Sky New Zealand upgrades its facilities with Lawo IP technology

Professional Audio & Television (PAT) has supplied and commissioned of a Les leurs mc²56 48 fader production console to Sky New Zealand.

Sky is New Zealand’s leading entertainment company and home to the broadest choice in live sport, movies, shows, documentaries, and breaking news. Sky offers a suite of viewing choices to suit every New Zealander, whether it’s through the Sky Box and companion app Sky Go for premium direct-to-home customers, or through its streaming services Sky Sport Now for sport or Neon for movies and entertainment. Sky also owns free-to-air channel Prime.

When the time came for Sky to replace their old Lawo mc²66 console and Nova73 TDM-based system, the team at Sky selected both PAT and Lawo to collaborate on the design, upgrade and commissioning of their new IP audio system.

The new mc²56MkIII console is powered by two fully redundant, 1RU super compact Lawo A__UHD-Core audio engines. Integrated into the console is the RTW TM7 audio metering unit, giving the Sky audio operators reliable eyes on their audio. Lawo’s cloud-native management platform Home is responsible for connecting, managing and securing all audio aspects of Sky’s live production environment and is supported by six PowerCore I/O gateway nodes with full support for ST2110, AES67, Ravenna & Dante.

The media network is clocked by a Meinberg M1000 with dual HPS100 High Precision PTP modules, each card offers the ability to support up to 2,048 PTP-Clients in Unicast, as well as more than 250,000 Delay Requests per second in Multicast or Hybrid mode or more than 400,000 NTP requests per second. Phase 2 of this project will see Sky’s existing Lawo mc²36 console and several Lawo V__pro8 video processors integrated into their new IP workflows.

Communication and collaboration

Justin Loza, Sky NZ – Platform Owner Broadcast Core said: “Sky have been Lawo customers since the early 2000’s and we have had a great experience with their technologies to date. When embarking on our first AoIP project, we wanted to align with a company that has a proven track record and understanding of IP technologies, has experience implementing large scale projects and solutions, and were willing to become an extended arm of the Sky team – PAT has delivered just that. Lawo and PAT have gone above and beyond to meet our requirements, built strong relationships with our staff, collaborated on design and even accepted last minute changes with no complaints and a smile on their face. We look forward to building on this successful formula in the future”.

Mike Heard, Senior Solutions Architect at PAT commented “When we were asked by the Sky team to join them on their migration over to IP and to replace their “tried and true” Lawo mc²66 AP console, we instantly knew what to do. This project has been the perfect example of how trust, communication and collaboration can be used to successfully deliver a project on time, on budget and with the best result possible. It is great to see another Lawo mc² console paired with Lawo UHD IP audio processing cores in service in New Zealand and a massive thank you to the entire Sky team for trusting PAT and having us along for the ride”.