The Instant Replay Center has been inaugurated in Cologno Monzese
EMG’s technological innovation at the service of LBA, FIP and Eleven
With the start of the second round of Serie A UnipolSai, the Instant Replay Center is inaugurated, managed completely remotely in the EMG Italy Production Center in Cologno Monzese at the service of the Lega Basket clubs and the Italian Referees Committee of the Italian Federation Basketball.
The remote solution is possible thanks to the important investment made by Eleven Sports for the infrastructural innovation of the Instant Replay solution and by LBA on the fiber optic connectivity between the sports arenas and the EMG production centre. The bandwidth capacity of the network, created by Fastweb, sponsor and partner of the LBA, has in fact been increased by more than 5 times compared to previous seasons.
The new solution proposed by EMG was immediately appreciated and chosen by ELEVEN SPORTS, which will use it for the championship matches for which it holds the exclusive rights and directly takes care of the television production.
Each station of the Instant Replay Center, dedicated to a single reference match, provides for the presence of an IR operator connected to the field in remote mode and directly with the referee when the game actions require it. Real-time communication between the parties will allow the referee to give specific indications to the operator on the choice of images to view and review.
In fact, the system expects all the cameras that record the match to be visible on the two monitors (the one on the field for use by the referee and the one for the operator in Cologno) and reproduce exactly the same images with minimum latency. From the mosaic it will therefore be possible to choose the best points of view: it will be possible to go to full screen, zoom in on the actions, review at reduced speed or frame by frame. The selected images can also be broadcast live by the director.
“After being the first European basketball league to use Instant Replay in all matches starting from the 2014-15 season – says the President of Lega Basket Umberto Gandini – in agreement with the Italian Basketball Federation, we continue in the process of technological improvement capable of guaranteeing clubs and referees increasingly advanced tools capable of giving certainty and uniformity of decisions to each match”.
“The new system – states the Commissioner of the Italian Referees Committee Luigi Lamonica – will facilitate the work of the referees above all by speeding up the timing of the decisions of the actions subject to verification. The hope is that this work will continue and that, thanks to technology, further possibilities may be developed to increasingly facilitate the choices of the referee class”.
“We are very happy to be able to be an LBA partner in this innovation project and to have chosen EMG as a technological partner. This initiative is perfectly in line with our vision and growth strategy which plans to invest in innovation for the benefit of sport and above all the fans to enjoy the sport they love to the fullest” – commented Giovanni Zurleni, CEO of ELEVEN SPORTS Italia .
Francesco Donato, CTO of EMG explains the project as follows: “The technological solution that we have set up in our production center is one of a kind, and the first ever in Italy, both for basketball and for other indoor sports. We designed and implemented the IRC within a larger remote production project, laying the foundations for extending the project to all of Italian sport.”
The choice of remote production, increasingly frequent in Serie A matches, follows a precise choice by LBA, in agreement with ELEVEN and EMG which produces all the matches in the championship, and has the objective of improving product quality, facilitating multi-platform distribution, but also making a more sustainable choice for the environment: lighter mobile control units on the street and in sports halls, less personnel handling and greater overall energy savings are all points in favor of this new technological solution also in the near future of television production.