Telstra to connect 29 stadiums for Fox Sports

Australia’s Telstra has secured a contract to connect 29 sporting stadiums across the country using its nationwide Distributed Production Network end-to-end IP network for cable TV broadcaster Fox Sports.

Under the long-term contract, Telstra will use the network to connect the stadiums to new Remote Production Hubs in Sydney and Melbourne.

The deployment is expected to be completed ahead of next year’s National Rugby League and Australian Football League seasons.

Telstra’s DPN has been custom-built for the media industry to allow customers to remotely produce live broadcasts combining multiple raw camera feeds and audio signals from centralized production hubs.

According to Telstra Broadcast Services head Trevor Boal, the DPN network will deliver a standard capacity of 100Gbps for each stadium using diverse network paths, and will support the broadcasting of more than 520 live tier sporting events per year.

“Telstra’s DPN is designed to help our broadcast customers meet the rapidly growing demand for live content by offering access to our high capacity, low latency, multi-tenant network of scale,” he said.

“In a world first, multiple channels of uncompressed linear contribution video at the lowest possible latency will be traversing our network from sporting venues up to 3500 kilometers away from the Remote Production Hubs.”

Telstra has already previously integrated its live, point of view miniature wearable camera technology Globecam into Fox Sports’ broadcasts.