As the 2014-15 Dutch National Football season draws to a close, Fox Sports Netherlands is bringing viewers all of the action, providing coverage of 18 teams competing in the final two Eredivisie matchdays. RCS was given front row seats to the action last Sunday while on-site at the Fox Sports Netherlands’ Production Hub in Endemol’s Amsterdam facility for the second-to-last matchday. There, our team supported graphics output for coverage produced by Endemol in conjunction with outside broadcast (OB) provider DutchView and broadcast on Fox Sports Netherlands.
With nine games set to occur simultaneously at various locations in the Netherlands for the final matchdays, Endemol needed a solution to streamline graphics and data output across match coverage. Pleased with a custom graphics solution we created for them in early 2014 comprising custom hardware and software, they enlisted our help again this year. Expanding on our original workflow, we transplanted four Bullet mobile graphics workstations from our Burbank office in advance of the matchdays to augment our central production hub system, which already manages graphics for five matches.
Our crew then tailored all four Bullets with data parsers, SQL databases and custom control applications. To ensure that the quality and consistency of graphics delivery at the central production hub would be replicated wherever our Bullets traveled, we also integrated SyncBackPro cloud backup software with each system. This enabled live match data feeds from data provider Opta to be distributed from one drop point to each of the OB trucks.
Before rigging Bullets to the OB trucks, DutchView and the graphics specialists at Prographics ran all four systems through thorough rigorous tests, which our Bullets passed with flying colors. The multifaceted mobile setup facilitated the integration of dynamic graphics across Sunday’s coverage of the matches, and will be used again this coming Sunday, May 17, as teams square off in the final matchday of the season.
Check out the images above to see our technology in action, and be sure to tune into Fox Sports Netherlands Sunday to view the graphics.