Chile’s TvTel delivers live coverage of the Chilean football league with a remote production and contribution system based on Nevion’s Virtuoso media node, using HEVC compression.
TvTel has gone live with a remote production and contribution system designed for live coverage of the Chilean football league. A technical services provider for broadcast productions in Latin America, TvTel won the contract to supply production services to TNT Sports, a subsidiary of Warner Bros Discovery.
In order to support the production and delivery of up to 480 football/soccer games a year, TvTel realised it would need to upgrade its production infrastructure. The project also required working from 32 stadiums using eight small OB trucks, and meanwhile keeping the video quality very high. Specifically, it needed a WAN solution to handle both remote production and contribution, which meant organising media transport, broadcast control and orchestration.
Software-Defined Media Node
Delivered by Sony company Nevion and local partner VGL, the solution uses Nevion’s software-defined media node Virtuoso with its new HEVC UHD/HD encoder/decoder function, developed by Sony, to stream very high quality video with low latency. At the same time, a further aim was to measurably reduce bandwidth consumption and therefore costs.
The system the group delivered is compact, and involves the installation of Virtuoso instances in each truck, and at the headquarters in Santiago. TvTel’s set-up, which also included 48 Sony HDC-3100 and HDC-5500 cameras, is controlled by Nevion VideoIPath, which handles both orchestration and broadcast control.
A major element of Sony’s Networked Live system, Virtuoso has been widely deployed around the world to transport, process and monitor signals in real-time. As a software-defined node, it can perform a huge number of functions for a range of applications including IP contribution and wide-area media transport, IP production facilities and converged LAN/WAN networks, making it suitable for remote and distributed production.
HEVC UHD/HD encoder/decoder
In this example, the HEVC function of Virtuoso is in use here for reliable transport up to 16 video signals from the stadiums to the central facilities, and up to four return feeds. Standards-based as well as high density, Virtuoso development focusses on delivering high-quality signals, and ensures that broadcasts are of a high standard.
Useful for bandwidth-limited live and remote production, the HEVC codec achieves high compression, high picture quality and low latency, reaching over 100:1 compression ratios for UHD with about 200ms latency. When combined with SRT, it works well in unmanaged network and GCCG (Ground-to-Cloud-Cloud-to-Ground) applications.
Currently, this HEVC capability enables multi-channel HD/UHD encoding or decoding with SDI interfaces, supporting up to 28 HD or 7 UHD channels per appliance, with multiple instances running on a single platform using standards-compliant IP Transport Stream encapsulation. Following an upcoming Virtuoso software update, it will also be able to support Ultra Low Latency of about 2 frames end-to-end. The HEVC function can combine with Virtuoso’s SRT function to deliver high-quality video reliable over unmanaged and managed networks.
Image Quality, Low Latency and As Little Bandwidth As Possible
The project was delivered in four months. Gonzalo Jara, Director of technology and operations at TvTel said, “Like most organisations involved in the broadcasting of live premium sports, we require premium picture quality, low latency and as little bandwidth usage as possible. The Virtuoso HEVC functionality delivers an excellent combination of those.”
Steve Hard, Product Director Virtuoso at Nevion said, “It has been exciting to be involved in such a high profile and critical project. This is also special for us, as it is the first deployment of the new HEVC codec in Latin America.”
Virtuoso will be on show at the Sony booth at the NAB Show in Las Vegas, 19–22 April 2026. nevion.com/sony-nevion
