Red Bee Media summarizes a successful 2018 FIFA World Cup

As the 2018 FIFA World Cup concluded on Sunday July 15^th with a thrilling final between France and Croatia, millions of viewers turned to their nearest screen to see the dramatic ending of the world’s greatest sports event. All throughout the tournament, live broadcasts and streams have been distributed, enriched and made accessible by Red Bee Media staff all over the world. A broad range of clients have benefited from the company’s services, including the BBC and ITV in the UK, NPO/NOS in the Netherlands, Canal+ International in France and even McDonalds in Sweden. Red Bee Media has made sure that every kick-off, corner and goal has been delivered on time, accessible for everyone, in high quality and amplified with state-of-the-art graphics.

Record breaking broadcasts in the UK and bringing the World Cup to the French speaking world

Our playout directors and their teams have had a busy month managing the broadcasts and keeping every single game on air for a number of our clients such as the BBC, ITV and Canal+International. The BBC enjoyed the highest peak TV share of the tournament at 89% during England’s quarter final win over Sweden with a peak of just under 20m viewers watching on traditional TV.

ITV was also enjoying peak viewing figures throughout the World Cup, especially when the England team was making its way through the tournament. During the game between England and Colombia, ITV experienced its biggest primetime share, since records go back, with an average of 16.5 million viewers watching the coverage. This record was broken shortly after by the semi-final between England and Croatia which averaged 24.3 million viewers – the UK’s biggest ever football match audience on a single channel. The one-minute peak for the match was 26.6m viewers, UK TV’s biggest peak since the Olympic’s Opening Ceremony in 2012.

Combined with non-TV ITV Hub viewing, the peak increased to a ginormous 27.5m (84% share) and so, that night, ITV had its highest prime time share on record. All through these record-breaking broadcasts, Red Bee Media worked alongside ITV Broadcast Operations, managing live playout to accommodate extra time & penalties, ensuring that ITV’s programmes, and crucially commercials, went to air seamlessly.

The 2018 FIFA World Cup was watched from every corner of the world, including the international French speaking community. Every day during the World Cup, a team of 10 to 15 Red bee Media’s staff in France managed the live production and playout for broadcaster Canal+International. Two dedicated channels covering Africa and the Indian Ocean, and with a feed that supported viewers in French-speaking Haiti in the Caribbean.

Red Bee Media installed a dedicated studio set, ordered by Canal+International, to support each game with commentary and dynamic graphics. During the whole tournament Red Bee Media produced trailers to get viewers excited for the games, ensuring that they tuned in. Every game day ended with a daily talk-show of sports analysis brought to the audience by Red Bee Media.

Innovative media projects in the Netherlands and Sweden

Red Bee Media is constantly innovating, trying new solutions and expanding their offering and knowledge base in the media landscape. The work during the World Cup showed no exception and in two successful projects in the Netherlands and in Sweden, Red Bee Media broke ground for their clients.

In a unique experiment with NPO/NOS, Red Bee Media tested the latest developments in image quality. During the World Cup, Red Bee Media provided the Dutch National Broadcasters with full Ultra High Definition (UHD) footage of all the matches – giving Dutch viewers the option to watch international football in the best resolution available in the world.

The broadcasts included images in High Dynamic Range (HDR), for an even more vivid viewing experience. The distribution was made through the UHD specific channel NPO 1 UHD through multiple distribution networks via satellite, fiber, cable and IPTV.

The UHD signal from Russia was received in the Red Bee Media facility in Hilversum, Netherlands, where it was decoded and distributed to the viewers of NPO 1 UHD, through the Red Bee Media Channel Store – one of the world’s fastest growing repositories of linear television and radios services, with around 10,000 channels from over 100 suppliers from around the globe.

Red Bee Media Master Control Room – Hilversum, Amsterdam  

About 1400 kilometers away, in Stockholm another innovate project was taking place during the World Cup. Thanks to Red Bee Media, McDonalds were showing all the world class football actions in every restaurant in Sweden during the tournament. The games were streamed in HD quality, enabled by Red Bee Media’s Managed OTT Services. The feeds were verified and fully up and running only a few hours after McDonalds greenlit the project. The Red Bee Media Managed OTT Services are based on a modular managed OTT platform, that gives anyone the opportunity to start streaming their content within minutes.

From a technical perspective a lot of emphasis were put on automated testing, as part of the Red Bee Media Continuous Deployment process. All micro services were tested individually and in end-to-end scenarios using our extensive test suite that is constantly growing. In this particular case additional load test were added to validate customer specific requirements.

Enriching the content, keeping track of data and adding an extra layer to the excitement all over the globe

Being one of the biggest live events in the world, it is simply not just enough to broadcast and stream the live content for the World Cup. A lot of work must be put in to making the games and the commentary accessible to everyone, keeping the audience up to date and adding graphics to assist the commentary and give new angles to the action. All these services have been provided by Red Bee Media teams around the world.

The World Cup is for the whole world to enjoy and with Red Bee Media Access Services our clients could make sure that their audience got access to the live matches, highlights, replays and catch-ups with subtitles. In total Red Bee Media provided over 600 hours of subtitling during the tournament all over the globe for clients in the UK, Spain, Netherlands and Australia.

To keep the audiences informed, a lot of dots need to be connected to keep info up to date before, during and after the games, which has been the daily activity of the Red Bee Media Content Discovery team during the World Cup. With many games going in to overtime, short-term schedule updates were essential – a service that were delivered in NRT (Near Real Time) for platforms such as Sky, UPC and Vodafone. Broadcasters outside of Europe received World Cup updates from European Broadcasters, to make sure that they had access to the right info about the teams, games and updates from the tournament. In terms of imagery, Red Bee Media sourced the official branded material, such the ball, mascot etc., to be able to provide branded imagery.

Finally, graphics and augmented images have become mainstay for live sports in recent years and the 2018 FIFA World cup was no exception. Using Red Bed Media’s Piero Sports Graphics, broadcasters around the globe have been able to analyze team tactics and world class performances. Over 20 Red Bee Media clients have been using Piero Sports Graphics in their coverage of the event.

The 2018 FIFA World Cup has been a busy event for big parts of the Red Bee Media staff, but we are already looking forward to the next big event, the 2020 UEFA European Football Championship. This tournament will be played across 12 European cities and it will be an exciting challenge that Red Bee Media is happy to accept!

Jesper Wendel, Head of Communications, Red Bee Media