rates adjusted to the consumer economies of its viewing countries), GOLFTV currently provides access to “Live & Replay” golf tournament coverage, Tiger Woods and fellow pro Francesco Molinari talking about their respective prep/practice routines, golf news highlights, Tiger Woods’ exclusive GOLFTV content, “Improve Your Game” instructional videos, top golf destination travelogues, and PGA archival footage; among others.

Given the sheer breadth of GOLFTV’s global offerings, it is astounding that a mere six months passed between the OTT service being announced and going live. So how did Discovery do it?

Besides assembling a team of crack sports producers to fast-track the service—O’Hare was Head of Digital Strategy at the IOC’s Olympic Channel, while GOLFTV Senior Vice President of Technology Eugene Huang helped Discovery’s Eurosport stream the PyeongChang 2018 Winter Olympics across Europe—Discovery got a head start thanks to a smart technological move.

Specifically, “We connected the PGA TOUR’s Florida production facilities directly into Discovery’s global wide area network,” said Eugene Huang. “This allows us to send their feeds directly to our production hub in London. This is where we add the multilanguage commentaries and produce the various broadcasts; encode them, and then post them on the GOLFTV web site.”

Non-tournament content such as Tiger Woods’s segments are similarly ingested into Discovery’s global network, for packaging at the London facility. Meanwhile, GOLFTV’s European feeds are brought to London by satellite. Here they are produced into GOLFTV multilingual content, encoded, and posted to www.Golf.tv as well.

MONTHLY GROWTH

Although Discovery will not release specific subscriber numbers, the OTT service is experiencing a “growing number of users month-by-month,” GOLFTV confirmed in a statement. This includes “significant user number growth” in registered GOLFTV subscribers compared to “the legacy PGA TOUR Live product available previously to international users,” it said.

Internal measurements show that the minutes per visit that users are spending on GOLFTV are growing every month with “very low levels of subscriber churn.”

All of this speaks to a global appetite for professional golf outside of the U.S., which has typically been viewed as the sport’s viewing stronghold. This hunger comes as no surprise to Vishal Parikh: “More than 50 percent of the professional players on the PGA TOUR are from outside the U.S,” he said. “This validates the value proposition as a business for us to be able to take the live content to the international audience, knowing it will resonate around the world and especially in all those countries that follow their local heroes; such as Francesco Molinari in Italy.”

GOLFTV’s apparent success is also good news for paid OTT operators. It reinforces the business case for this distribution model, which is still proving its viability to investors worldwide.

What remains to be seen is GOLFTV’s long-term impact on the PGA TOUR’s U.S. broadcast rights deals, and golf on TV in general. As Luis Goicouria, senior vice president of digital platforms and media strategy at the PGA Tour, recently told sister publication Multichannel News, the “days of us just strictly licensing our TV rights to a media partner and then calling it a day are behind us. I think the Discovery deal will be sort of the model for how we do things going forward.”

OTTAWA—“Virtualization” is the big buzzword in efficient, money-saving broadcast systems. In plain English, virtualization is “a term that sums up the logical division of actual server resources [CPU, I/O, and RAM] into ‘virtual servers’ that support specific software applications at will,” said Al Kovalick, founder of Silicon Valley’s Media Systems Consulting and cloud columnist for TV Technology. “Virtualization allows broadcasters to ‘spin up’ new automation systems, content channels and distribution platforms in a purely software environment; rather than having to purchase, install and service specific hardware for each new project.”

‘VIRTUAL SERVERS’
Virtualization is the natural add-on to the broadcast industry’s existing software-based automation systems; the kind that control day-to-day program scheduling, content playout, and channel-in-a-box applications. These automation systems save broadcasters money by eliminating the need to buy expensive proprietary hardware every time they want to add a new process/playout stream; by allowing the work formerly done by this hardware to be performed by low-cost commodity servers. Virtualization takes this cost-saving process a step further by replacing physical computers with “virtual servers” carved out of the broadcaster’s existing server resources.

Harmonic Polaris Live Because today’s automation systems are software-based, vendors such as Imagine Communications are encouraging broadcasters to target these systems as their initial points of entry into virtualization.

“We see automation as being a fulcrum point for customers wanting to make use of virtualization, because they can do as much or as little as they want to,” said Chuck Kocsis, senior product manager for the Dallas-based company. “This flexibility gives broadcasters the comfort zone many need before venturing into a new technology.”

At the same time, virtualizing a broadcaster’s automation system can provide tangible benefits for the entire operation. The reason: “Presuming the word ‘automation’ implies operations without the requirement for human intervention, 95 percent of operations can be automated,” said Rush Beesley, President of RUSHWORKS in Flower Mound, Texas.

