From Highbury to high definition

Arsenal wanted to be able to broadcast in HD from day one of being at the Emirates Stadium, which is a large and complex re-generation project and is intended to transform the Arsenal business. It was created as a flexible events venue with 60,000 seats, including 9,000 premium seats and cutting edge technology.

One major challenge lay in ensuring that that the entire system – from production to distribution to presentation – worked in the HD format. However, the bigger challenge was to find a suitable solution as none existed in the market. As a result, Sony and Arsenal joined forces to develop a new solution from scratch that could meet Arsenal’s needs.

By working with Sony, Arsenal could take advantage of the vendor’s extensive research and development, and also have access to Sony’s other divisions.

“We are proud to be at the heart of content production within Emirates Stadium,” says Mark Grinyer, manager, Professional Services Sony UK. While Arsenal’s requirement for an HD solution was a real challenge for all involved, by uniting Sony Professional Services with our R&D and factory resources, we were able to rise to the challenge.”

The tie up helped make Emirates Stadium the first HD streaming stadium in the world. Sony Professional Services, with system integrator Venue Solutions, worked closely with Arsenal to create a digital content package that could keep fans both entertained and informed at the Emirates Stadium. “Sony was able to give us a bespoke HD end-to-end solution that allows us to amalgamate content at the beginning and distribute it and present it to fans in a compelling way on match day,” says Richard Glover, manager of Arsenal Digital Products This solution included equipping other stadium facilities such as the press room, the cinema and conference rooms with Sony SXRD 4K projectors. The end-to-end HD solution combines HD broadcast products with state-of-the-art encoding and streaming techniques to provide a true HD AVIT solution that not only offers fantastic picture quality, but is also simple and cost effective to install.

Content is produced in the HD production room, which is able to handle sources from OB trucks, Ziris View players, RSS Feeds, source decks and satellites. The produced output is then sent to large screens within the stadium bowl and also to the 450 LCD screens around the stadium. Distribution to the screens is based on MPEG4 (H264/AVC) compression with the stream being carried over the stadium local area network (LAN). The key to the solution was the creation of the Sony ICS-FW40 streaming receiver card, which is installed into each LCD display. This card not only acts as the stream decoder for content, it also provides direct control and monitoring of the content that is displayed in each individual screen.

“From our perspective, if you are going to do something, you’ve got to ensure all parts of the chain work together and to the best of their ability,” says Adrian Ford, commercial director of Arsenal. “Sony has been investing in HD and we knew that we could future-proof our investment with them,” he adds.

By being able to create, distribute and present quality entertainment, Arsenal is steadily bringing a whole new dimension to watching football matches. Fans are spending longer days at the stadium to watch the match and other entertainment – behind-the-scenes Club footage, pre-match interviews and post-match analysis on Arsenal TV, the Club’s very own channel.

Moving from analogue to HD was challenging as the latter is a relatively young technology, says Ford. However, the new technology has also unlocked a new and improved football experience, meaning fans now not only spend more time at the stadium, but the quality of the time spent there has improved.

Where previously fans would spend only five minutes at the stadium before and after the game, it has now become common for them to spend one hour before and 30 minutes after, which has resulted in increased revenue, Ford claims.

“There is a clear change in the matchday culture at Arsenal – fans are spending more time at the stadium because we are able to give them something quite special. We are seeing them come in an hour before the match starts, instead of in the last five minutes, and they are also staying longer after the final whistle,” he says.

The ability to draw fans in by customising the content on each screen – be it by adding text, graphics, graphical bars or split screen effects – has also been a major advantage of the solution.