“It’s a big challenge – and for us it’s a great opportunity, particularly as we acquired Flowics, an HTML-based graphics company, just last year. Now we are much more of a player on these newer platforms. The acquisition was a beautiful door- opener for us to participate much more on that side – not only on the traditional broadcast part,” explains Jakobsen. “The cost of running an HTML-type graphics system based in-cloud is a fraction of something needing a GPU – it’s on a different scale. So you have all the people in the digital domain who have been born and bred with HTML and the very low price of operation, which also fits with the drive to smaller productions.” SINGULAR TAKE ON GRAPHICS Australian production company DoubleTake Sports, supported by technology from Singular, deploys lean, digital-first remote production for the delivery of major international events to linear and traditional broadcasters. DoubleTake Sports has provided coverage recently at a level that wouldn’t have been possible without remote production at ultra-low latency. The company produced a fully remote outside broadcast of the Rugby World Cup 2023 qualifier between Tonga and Hong Kong – and a Women’s Rugby World Cup warm-up match between Australia and Japan – with only the cameras and on-screen talent at the venues. Across these events, production included up to eight cameras, sideline hostings, venue video
screen returns, TMO/video referee (both onsite and remotely in the production centre) and pitch- side medical video review integration. Australia’s Stan Sport was the domestic rights holder. A bespoke Singular Live graphics pack brought Stan Sport’s look and feel to life, fed by live match data and a custom API-driven control interface developed by DoubleTake Sports. The matches were also delivered to international rights holders in New Zealand, Japan, Fiji, Tonga, Hong Kong and Argentina. Mike Ward, managing director EMEA for Reality Check Systems and head of marketing at Singular. Live, tells FEED : “Singular is a web-based and cloud-native graphics platform. It’s everything you would expect, in that you can fully customise and build your own graphics and control them in and out, build playlists and connect them to data sources, plus you can use APIs to trigger them from different applications and products. Fundamentally, it is a graphics platform. “The main difference is it’s entirely web-based. It doesn’t require any dedicated hardware. All you have to do is go to our website and you can sign up for free to use it straight away. You don’t need to download any software or buy any hardware. It is done literally all through the website. “As technology evolves, good-quality cameras and microphones get cheaper and other production software is more readily available, the standard of content from non-traditional broadcasters or big professional organisations is increasing significantly. One of the areas we thought was lacking was around graphics because smaller production companies, individuals, sports federations or smaller broadcasters just don’t have the money to build up a full studio, with all of the kit and graphics systems,” describes Ward. “Our output is HTML-based, essentially like a webpage, so our graphics can be rendered by anything that can open a website – smartphones, tablets and computers. We call this ‘on-device’ – essentially client-side rendering. The graphics are actually being rendered on each end user’s device,” explains Ward. “This means graphics can be both personalised and interactive – and again, because Singular is a platform, we don’t predetermine what you can achieve. The interactivity is there for absolutely anyone to build. “If, for example, you want to do a viewer poll, betting or merchandising – or maybe you want to let viewers change the cameras – it is all possible within the platform.”
AIM OF THE GAME DoubleTake Sports is successfully carrying out remote production thanks to Singular’s solutions
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