NO MORE DEDICATED HARDWARE
Whether software-based systems are operated on a broadcaster’s own data center, a third-party data center in one or many locations, or in the private or public cloud, virtualization offers the potential for broadcast operations to become entirely software-driven. In its broadest sense, this means an end to discreet pieces of proprietary broadcast hardware from content acquisition to editing, mixing, recording, and commercial/program playout to multiple platforms.

As a result, virtualization moves the cost of new channel launches and production facility upgrades from money-intensive capital expenditures (CAPEX) to more manageable operating expenditures (OPEX). “You no longer have to prebuy or overprovision your facility with physical equipment, that you may not know if you’ll be using for the next year, or two, or three,” said James Stellpflug, vice president of product marketing for Belgium-based EVS.

Jean-Louis Lods, director of business development for DMC One content distributor that has already implemented virtualized channel playout and distribution is Amsterdam’s Digital Media Centre (DMC). It provides European playout services to A&E Networks, BBC Worldwide, CBS, and Fox Networks Group; among others. DMC has deployed Pebble Beach’s Orca software-defined virtualized IP channel solution on the company’s Private Broadcast Cloud located in the Equinix AM3 datacentre, about 3.7 miles away from DMC’s new operations center.

The payoff: “Time to market [for a new channel] and the challenge of acquiring an assortment of equipment from different vendors and connecting these together with SDI cabling has been removed, while commissioning a new channel is greatly reduced from a typical lead time of 10-12 weeks to literally hours, if not minutes,” said Jean-Louis Lods, director of business development for DMC. “This time-to-market feature naturally lends itself to support for services such as pop-up channels, companion channels for special events on OTT, and finally simply more redundancy if and when required.”

Karl Mehring, director of playout and delivery for Snell Advanced Media (SAM)BUILD UP, TEAR DOWN
The ability to create temporary new services to is one of main advantages of virtualization, according to Karl Mehring, director of playout and delivery for Snell Advanced Media (SAM). “This flexibility lets broadcasters launch new channels to take advantage of short-term opportunities, such as the Olympics, and then to shut down those channels once the opportunities have passed.”

Because virtualized deployments are entirely software-based, launching new services over a broadcaster’s existing distribution system “comes down to a licensing question,” said Andy Warman, director of production and playout strategy and market development for Harmonic in San Jose, Calif. “You just increase your licenses when you add a new content service, and reduce them when the service is shut down.”

Factor in the ability of software-defined virtualized deployments to do as much or as little as a broadcaster requires, “and we are moving to a content service environment where you are able to customize a playout solution almost on demand,” said Shawn Maynard, vice president/GM for automation systems provider Florical Systems in Gainesville, Fla.

Moving to a virtualized playout environment can also protect broadcasters from human-caused playout disruptions. “This is because everything is being remotely fed into master control from a virtual machine that’s living in a nice environmentally-controlled server room; well-protected from the normal issues that can occur in a control room where somebody can spill coffee into a piece of equipment,” said Dave Turner, executive vice president of ENCO Systems in Southfield, Mich.

Tally up the many advantages of virtualization, and one can see why “broadcasters are not looking to build their own rack rooms anymore,” said Scott Rose, senior director of product management, digital media for Grass Valley. “Instead, most of the major broadcast groups are looking at trialing both virtualized technology and varying rates of IP in their facilities, and some are starting to adopt them in line with their equipment replacement cycles.”

NOT A PANACEA
Clearly, moving to virtualized automation offers substantial benefits to broadcasters.

“But it’s a bit of a misnomer that you put something into a virtualized environment and everything magically takes care of itself,” said Eric Openshaw, general manager for Pebble Beach North America. “There are a number of network infrastructure variables, especially in a real-time system, that the engineers at the operator’s facility need to understand and interact with, which require a unique IT skillset beyond traditional broadcast engineering. It’s not set-it-and-forget-it.”

As well, cloud-based virtualized systems can be inefficient and costly if the data farms that support elements of these systems are geographically distant from each other.

“For any workflow automation system that needs to move media from point A to point B, you better be sure that the media is very close to where it is being processed,” said Paul Turner, vice president of enterprise product management for Telestream in Nevada City, Calif. “Otherwise a simple copy, which would take a matter of minutes in your facility, could take hours because the data has to keep going between Singapore and Seattle.”

This said, the efficiencies and cost savings provided by virtualized automation make this option worthy of consideration by broadcasters large and small.

OAKLAND, CALIF.—The awarding-winning Golden State Warriors Studio is a very busy production facility. Tasked with producing in-house video for the NBA’s Golden State Warriors, “Warriors Studio” produces video content for the scoreboard and LED displays at Oracle Arena, home court for the 2015 NBA Champion. Warriors Studio also shoots and creates team commercials, online video content for warriors.com, and video for the team’s social media platforms. The unit also makes feature-length TV series that are aired on regional sports networks such as Comcast SportsNet Bay Area TV (CSN Bay Area).

