Metricon Stadium, Gold Coast
The Challenge
The dawn of the Gold Coast SUNS in 2011 has brought AFL football to the Gold Coast. A complete redevelopment of the former Carrara Stadium to a rebranded Gold Coast Stadium (now officially Metricon Stadium), ensures that the SUNS has the environment that will allow it to grow from a football team to a club that has the support of its local community.
Hills Antenna & TV Systems is a part of this story. It’s well known that television and AFL rely on each other for success and the upgrade of the Metricon Stadium presented Hills Antenna & TV Systems with an opportunity to showcase the capabilities of its IPTV technology.
A venue the size of the 25,000 seat stadium requires a fully robust system that can accommodate the various requirements of different areas on the campus. Signals from the broadcaster’s OB van need to be encoded and distributed around the venue: to concourse displays, corporate boxes, the 200 sqm videoboard, and to approximately 130 large screens around the ground.
Drawing upon the resources of the Hills group of companies, Hills Antenna & TV Systems worked closely with the Hills Technology Systems Group (HTSG) and the project consultants, contractors, broadcasters and operators to bring together a state of the art TV encoding and distribution system that will ensure spectators see every detail of the action from any corner of the ground.
Technical Solution
Early plans were for the video distribution to utilise the faithful old RF technology, but Hills HTSG were able to demonstrate to the consultants that an IPTV system would provide the flexibility, capabilities and robustness required for a project of this size and complexity. After a tender process, The PA People was selected as the successful contractor, with the support of Hills as equipment supplier.
Hills provided equipment manufactured by Exterity in Scotland for the project. This included Set Top Boxes which are used to provide control of each TV screen, DVB-T gateways for free to air television, encoders for Foxtel Pay TV to IPTV, DVB-T players, computer monitors and so on.
With such a large amount of digital processing of the video signals, it is necessary to ensure that the timing of the signals is kept within manageable limits, in order to avoid annoying synchronising problems in various parts of the IPTV network. Hills and Exterity have demonstrated that they are up to the task by keeping synchronisation of displays and audio within acceptable limits.
The Outcome
The successful implementation of IPTV technology at the Metricon Stadium has provided an excellent reference for similar projects elsewhere. The same partnership between Hills, Consultants and Contractors is also working towards the successful completion of a similar system at the Canberra stadium.
