La Télé’s National League Hockey Expansion Powered by Blackmagic Design

Blackmagic Design today announced that Swiss broadcaster La Télé has implemented a shared routing and production backbone powered by Blackmagic Design to deliver National League hockey programming. By connecting its Lausanne and Villars sur Glâne facilities, La Télé can operate two control rooms as one workflow and maintain daily broadcast operations.

At the center of the build is a Blackmagic Videohub 120x120 12G router that ties both sites into a single signal backbone, with routing control available from either control room. La Télé also uses an ATEM 4 M/E Constellation HD live production switcher with an ATEM 2 M/E Advanced Panel 20 for studio production.

Serving the Vaud and Fribourg cantons with news, general interest and live sports coverage, La Télé secured National League free to air rights alongside television channels Léman Bleu and Télé Bilingue. Broadcast rights holder MySports subsequently contracted La Prod (the production arm of La Télé) to produce French language studio programming on match nights.

The project required handling feeds from all seven games that take place across three nights a week with an eight person crew handling the live production, highlights packaging and studio production.

With three months to build a second control room and studio with minimal disruption to daily operations, the technical implementation was led by François Vittoz (Technical Director), Maxime Humbert (Technical Manager), Ouriel Barbezat (Sound Manager) and David Klaus (AV Technician).

“We needed to exchange signals between existing facilities and the new MySports control room, with ease of use and redundancy at the forefront of our needs,” said Klaus, speaking for La Télé’s technical operations team.

On match nights, the pipeline handles approximately 45 sources and 60 destinations for MySports content alone, with additional capacity supporting concurrent daily operations. “It helped us avoid having to build two parallel systems,” Klaus said.

Audio moves between the 12G-SDI core and La Télé’s audio over IP network via converters that embed and extract the audio before routing to the shared backbone for distribution. Linked routing also helps the small staff cover busy match nights. “We can even share operator positions between La Prod and La Télé, which represents a considerable advantage for small teams like ours,” noted Klaus.

All seven weekly National League matches arrive simultaneously over fiber via IP video transport. La Télé receives ten signals from onsite production trucks plus two exchange feeds with the German language master control in Erlenbach.

Three editors on replay stations equipped with DeckLink Quad 2 and UltraStudio Monitor 3G capture and playback devices monitor match feeds, tag key moments and assemble highlight packages. A highlights program concludes the coverage across La Télé, Léman Bleu, MySports and Télé Bilingue.

“As a regional broadcaster, we have to be disciplined and ensure we get value for our money,” Klaus concluded. “Implementing a Blackmagic Design solution ensures we can work flexibly without compromise, with price, availability and breadth of offering driving our technical decisions.”

Press Photography
Product photos of ATEM 4 M/E Constellation HD, ATEM 2 M/E Advanced Panel 20, Videohub 120x120 12G, DeckLink Quad 2, UltraStudio Monitor 3G and all other Blackmagic Design products are available at www.blackmagicdesign.com/media/images.

About Blackmagic Design
Blackmagic Design creates the world’s highest quality video editing products, digital film cameras, color correctors, video converters, video monitoring, routers, live production switchers, disk recorders, waveform monitors and real time film scanners for the feature film, post production and television broadcast industries. Blackmagic Design’s DeckLink capture cards launched a revolution in quality and affordability in post production, while the company’s Emmy™ award winning DaVinci color correction products have dominated the television and film industry since 1984. Blackmagic Design continues ground breaking innovations including 6G-SDI and 12G-SDI products and stereoscopic 3D and Ultra HD workflows. Founded by world leading post production editors and engineers, Blackmagic Design has offices in the USA, UK, Japan, Singapore and Australia. For more information, please go to www.blackmagicdesign.com.