Warriors Studio produces a wealth of award-winning broadcast and online content from a compact production facility. Credit: Warriors Studio

By “award-winning,” we’re talking Emmys: Warriors Studio won two Northern California Emmys in 2015 for their in-house produced content. The first Emmy was in the Sports-Daily or Weekly Program/Series category for “Heroes’ Journey,” an episode of their “Warriors Ground” series first broadcast on CSN Bay Area. The second Emmy was given for Warriors Studio’s feature “Marcel Reese Pride of the Bay,” which was shown on warriors.com.

These programs, plus all of Warriors Studio’ wide-ranging portfolio of original content, were produced by a team of about a dozen full timers and as many part-timers, headquartered at the Warriors Studio production facility at the team’s offices in downtown Oakland.

“We are a very active team,” said Blake Wilberding, Warriors Studio’s director of production. “On average, we are doing one or more shoots on location per day, plus all the editing and post-production that goes with turning these shoots into polished video content.”

PRODUCTION TECHNIQUES

Warriors Studio essentially operates as an ENG-style production company. Their camera people are constantly moving from place to place; getting video for everything from team documentaries and online content to promotional videos with corporate partners like ride-sharing provider Uber.

“We are 15-20 minutes’ drive from Oracle Arena,” said Wilberding. “Our people have to go there anytime we need to do a shoot with the team—and bring our own equipment, since we don’t own the arena.”

To accomplish this, Warriors Studio relies on a range of HD ENG cameras, including the Canon XF100, Canon XF300, Sony NEX-FS700R, and Sony PXW-FS7.

“Because the Oracle Arena’s video scoreboard and monitors are in full HD, we stick to HD cameras,” Wilberding said. “We have done some experimental 4K shooting with rented RED cameras, but we have no plans to move to 4K until we move to our new arena, the Chase Center stadium in San Francisco.”

At press time, Wilberding was unsure when this move will take place, however in a recent interview with “The Mercury News,” GSW Team President Rick Welts said he hopes to break ground for the new stadium in early 2017 and ready by the 2019-2020 season.

On the editing/playout side, Warriors Studio is built upon the Avid MediaCentral platform with its Avid Everywhere functionality. MediaCentral’s ability to move, edit, share and playout video across various locations is nicely suited to the Warriors Studio’s ENG-style, multilocation shooting style.

All of Warriors Studio’s content is produced using the Avid MediaCentral platform. Credit: Warriors Studio

The Avid MediaCentral system even allows production teams in different locations to virtually work together in real-time, just as if they were in the same facility. This is a major benefit for the Warriors Studio’s shooters when they are accompanying the team in other cities—and trying to produce timely content for fast turnaround on the team’s warriors.com site.

“We’re a small studio doing the work of a huge facility, with Avid as our backbone,” said Wilberding. “We can now hire freelance editors even if they’re 300 miles away, and production staff on the road can quickly access content in our archives remotely.”

IS CALM ON THE HORIZON?

Ask Wilberding about the most challenging part of his job, and he’ll point to the fast pace of life at Warriors Studio. “It is the workload,” he explained. “We are doing all kinds of shoots in all kinds of locations, and turning out a lot of content given the small size of our production team.”

That said, it appears that the crew at Warriors Studio cope with stress by rising to the challenge. How else can one explain not just their prodigious output, but the quality they maintain despite the fast pace; including Warriors Studio’s two Emmy wins? (Worth noting: Warriors TV broadcasters Bob Fitzgerald, Jim Barnett and Rosalyn Gold-Onwude also won an Emmy for their work on the Warriors vs. Kings game on Jan. 23, 2015—seen on CSN Bay Area—where the Warriors won 126-101.)

Meanwhile, the hectic pace at Warriors Studio may be eased in a few years’ time, when the Golden State Warriors move into their new home. “Once we are there, we should have everything under one roof,” said Wilberding. “That should bring at least some calm to Warriors Studios—although we’ll likely be as busy as ever!”

OTTAWA, ONTARIO—It’s official: the Consumer Electronics Association has announcedits industry definition for High Dynamic Range compatible video displays. In doing so, the CEA has set a standard for consumers and retailers to rely on when buying a HDR compatible display, be it a TV set, monitor, or video projector. Compared to standard HD, HDR TVs offer much greater contrast between light and dark images, thus providing a far more realistic viewing experience.

“HDR provides a significant step-up in delivering an incredible viewing experience for the consumer,” said Brian Markwalter, senior vice president of research and standards for CEA. “We encourage manufacturers and our industry partners to use this voluntary compatibility guideline to provide greater consistency and clarity while ensuring compatibility and interoperability across the full content development to display ecosystem.”

