IMG Sports Media is building a £5m studio to produce and distribute 24-hours-a-day Premier League football content for international broadcasters.

The single-use studio is being added to the company’s Burlington Lane office in Chiswick and replaces an area that was previously used as a reception.

It will feature an 800sq ft production space with two sets, dedicated sound and vision galleries and a control room.
The studio will be used by IMG’s Premier League Productions to make programming predominantly for a new 24-hour content service being offered to licensees around the world that want to broadcast a Premier League channel but don’t want to produce their own content.

A mixture of studio-based output such as news shows, magazine programming and international phone-ins is being offered as part of the seven-day-a-week service, which also includes both live and archive matches.

A fully redundant technical set-up is being put in place for the new studio.

Included are:

  • Sony HXC-100 HD studio cameras, EVS XT2 replay and slo-mo servers, IP Director logging software, Calrec 5.1 audio desks and Sony MVS800 vision mixers.
  • An Avid Isis with Interplay will provide central shared storage, while Vizrt’s Ardome will be responsible for asset management.
  • Pebble Beach is providing playout and automation capabilities.
  • Lighting will be mainly LED based but some tungsten has been retained for key lights.
  • Back projectors will be used to alter the look and feel of the sets for different types of programming.

At the same time, 21 technical staff have been recruited to work within the studio with a further four based in transmission.

According to IMG Media’s global director of engineering and technology. David Shield, software integration
is the biggest challenge for he project, which is due to go live for the new Premier League season.
“It’s a completely tapeless HD set-up, but that’s not crucial,” he said. “It’s about providing better production tools, like desktop archive browsing, by installing a large, fully integrated system.”

Initial building work is due to be completed this week with technical installation starting later in the month.

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