Calrec’s remote production package meets NEP UK’s goals for English Football League coverage

Combining scalability and robust disaster recovery while reducing its onsite footprint, NEP UK has streamlined its English Football League (EFL) coverage for Sky Sports with its compact NEO hybrid remote unit. Designed around two headless Calrec ImPulse1 cores, an RP1 and a compact Type R mixing panel for disaster recovery, the lightweight mobile unit delivers reliable remote IP connectivity and routing for up to three EFL matches every single week.

Although the company has delivered remote football production for Sky since 2020, NEP UK deputy head of sound/technology Neville Hooper said Calrec’s NEO installation has enabled it to not only reduce the cost and weight of its traditional remote unit builds, but minimise power consumption with a unit that is also capable of running on batteries as a backup.

“NEO is part remote production technical truck and part tender, a hybrid trailer designed to reduce the number of vehicles we send to site,” said Hooper. “The Impulse1 cores are used purely for audio routing and distribution; they process incoming field audio, gain match everything for onward distribution, route to and from the RP1, manage outputs of the RP1 for local onsite distribution, and hand everything off to Sky’s Production Hub in Osterley.

“Meanwhile, a lightweight Type R panel allows us to create a disaster recovery mix in the event of circuit problems or issues at Sky, and as the surface is POE-powered it consumes much less power than a conventional console. Coupling this with the headless ImPulse1 cores means we can keep power consumption to a minimum without sacrificing processing capacity.”

The implementation adopts NEP’s proprietary TFC Broadcast Control System to integrate third-party IP equipment and route IP flows from other devices on the network, with incoming Dante signals processed as AES67 in the ImPulse1 cores. NEP delivers a multichannel MADI audio stream to Sky as well as MADI streams to Calrec’s RP1 for local cue feeds. Both are remotely controlled in Sky’s production hub in Osterley.

“The incoming IP flows are dual routed to both the ImPulse1 cores and the RP1, so they are effectively separate consoles,” added Hooper. “This improves resilience, while the Type R just feeds the disaster recovery mix and audio FX back to Sky.”

NEP UK has been refining its football coverage for Sky over many years and the company understands better than most how production requirements can change at short notice. It is why NEO is designed to enable them to pivot quickly and incorporate all iterations of production, whether presenters are onsite or at Sky’s production hub.

“NEO provides a blanket configuration that meets all our needs,” said Hooper. “As there is no control surface on the ImPulse cores, control is managed via Calrec’s Assist, Control and Connect GUIs, which are already familiar. Calrec Assist is the main configuration tool across the ImPulse Cores, Type R and RP1, and it is helpful to have the same user interface to configure all devices; it speeds up learning as there are fewer new interfaces to learn to operate the system.”

Hooper said NEP UK chose the Calrec solution for several reasons, “It has proven reliability, familiarity for our operational crew, strength of support, known integration with TFC, our proprietary control system, and also competitive pricing.”

As broadcasters look for greater efficiencies to deliver more content with the same equipment, Calrec’s regional sales manager Anthony Harrison believes that the ability to adapt to different scenarios is crucial to succeed in modern broadcast environments.

“Calrec has worked closely with NEP UK for many years to help engineer more sustainable production methods without sacrificing DSP or reliability,” he said. “As broadcast workflows continue to adapt to more versatile production requirements, it’s important companies like Calrec continue to work closely with its partners to achieve new goals. This installation is a great example of that; a hybrid workflow that delivers huge processing power in a very compact footprint.”