The Barclays ATP World Tour Finals is the year-end climax to the men's professional tennis season, featuring only the world's best eight qualified singles players and doubles teams as they battle it out for the last title of the season.
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 sports presentation involved all of the usual display elements as provided by CT. This included 230 linear metres of LED courtside banner, 160sq.m of flown LED in the form of an eight-sided gondola hung above the court and a 90sq.m IMAG screen.
Key to maximising 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 specialisation 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 centre 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.
(Jim Evans)
