TWI Interactive
TWI streamlines delivery to PCs, TVs and devices
TWI Interactive has created the Interactive Content Factory, encoding video and audio with Windows Media 9 Series, to allow broadcasters and content producers to deliver content over many platforms, from broadband to television
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Sports is big business and attracts a lot of ardent interest from fans who, if they don't exactly want to go as far as participating, still want to interact in some way. Take as an example the interest in the website for the UK Open Championship, which attracted 1.5 million unique visitors during the four days of the tournament.
 Sport provides a lot of interactive potential for content and revenue, but also added complications for the media production process of the event, which until relatively recently would have been concentrated on traditional television rather than interactive media such as broadband, interactive TV and mobile phone services.
One company that has been in from the beginning with these media is TWI  , part of the IMG group, the largest sports and events management company in the world. TWI is the largest independent television producer in the UK, and also the largest producer of sports programming.
The group's digital media arm, TWI Interactive, started in 1996: its job is to manage the interactive rights and interactive facilities for IMG clients such as Wimbledon, The Open Championship and Manchester United. They manage Tiger Woods' website too. "Our aim is to help our clients monetise their interactive assets by providing end to end solutions, spanning from rights sales to hosting," is how Max Haot, senior vice president of Worldwide Production, puts it.
TWI Interactive is also responsible for helping to develop the technology which distributes and creates interactive content. In 1999 they formed an alliance with Hewlett Packard and in 2002 launched a product called the Interactive Content Factory (ICF), which aims to change the way interactive services are produced.
"Many media companies produce all sort of services," says Haot, "but they all do it with different departments, all using different technology. It is very inefficient, many tasks are duplicated and there is little interaction between those who might be working on a television programme and those who are producing mobile content, for instance. We wanted to create a single production process, develop one platform and technology to use for everything from broadband to television. The idea of ICF is to produce once and deliver to many outputs. We developed and marketed this to media companies to use as a customised solution for interactive broadcasting."
The latest version of the ICF, the ICF Workgroup Edition, provides high quality video proxy logging and editing using Windows Media® 9 Series. "We have chosen to use Windows Media 9 Series as an alternative to MPEG1 or MPEG4 to do all the proxy viewing and editing," Haot says. "The key to this system is that we can use PC workstations to view live feeds, log, trim, rough edit with voice over, fine edit and distribute. We chose Windows Media 9 Series because it gives by far the best quality images at the lowest bit rate. It's high quality, it's fast and it's inexpensive to license. Plus the development tools of Windows Media 9 Series make it easy to integrate with the ICF platform, which makes it more flexible."
Within the ICF, video and audio are recorded in an MPEG2 file at 50Mbps, which is too large to be viewed and edited on a standard networked PC—it requires a high speed storage connection and hardware acceleration. Proxy editing involves editing video at a lower resolution on a PC, after which the final cut is rendered from the high resolution original.
"The system offers a full digital workflow, everything edited and distributed digitally—without tape—which enables fast turnaround and lower cost," says Haot. "It gives more power to producers because you don't need an Avid suite and a trained editor for preliminary processes—you can log, look at the archives and create a basic cut yourself. Windows Media 9 Series is used at every part of the workflow, from receiving footage, to reviewing and logging."
The system has been at work throughout TWI: one of its partners, Mobix, utilises it to deliver content to mobile networks. The system was also used to produce the Wimbledon video-on-demand service on the official website. At the Open Championship, it delivered a mobile video service—a feed of highlights and interviews—to mobile operators such as UK G3 mobile service 3, in addition to being used to create the daily television highlights and distribute content to the official website.
"Everything is streamlined, which cuts the cost and the stress of production, and Windows Media 9 Series is core to this process," Haot concludes.
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