QuickLink, empowering creatives to exceed modern-day standards of production, has been instrumental in easing the remote production challenges of ITV Studios’ massively popular Saturday Night Takeaway television series. QuickLink StudioEdge with StudioCall is the ideal solution for making complex remote production work not only easier but of the highest quality.
ITV Studios is the largest commercial broadcaster in the United Kingdom. Lifted Entertainment is part of ITV Studios, producing some of the world’s most successful unscripted format television shows. Lifted Entertainment produces over 500 hours of television for UK audiences every year, ranging from Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway, The Voice, Countdown, and University Challenge.
Saturday Night Takeaway is a hugely ambitious, family-oriented entertainment program spanning seven weeks of live shows per season. This technically complex, award-winning program is a mixture of live and pre-recorded entertainment, with gameshow-influenced segments and regular surprise interactivity with viewers, including children facing health challenges and their families.
At the remote end, which could be literally anywhere in the country, laptops were initially used with either video capture cards or webcams. To take Saturday Night Takeaway remote segments to the next level, Lifted Entertainment needed a way to fine-tune audio and video signals coming in remotely to improve picture and sound quality.
StudioEdge with StudioCall
Lifted improved this by introducing QuickLink at the remote sites for an end-to-end solution using QuickLink hardware. Doing so removed the requirement for laptops and capture cards. At the central location, QuickLink StudioEdge allows ITV to receive Teams, Zoom and other popular video call services but ITV opted to use StudioCall, a built-in feature within StudioEdge for its ease-of-use advantages.
“Using QuickLink hardware both out on location and in the studio enabled us to have a true end-to-end solution,” said David Williams, Technical Director for Lifted Entertainment. “Monitoring and managing all connections from the QuickLink web UI enabled us to quickly troubleshoot issues and ensure every item went smoothly, from Ring My Bell to Singalong Live.”
Leon Langdale, Technical Producer summed up Lifted Entertainment’s reliance on QuickLink technology by adding, “QuickLink is the perfect solution for our hugely demanding remote production environment. There is no other program on television with the size and scale that Saturday Night Takeaway has. The technical demands of the format grow each series, and we simply couldn’t make it without a key partner in QuickLink.”
With the series averaging five- to nine-million viewers per episode, Saturday Night Takeaway is broadcast live to the nation in a primetime weekend slot. The show typically includes numerous remote connections around the country to surprise members of the public across several segments in each show. QuickLink technology makes this aspect of their show far easier to produce than ever before.
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