Nevion, a Sony Group Company, has provided a contribution system to Italian telecom service provider EI Towers to support coverage of Italy’s Serie A football league. It connects 17 stadiums to a new International Broadcast Centre in Lissone, near Milan, and was delivered in just four months.

The contribution system was needed to provide the secure and reliable transport of 16 3G-SDI and one UHD video feeds (plus audio and data) from each stadium to the IBC – where virtualisations and graphics are inserted and then distributed to the rights holders in Italy and abroad. Feeds are also provided to the video assisted refereeing (VAR) unit.

D2-Nevion

EI Towers’s new Nevion installation was built to a demanding schedule

The contribution system delivered by Nevion and its Italian partner CVE involves both products and services.

Nevion Virtuosos software-defined media nodes handle the SDI transport of video, audio and data over transport stream across the WAN with 1+1 redundancy, encoding the video signal with JPEG 2000 for transport, and providing SMPTE ST2022-6 adaption at the IBC.

The VideoIPath media orchestration platform controls the connections with all the stadiums with bandwidth management. A soft-panel interface was developed to make it easy to connect all signals from a stadium with a single button.

Nevion and CVE also undertook project delivery, design, remote configuration, onsite support and 24/7 premium support.

“We took on an enormous challenge in building a new production infrastructure in such a short time – not just the contribution but also a completely new facility in Lissone,” said Piercarlo Invernizzi, CTO at EI Towers. “We needed reliable partners that would deliver, and Nevion together with CVE did just that for the contribution part of this project. The solution has now been in operation successfully for the whole of the season.”

Stand Number: 13.A10

Company URL: Nevion