Telstra powers multi-market sports production from Sydney

By Shaun Lim

To deliver futureproof broadcast solutions for sports rights holders across APAC and Europe, Telstra Broadcast Services (TBS) has opened new Remote Operations Centres (ROCs) in Sydney and London.

The Sydney ROC will help APAC broadcasters and sports federations scale remote production across diverse markets. “It’s built to operate multiple live events concurrently and produce market-specific programme versions from a single control room,” Mark Strachan, Chief Product Officer, TBS, told APB+. “That includes generating tailored ‘virtual’ feeds per territory – sponsor variations, language graphics, and regulatory edits – downstream of the host production.

“This is an approach we’ve already proven in APAC with multi-feed virtual advertising workflows delivered from Sydney and London.”

In recent seasons, TBS has expanded this foundation to remotely deliver multi-feed weekend slates, including A-League football matches, demonstrating sustained concurrency and repeatability beyond one-off trials.

The Sydney ROC further enhances this capability, connecting directly to Telstra’s Global Media Network (GMN) for international contribution and distribution, and into TBS’ domestic Digital Video Network (DVN) and Digital Production Network (DPN) for venue and broadcaster connectivity.

Strachan explained, “DVN reaches every major broadcaster, stadium, and production hub in Australia, giving us consistent latency, predictable bandwidth, and end-to-end management when we’re lifting venue feeds into the ROC and handing finished content back to rights takers.”

For rights holders seeking regional revenue gains without in-venue hardware changeouts, TBS offers a software-only virtual advertising workflow that supports unlimited virtualised feeds per match with less than 30 frames of latency during augmentation.  

This enables a single APAC match to produce sponsor-specific versions for markets like South-east Asia, Japan, South Korea, and Australia, all orchestrated remotely from Sydney. Contribution, remote operations, and distribution are monitored 24/7 by TBS’ broadcast operations and master control teams, who also handle incident response and customer communications. This ensures federations and broadcasters work with one accountable operations group rather than multiple vendors.

“Because we generate the market versions in-network, content owners can enforce jurisdiction-specific advertising and content policies while monetising regionally targeted placements, again, from the Sydney console,” added Strachan.

Acting as a global hub for live sports, TBS’ GMN is a dedicated, broadcast-grade fibre network with over 2,500 on-net endpoints, including customer sites, venues, and stadiums across Asia, Europe, and the Americas.

“GMN is designed for the lowest practical latency, jitter, and packet loss, with 24×7 broadcast operations support. For APAC productions egressing Sydney, that means deterministic routes and broadcast-specific service level agreements (SLAs) rather than best-effort internet paths,” said Strachan. 

Built with two physically and geographically diverse cores and no common components, GMN can sustain multiple fibre faults without affecting traffic, a critical safeguard during live, high-profile sporting events.

Strachan continued, “For cross-region paths, Telstra’s subsea footprint across Asia-Pacific lets us select the shortest reliable routes, reducing transport delay and cutting the risk of congestion or policy-driven detours common on public internet backbones.”

GMN is currently being upgraded to support 100 Gbps bandwidth, giving TBS greater capacity for Ultra HD (UHD) and multi-camera remote production feeds, as well as managing event spikes.

At the edge, TBS’ Australian DVN connects every major broadcaster, venue and transmission facility, while the DPN provides production-grade paths connectivity between hubs. Collectively, these networks provide predictable first- and last-mile latency and assured diversity.

For customers requiring internet-based delivery, TBS’ Internet Delivery Network, a software-defined platform for real-time Secure Reliable Transport (SRT) distribution, is available. 

“It’s tightly integrated with GMN and operated by the same broadcast teams, so we maintain observability and control even when the last mile runs over congested networks,” said Strachan.

For high-density remote production, TBS supports mezzanine, low-latency profiles such as JPEG-XS/TR-07 with resilient protection across contribution links. This enables large signal counts to flow between venues and the Sydney ROC without compromising switching responsiveness or picture quality.

“In summary, Sydney functions as an APAC ‘remote-first’ hub that can originate, version, and distribute multiple live events simultaneously, while Telstra’s APAC media networks provide the deterministic, resilient transport required for live sports, backed by 24×7 broadcast operations and broadcast specific SLAs,” concluded Strachan.