Tieline enhances Nine Entertainment’s Olympic coverage

PARIS — Nine Entertainment in Australia has holdings in radio, TV, publishing and digital media and was a rights-holding broadcaster for the 2024 Paris Olympics. The company acquired the Macquarie Media Radio Network in 2019, and along with the network’s TV assets, radio played a crucial role in coverage of the Games. “Tieline played a pivotal technology role in delivering successful coverage of the Olympics to Australian audiences,” said Michael Sammut, head of technology and operations for Nine Radio. “TV and radio work independently of each other, but we came together to achieve synergies throughout the network for the coverage.”

“For example, TV operations are centralized in North Sydney, whereas radio operations are in Pyrmont,” said Sammut. “Incoming host broadcast feeds from the International Broadcast Centre (IBC) in Paris were sent to North Sydney, then restacked and fed to our Pyrmont studios for use across our radio assets.” Around 12 Tieline hardware codecs were used for radio coverage from Paris in various roles. Tieline codecs were also used for the network’s STL and outside broadcast links.

Live breakfast shows

Nine’s 2GB breakfast show with Ben Fordham and 3AW’s breakfast show with Ross Stevenson and Russel Howcroft were broadcast live from Paris for the first week of the Games using Tieline ViA and Gateway 4 codecs. “These are our two biggest breakfast shows with huge audiences, and the Tieline codecs sent flawless audio each day from Paris,” said Sammut. 3AW used a combination of bonded cellular and LAN connections with the ViA. 2GB’s show was live from the Trocadero using a Gateway 4 over a dark fiber link to Australia. “In addition, Nine had several reporters working from numerous venues around Paris using Tieline’s Report-IT app for live contributions,” said Sammut.

Communications were also critical for Olympic coverage, and the team realized in the lead-up that they needed more coordination circuits than were available at the venues. “We are upgrading our infrastructure and have built two data centers for a new operational model we have designed,” said Sammut. “The centers are not yet online. However, we have already installed Gateway 4 codecs in them. We used these codecs to send and receive communications circuits between venues like the Stade de France for the athletics and opening and closing ceremonies and the La Défense Arena for the swimming.”

After arriving onsite, it soon became apparent that the comms mixing capabilities provided by the host broadcaster were not flexible enough for the team’s requirements. “The OBS [Olympic Broadcasting Services] host broadcast team couldn’t provide some of the nuanced mixes we prefer to use with outside broadcasts, mainly because they have to deliver services to so many broadcasters at such a big event,” said Sammut.

“Instead, we used our own ViAs at venues because they have flexible audio routing and mixing capabilities with compression and other features. This allowed us to create tailored audio circuits exactly how we wanted them. The ViAs connected to our Gateway 4 codecs at the data centers in Sydney to deliver flawless bidirectional comms and production audio. In fact, when Nine’s TV broadcast team saw our setup, they reconfigured some of their commentary audio systems to match our setup.”

Built-in flexibility

William Todd (better known as Toddy in the industry), Nine’s broadcast IT systems architect, was onsite in Paris for setup and the Games. “At each stadium, the mix-minus from Sydney was sent via dark fiber to our hub at the IBC; OBS subsequently routed this to each stadium, which arrived at the commentary positions into an AEQ comms box. Once onsite, we made use of the I/O to route this into one of our ViA codecs,” said Toddy.

“We attached commentary headsets to the ViA, which allowed us to add compression and EQ to the mics before connecting them back to the AEQ unit as a complete mix. We could also connect the codec back to our studios in Sydney using the 3x mono profile to give us individual channel control of each position.”

This flexibility meant the team could send talkback to each commentator individually and PTT reply on the unit. Its main mix of the commentary was sent to the ViA’s XLR outputs and fed back to the AEQ unit. This was routed back to OBS and embedded with the vision to send via dark fiber to Nine’s TV studios at Denison Street in Sydney. “These TV studios are SMPTE 2110 compliant,” said Toddy, “To extract audio from this network, we utilized Tieline Gateway 4 codecs, which then connected and streamed audio to Gateway 4 codecs at our radio studios.”

The team used Tieline’s Cloud Codec Controller software onsite and back in Sydney to monitor and adjust input settings on the ViAs at multiple venues in Paris. “The flexibility of the ViA’s matrix editor routing, input processing, streaming capabilities and preamp quality delivered the flexibility we required,” said Toddy. “It allowed us to adjust settings at any venue without actually being onsite.”

ViA’s record and playback functionality was also valuable in Paris. If two events were simultaneous, one could be recorded locally and replayed after the first event finished. ViA codecs were also used to prerecord TV voiceovers at Nine’s Trocadero studio for later use.

“William Todd and Harish Samineni were our men on the ground in Paris, and without them and Tieline, we could not have delivered such an outstanding success,” Sammut reflected. “At such a large event, it’s always a scramble to get up and running, but we were super happy with our radio coverage. Tieline’s Gateway and ViA codecs were a cornerstone of our success throughout Paris 2024. We look forward to using them at future events.”

A long-time media addict — radio, TV, web and press, the author says that not a day goes by without him listening to the radio. Since 2019, he’s also been a volunteer at SUN, where he writes a weekly column. This article first appeared in French radio publication La Lettre Pro.

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