LONDON – For the fifth year, Creative Technology (CT) supported Barclays ATP World Tour Finals. Held at the O2 Arena, the men’s professional tennis competition included top-ranked singles players and doubles teams. Players compete for Emirates ATP Rankings points throughout the season in a bid to earn one of the eight coveted berths and a chance to win the $2,075,000 top prize.
More details from Creative Technology (http://uk.ct-group.com):
Creative Technology (CT) has been supplying equipment to the Barclays ATP World Tour Finals since 2009; the first year they were held at the current venue.
The spectacular visual sports presentation involved all of the usual display elements as provided by CT. This included 230 linear metres of LED courtside banner, 160sqm of flown LED in the form of an eight-sided gondola hung above the court and a 90sqm IMAG screen.
Key to maximizing the potential of all the display technology in the arena is the event control system consisting of 20 media servers controlled and cued by a Spyder X20. This enables the integration of live scoring data, camera footage provided by the broadcasters, social media feeds and the rotation of the sponsor logos.
Steve Purkess, CT’s Account Manager, said: “It is hard to decide what to focus on when describing the video overlay services we provide at the Barclays ATP World Tour Finals. But what is becoming an increasing specialization in CT’s sports presentation offering is the bespoke graphical content designed to match the resolution of the displays and integrating sources ranging from event scoring and timing data to social media content such as posted ‘selfies’. We see this as an area of spectator engagement that is becoming increasingly important to live events and at CT we have developed applications to manage this for our clients.”
Outside of the arena CT also installed a 100 HD television network with displays in the Fan Zone, media centre, Sponsor Village and other VIP areas. The network is fed with six encoded IPTV channels; some of which are bespoke services. For example, in the media center the radio booths are fed HD broadcast coverage of the court action but with a specially mixed audio feed which excludes the host broadcaster’s commentary.
CT worked with the ATP to provide the display equipment and alongside The Wasserman Media Group to deliver the complex event control system.
