Benfica TV (BTV) is a TV channel majority owned by the Portuguese sports club Sport Lisboa e Benfica Club. The club is best known for its association football team but competes in a number of other sports including basketball and sports fishing. It started broadcasting in 2008 with a mix of live soccer matches, interviews with staff, players and historic matches, as well as other sports.
Although current broadcasts are SD, the club recently decided to make its system HD capable. The turnkey project includes a complete HD system of news production, master control and a digital archive. The system occupies a 300sq-m studio within the stadium complex. Local systems integrator DMTS installed the tapeless system based on Sony XDCAM HD format cameras and VSN’s software platforms.
The system comprises ingest, news, archive, master control and traffic management. The six-channel ingest system uses vsnautorec HD, a V-Max video server and 10 Grass Valley EDIUS editing stations. There are two daily servers providing storage, a Nexsan and a Tiger Technology MetaSAN for post production, and vsnstorage for the newsroom.
BTV uses vsnnetsharer content management, which also integrates vsnarchive that controls a Qualstar library with a more than 100TB capacity using LTO-4 format tapes. The club is building a historical archive of documents as well as audio/visual material collected over the club’s history since its foundation in 1910.
The studio playout system, graphics and the integrated teleprompter were also supplied by VSN with a redundant master control system controlled by vsnmulticom automation. A separate server is used for daily news, managed by vsnnews. The programming, scheduling, publicity contracts and playlists are managed with vsncreaTV.
