Brighton & Hove Albion Football Club is a professional football club based in East Sussex. The club competes in the Premier League, the top tier of English football and is based at the American Express Stadium.
Tim Dudding, Brighton’s deputy head of media, started working with the club in 2002 and feels privileged to have had a front row seat for one of the most historic eras for the team. From playing in a temporary stadium of around 6,500 fans in 2002, to the Amex’s capacity of 31,876, the club has transformed over the past 25 years. Still on their journey to improve facilities for supporters, recent investments include a new PA system as well as an impressive fan zone currently under construction.
Throughout this journey, the club have worked hard to keep their media technology up to speed with their success on the field, to make sure they deliver the best possible experience for their fans.
Initially, when moving to the Amex Stadium, the Brighton production team undertook extensive research to understand their peers’ media systems and focus on what they wanted to deliver for their fans. Armed with an initial wish list of what coverage they wanted to achieve on matchdays, the preliminary workflow at the Amex was built around delivering pre-match coverage and the ability to do their own match production.
The need for change
The team were promoted to the Premier League for the 2017-2018 season, which changed the on-site technical requirement for the club; along with promotion comes external outside broadcast provision which enables the team to take a feed directly into their workflow.
Dudding explains that the OB feed is “the key to everything, because that gives us all we need from team arrivals, pre-match interviews, warm-ups, multi-camera match feed, post-match interviews and ISOs. Capturing that content and making it available as quickly and easily as possible is the key to everything.”
The in-house system is now designed to maximise the experience for the fans around the match, creating content for the big screens on site and multitude of relay screens around the concourses. This includes links from a pitchside presenter, video packages, team news and keeping the fans up to date until the match starts.
During the game the content focuses around team line-ups, substitutions, in-game replays and VAR decisions.Run with a core team of just five staff, and supplemented by a number of freelancers on matchdays, the production team are responsible for creating all the content for Brighton’s teams: men’s, women’s and under 21s, so the club relies on technology to help give them an edge with their in-house production.
Upgrading the workflow
In order to provide fans around the world with the best possible experience, delivering content as quickly as possible, Dudding and the production team recently upgraded their workflow with a Telestream Lightspeed Live Capture device, capable of providing growing media files to the editors and removing any delay between footage arriving and being ready to cut.
The previous workflow involved a time-consuming process where footage was saved onto an SSD, then transferred onto a NAS, before the editors could get to work.The new workflow means the team can start editing in Adobe Premiere immediately, creating highlights that are ready to be played out to fans on the concourse as soon as the match is over, as well as preparing clips for social channels after the various Premier League holdbacks.Game highlights are shared on the club’s website and YouTube channel, with additional graphics layers to add further value to the content.
“What the Telestream Live Capture enables us to do is edit while we ingest and that’s saved so much time and allowed us to be more creative, because we’re not going through the laborious process of having to dump footage onto a RAID and then pull in files,” explains Dudding, “The file is just available to us straight away and our editors are cutting it as the match is happening. It’s brilliant.”
The new workflow is enabling a much more efficient workflow for the team, but they are still focused on improving the experience for fans.“Recent stats showed that over the last year we were inside the top seven clubs in the Premier League for total views on YouTube. That was really big for us. Given the size of our production team, we’re really proud of that, but we’re always aiming to achieve more”.
So what’s the main benefit of the new workflow? “It’s time” says Dudding, “And that allows us to be more creative. So instead of having to wait for footage to be available before you can edit it, it’s ready straight away. It gives us more time to spend on social content, allowing us to build revenue and growth across our social channels.”
In terms of installation, Dudding was impressed with the speed at which the system was installed and up and running. “It was just ready to go and we were using it straight away, it didn’t need a lot of training at all. And that I guess is the beauty of it.”
It’s clear that being at the forefront of innovation is important to Brighton, “I think across the club, that’s what we’ve always tried to do, whether it be with our policies or using technology, we like to push the boundaries as much as possible to give us a competitive edge” says Dudding. “We’re constantly trying to find ways to do things differently, and to give the fans the best experience that we can – both at the stadium and across our various platforms.
So why did the club choose Telestream’s Lightspeed Live Capture to optimise their workflow? “I just felt like it was going to do exactly what I wanted it to do,” Dudding comments. “Telestream’s reputation was a leading factor but then having seen a demo of the device and its capabilities, I just felt that was the one for us. I wanted a solution that was going to be really robust, really simple to use and just do the job perfectly, and so far, that’s what it’s been. It’s fantastic, and the support from Boxer has been brilliant.”