Gravity Media details broadcast technology to be used for Australian Open coverage

Gravity Media and Tennis Australia have announced that the production company will deploy broadcast and technology for coverage of the Australian Open.

This is Gravity Media’s 9th year as the broadcast and technology solutions partner for Tennis Australia for the Australian Open in Melbourne, and its 19th year as the host broadcast technical provider for the entire event.

Across the entire precinct, there are 165 cameras including Sony HDC 3500/4300 channels along with various robotics solutions using Sony P43, Hitachi DKH 200 and Panasonic robotic cameras with Mark Roberts PTZF heads. The entire precinct is covered with receive sites allowing 16 roving RF cameras to work anywhere within the venue plus two remote RF robotic cameras delivering broader views of Melbourne.

The production facilities are housed at Tennis Australia’s headquarters. These facilities are connected via 500 metres of fibre to the central apparatus room. The production facilities consist of seven production galleries using Kahuna Maverick panels and six audio control rooms using Calrec Artemis audio consoles. Gravity Media is also utilising 10 x ViBox vision mixer systems to provide coverage on the ten outside courts.

To achieve system connectivity, Gravity Media is using an IP-based large “fly away” system with a level of base band systems to provide a system that is effectively a 3900 x 3500 video router. An integrated audio solution between Audio Live and Calrec cores deliver the ability to route over 2500 audio signals within the facility.

All slo-motion replays plus archiving and media management is achieved using 25 x EVS servers, 52 x EVS IPDs, 16 x XT Access, 3 x X Files plus 4 x DB Servers.

During any day’s play, Gravity Media is delivering 25 to 45 streams to the 900 Tb of storage on site which allows all the action to be accessed by the host and unilateral broadcasters.