The Africa Cup of Nations broadcasterd using Sapec’s technology

Live feeds of Africa Cup of Nations matches from six stadiums are being compressed and streamed using Spanish technology company Sapec‘s contribution solutions.

5 cities, 6 stadiums, and 52 matches to know which of the 24 national teams will be the champion of the most important soccer tournament in the African continent.

The technological partners of Sapec in the country has trusted once more in Sapec´s compression technology to cover this event. Reliability, video quality, and good technical support have been key factors for continuing this cooperation.

The Spanish company is proud of that according Javier V. Golfe, Sales Manager at Sapec: “We are a small company and with much more limited resources than our giant competitors, and still, we leave our footprint internationally with world class sports references. We are proud and honoured that our technology is being used again on a CAF tournament of this magnitude”.

Sapec counts with a wide range of contribution solutions as for example, a versatile multimedia platform called Laguna Media Processor than can process up to 8 channels (encoding, decoding, multiplexing…) and offers a wide range of features to address many different applications. Another solution worthwhile to have a look at is the Sivac-one family, a very low latency solution for compression of UHD 4K services on HEVC. For DSNG applications, Sapec offers its Gredos product family with different solutions for both up and downlink.

Broadcast of the Tournament

The tournament will be broadcasted in more than 150 countries by world. Canal+, SuperSport and StarTimes in the Sub-Saharian region. beIN Sports will broadcast the tournament across North Africa and the Middle East, as well as on its channels in the Asia-Pacific region and North America, including the United States, and as far afield as Cambodia and Laos. ESPN will broadcast it over its Latin American territories. In the UK, the BBC and BSkyB will broadcast the tournament. In Europe, France will be covered by beIN Sports, Italy by Discovery, and Germany by SportDigital. Nordic fans will be able to watch on NENT’s sport channels, while Eastern Europe will tune into SportKlub. In Brazil, Bandeirantes will show the tournament.

All of Africa’s football fans are sure to be tuning in for the tournament, with the public broadcasters from the participating countries set to beam their nations’ games live from Cameroon.

Finally, for the territories not covered by CAF’s broadcast partners, CAF will stream all matches live with English commentary on its YouTube channel, CAF TV, and cafonline.com.

The CAN 2021 is the 33rd edition of the Africa Cup of Nations, the biennial international men’s football championship of Africa organised by the Confederation of African Football (CAF) and considered the most important football event in the African Continent.

The tournament is being hosted by Cameroon and taking place from 9 January to 6 February 2022.

The tournament was originally scheduled to be played in June and July 2021. However, on 15 January 2020, the CAF announced that due to unfavourable climatic conditions during that period, the tournament had been rescheduled to be played between 9 January and 6 February 2021. On 30 June 2020, the CAF moved the tournament’s dates for the second time to January 2022 following the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic across the continent, whilst retaining the name 2021 Africa Cup of Nations for sponsorship purposes.