LG Electronics promoted its lineup of OLED TV sets with support for HDR at the recent IFA in Berlin.
For broadcasters, CEA’s establishment of an HDR standard signals the arrival of this new technology. The problem is that today’s HDTV broadcast plants are unable to broadcast HDR/HDTV programs; let alone the HDR/4K content that consumer TVs are starting to support and that Web-based OTT providers such as Amazon and Netflix are beginning to offer.

Add the recent announcement from Rogers Communications that its cable service—Canada’s largest—will begin offering live sports in 4K and HDR starting with the Toronto Blue Jays home opener in April 2016, as well as 20th Century Fox movie studio’s support for HDR/4K home viewing; the push to offer HDR/4K on the next generation of Blu-ray (Ultra HD Blu-ray) discs and the new Vidity dockable HDD players, and the push to woo consumers to HDR is in full swing. The question is how will broadcasters be able to respond without breaking the bank?

WHY HDR NOW?
The reason consumer TV manufacturers are promoting HDR/4K when very little content exists is the same reason they’ve been selling 4K sets and 3DTVs before that: they need to make money. “We want to speed up the TV replacement cycle, especially with the addition of HDR,” said Peter Fannon, vice president of corporate and governmental affairs for Panasonic.

There’s a good reason for Fannon’s assertion. “TV sales in the second quarter of 2015 were down 8 percent,” said Peter Putman, president of Roam Consulting in Doylestown, Pa., and one of three SMPTE Education Directors. Worse yet, this is just the latest drop in a consistent five-year sales decline. According tothe German statistics compilation firm Statista, global LCD TV sales peaked at 104 billion euros (US$116.48 billion), and has fallen annually since then; with 2014 sales at 95.7 billion euros ($107 billion) and 2015 sales projected to fall to 93.5 billion euros (US$104.7 billion).

Faced with this constant decline, TV manufacturers are pushing HDR/4K TVs hard; even though they know that virtually no content exists for consumers to watch at home.

“If there is HDR content, it would show up well on our OLED displays,” said Dr. Nandhu Nandhakumar, senior vice president of advanced technology for LG Electronics USA. “Besides, although HDR doesn’t exist on broadcast TV, the fact that 20th Century Fox, Amazon and Netflix are supporting HDR/4K content, plus the development of Ultra HD Blu-ray and Vidity dockable HDD players, means that content is on its way.”

THE HDR DILEMMA FOR BROADCASTERS
It cost broadcasters millions of dollars to convert their broadcast plants from analog to digital. Unfortunately, it would cost them even more money to transmit HDR content, because the system isn’t compatible with the current ATSC 1.0 standard.

“HDR requires at least 10-bit color, whereas the MPEG-2 system now being used by U.S. broadcasters uses 8-bit color,” said Putman. “The ATSC 3.0 standard now being tested does support HDR and 4K. But ATSC 3.0 is not backward-compatible. If you completely upgrade your station to ATSC 3.0 when this becomes possible, viewers with older generation, ATSC 1.0 HDTVs won’t be able to see your broadcasts.”

For broadcasters, HDR is not just a challenge, it is a true dilemma. “TV broadcasters are in a position where their viewers are increasingly stepping up to the TV equivalent of Ferraris, but today’s TV broadcast highway is still a slow gravel road,” said Putman. “If the broadcasters want to keep these Ferraris from going elsewhere, they’ve got to build a faster highway—but who will pay?”

This same dilemma doesn’t exist for OTT services like Amazon or Netflix, because they can theoretically offer HDR/4K, 8K, or even 16K programming should the demand arise for it, and the bandwidth into the home would be sufficient to support it. Meanwhile, supporting HDR/4K gives Blu-ray manufacturers the chance to sell current DVD and Blu-ray player owners a whole new generation of devices; just as the TV manufacturers hope to do with HDR/4KTVs.

The worst part for broadcasters: even if they do spend millions to adopt ATSC 3.0 and support HDR/4K when they can, there is nothing to stop TV manufacturers from pushing the resolution envelope to 8K and beyond once they have decided that everyone has a 4KTV and the only way to boost sales is to start another replacement cycle.

It is ironic that U.S. TV broadcasters spearheaded the launch of HDTV, in a bid to protect their analog spectrum—and their businesses—from encroachment by other users. The success broadcasters achieved by launching HDTV taught TV manufacturers that there was big money to be made from consumers replacing their current TVs with new, more capable models every few years; just like personal computer manufacturers have been doing for decades. What remains to be seen is whether TV broadcasters can cope with the fallout from this sales cycle, and the TV manufacturers’ push for ever-increasing resolution TV pictures.