Watching the visuals of superbikes pushing themselves to their limits on the demanding Buddh International Circuit in Greater Noida, which is hosting the first MotGP Bharat races this weekend, one would not guess the kind of data crunching and tech muscle that is going into broadcasting every single frame around the world. This cutting-edge work is managed by Tata Communications, the broadcast connectivity provider for MotoGP and a host of other international sporting events. “MotoGP is one sport where they passionately develop the technology, like for instance the onboard cameras. Our role comes in as soon as a video is captured. It is up to us to then use technology to find a way to reliably get that video first to the producer,” explains Dhaval Panda, Global Head, Media and Entertainment Services, Tata Communications. This is not as easy as it sounds, for it means producing a final feed from all the onboard cameras, scores of video feeds from the venue and even above via drones and helicopters. “When you have a bike that is moving at let's say over 100 miles per hour and then you are trying to get video from it at the same time, we run into some technology issues which cause the video to lose quality, to go out of sync,” Ponda adds, clarifying he’s taking this example because of how they have spent months using local private 5G deployment and other cutting edge tech to get that video in the lowest latency and at 4K quality. “This is the level of obsession and attention to detail that goes into the sport.” Nestled somewhere in the middle of the noisy race course, where scores of bikes are revving up new records despite the sweltering north Indian heat, is a broadcast compound full of pods and cabins that help the Tata Communications teams cater to the hundreds of feeds needed by their broadcast partners across the world. In their air-conditioned control centre, a team of 4-5 experts monitor the master feeds which are uplinked to the production facility in Barcelona, Spain so that the International Programme Feed can be pushed out to almost 80% of the broadcasters who will be showing the races live. There are some VIP broadcast partners who do their own recording at the venue and these are uplinked directly to their stations, mostly in Europe. "We transport a lot of technology that is capable of being put in a suitcase and we have experts on the ground who help get let's say hundreds of video feeds, audio feeds, data feeds, live video, a lot of technology that goes into it every weekend and then we are also helping Moto GP do remote production. So rather than sending hundreds of people at the race location, they are working on the same from Barcelona,” Ponda says, adding how it helps reduce the environmental impact of these events as well as helps cut attrition of the producers who otherwise have to travel around the world. To ensure that not a second of the action is missed, Tata Communications has set up two fibre feeds to London as well as satellite backup on the ground just in case something goes wrong. The team in London selects the best feed in real time and pushes it to the production team. The latency here is all of one second and nine frames, one of the experts explains. And when you are doing remote production, Ponda highlights, “you are really not adding any latency to it”. In fact, the viewer at home does not really realise that a video of a race in Australia is produced in Barcelona to be consumed maybe in the US within milliseconds. “They would not realise there's so much of technology going into it.” Interestingly, since the MotoGP races are literally back to back every weekend during peak season, this entire rig of the control centre, the data centre pods and monitoring kiosks are all knocked down and moved from one venue to the other by air freight. “For the Noida leg, which started Friday, the rig arrived exactly a week before and was up and running in two days.” Almost everything here is plug-and-play at the unit level so that none of the circuitry has to be configured each time. The control centre monitors all the equipment too, along with temperatures, latency and jitter. For the data stack, there is a UPS backup that lasts three hours after which it will switch to the generator if needed. Ponda agrees that a new location like Noida is always a challenge. "Most times we welcome challenges like that because a new location means a new venue now has the ability to broadcast and you have a lot of additional content that was previously not broadcast is also coming in. We usually start with having maybe even six months before with our field engineers understanding the lay of the land,” he explains. Even with a fixed location like the Buddh International Circuit, they still have to go in and spend weeks and a lot of investment into getting not just usual infrastructure at that particular venue, but also that would be capable of supporting live video and audio at the highest quality possible. With so many moving parts and so many things that could go wrong in a situation where there is zero margin for error, Ponda says it is their three-pronged strategy developed over the years that triumphs. “The first is the most important thing and often is the most underrated one. We have empowered the individual at the first point of contact, whoever it is, to make the right decision. Then we have invested and obsessed over the type of technology that goes into managing everything and every year we do more than 100 proof of concepts to test what is the breaking point. And finally, there is a focus on how are we getting automatic triggers if something goes wrong, how are we creating systems that are auto-correcting, because in the world of sport, you do not have a four-hour window to fix something.” This is the process that helps get over 80,000 events to billions of screens across the world throughout the year. As for the kits and technology at the MotoGP venue in Noida, within hours of the races getting over on Sunday, they will be packed and taken by air to Japan, where the next race starts on Friday.
