Infront Group Italy, April 2012
Italian soccer tv rights for the two main Soccer Leagues, Serie A and Serie B are a complex matter and are presently managed as a consultant by Infront Group from Milan headquarters, via Deruta 20.
Part of a bigger Swiss group, Infront has headquarters also in Austria, Germany, France, Finland, Sweden, China, Singapore.
Its President is Marco Bogarelli (brother of Bruno Bogarelli founder of Interactive Facilities) and the Group is born in 2006 following the incorporating of Media Partners (founded in 1995 by Marco Bogarelli and already a leader in Italy in selling tv sports rights) from central organization Infront Sports & Media AG (headed by Philippe Blatter, nephew of well known Joseph, present president of FIFA), with general headquarter in Zug, Switzerland.
The present portfolio of Infront today comprises, besides soccer Serie A and Serie B, cultural and sports events, like "Coppa del Mondo di Sci" the "Ferrari Challenge" or the "Europei di volley".
And this is just apart of the story, since in 2010 Infront was promoter for Italy of NBA Europe Live by Philippe Blatter, basket, and last year they were involved in the world Boxing Championship
Their mission is to handle in the most integrated way possible all services involved in the world of sports, meant as a central element in the entertainment industry. This involves production contents rights and events organizing and marketing, sponsoring consultancy and hospitality.
From a production point of view Infront may supply technical high quality services through a proprietary and independent tv production centre, which is complete of the necessary facilities, including reception, post production, and signal delivery (also via satellite). Among the many services rendered, are cross-media formats, sports comments and voice overs, streaming and encoding.
Tv Production Director Infront Italy, Claudio Cavallotti, recently interviewed in Italian magazine Millecanali (ilsole24ore Ed.) described some of the main technical structures.
The production centre is composed of tv studios and post production facilities. In detail there are four tv shooting studios of 1300, 1000, 400 e 300 sq m. The offering covers houling studios, tv shooting, plus SD and HD shooting media. The centre also is provided with a video master control room in order to interchange and root all video signals incoming from national and international tv operators capable of handling SD, HD and 3D signals.
Due to the number of sports events followed, it is impossible to follow everything with proprietary facilities so they often implement external service companies.
The general trend is to acquire the rights for the complete production of an event in order to achieve maximum quality, though some times it happens to offer only shooting or distributing services.
These external services, Host Broadcast Services following the Serie A matches, have been carefully selected together with Lega Calcio to guarantee the best possible quality.
Being Infront the advisor for the Lega, any decision is taken in complete cooperation, and personalizing the different platform is left to the service provider who has nevertheless a stiff technical “capitolato” (a set of rules) to respect.
Such companies have a variable length contract connected to the selling rights of the event.
