February 2015. Evolved interactive TV services: Francesco Zupi "Interactive manager SKY"
Francesco Zupi "Interactive Services manager for SKY Italy", describes the mosaic screens.
"Every window in the mosaic is a channel: in some cases the windows link to existing channels, in other cases they are dedicated channels that exist in mosaic mode only that require an additional satellite bandwidth.
The mosaic itself is similar to a video channel and then it is one more channel to consider. Some mosaics are broadcast in HD, a signal that weighs 3 times a SD signal.
Behind each mosaic a dedicated hardware called "mosaic-creator” receives a series of input signals and in output returns a mosaic channel-shaped.
The interactive control room is the space where the events are handled and its set up for two or three hours live program for a football or engines event requires specialists and involves many tech structures within SKY.
The mosaic area by SKY provides 35 input signals in HD and 4 graphics stations by Dalet Gaphic assisted by 12 Monitoring stations, then 2 editing workstation by Dalet, 4 AirSpeed video servers by Avid and 3 CountDown Avid stations, then 4 suites with TVs and set-top-boxes, six mosaic generators Kaleido and then in output we have two mosaics in HD, (ie Serie A mosaic and and Mosaic F1) a feed HD Goals Alert, a feed in HD for personal live choice race control and 10 HD feeds (I.e. Gol Parade Live and Highlights).
The mosaic for soccer's Serie A is divided in turn into two mosaics, the "mosaic Series A" for live matches on Sundays and the "gold parade mosaic" for the post game with all the goals and highlights.
There is also another mosaic for the Champions live and post game, called "Gold Champions Parade".
The commitment of SKY on the mosaics is not finished here because there are those dedicated to the engines, as the one launched last year on the Moto GP and Formula 1.
The mosaics of SKY are created to improve the "content discovery", an activity to improve the user experience that springs from the EPG.
Two decoders are disclosed to customers, based on the middleware softwares, "Open TV" or "Fusion".
Fusion internal at MySKY HD allows to display graphics in HD and has many more features.
If connected to the network allows to enjoy the full interactivity of the mosaics, and all interactive features, such as in sports and in the engines the "head to head". Usually on the Moto GP allows, while we are watching the grand prize, to choose between all the drivers that are in the race who are presented with the small faces flanked by the time laps.
These data are measured in intermediate times of the circuit and then the user can compare several drivers, see the gap to the leaders, the gap from one to the other, the best recorded time, the maximum speed and so on.
In practice, it is as if the viewer could have a mini telemetry console on the mosaic.
For sports there are two different models of mosaics, one of General Motors, which is basically a bit 'a director's view: different video feeds arriving parallel to the mosaic sided by the Program, allow to see for example the camera car, the onboard camera, or the view from the helicopter.
The viewer chooses when and what to see.
In football, the one mosaic that works is the simultaneous multi event vision of many parallel events and the ability to jump from one to another very quickly or watch them simultaneously.
A video feed will allow everyone, even non-connected, to see the timing of the race and then to better get how the individual riders are driving.
