Sky Sports

World Darts Championships 2015

As part of our contract to supply edit systems and desktop production for Sky Sports' coverage of major Darts events, we installed our tried and tested system at London's Alexandra Palace for the biggest event on the darts calendar, The Ladbrokes World Darts Championship. The contract also includes events in Blackpool, Dublin and Wolverhampton.

The event takes places every year over Christmas and New Year, and sees massive crowds descend on North London in all manner of crazy costumes, to drink some 250,000 pints of lager and witness the finest players in the darting world.

The tournament for us started around a week before the first transmission, where we spend 2 days building the system off site before heading over to meet up with our friends at CTV in High Wycombe and installing our gear in MVT5, their VT truck that goes to all the major darts events for Sky Sports.

Once on site, we start a 2 day rig, to get our system fully up and running. For all the Sky Sports darts events, we run Adobe Premiere Pro CC as the main editing tool, which is fully integrated into an EVS system made up of XT3 servers, IP Directors, XTAccess servers and XFly storage. All the EVS content is made immediately available to the Premiere Pro platform using EVS's IP Link plugin. As the tournament progresses, we accumulate 100's of hours of content, all of which is instantly available to editors and the production team, who are able to build their own sequences using our prep stations before handing over to the main edit suites for finishing.

All of this content requires some fast and reliable storage to provide the performance that we require. We use our 50TB PixStor from PixitMedia for all the Sky Sports darts events. This storage allows the flexibility and speed that we need for this system, and provides all the connected clients with all the bandwidth they need to deliver content quickly and efficiently.

In addition to the edit system, we also provide support for Sky's Media Managers, who make sure all of the content is correctly backed up for archiving back at Sky HQ, as well as managing an archive of content from tournaments in years gone by.

As always at this time of year, it's a festive and fun event, and that goes for the crew as well. It's a great event to be part of and there's always a lot of laughs along the way. We're proud to be involved in a sport that's always growing and an event that's become a landmark of the London Christmas calendar.