VideoReferee in action as video judging system at Basketball EuroCup 2017 and at NAB 2017

The VideoReferee systems proved their reliability and ease of use and were therefore selected for video judging during the 2017 Basketball EuroCup in Lithuania.

For more than three years Slomo.tv’s video judging system VideoReferee is used at various national and international basketball championships. Since 2015 the Lithuanian Basketball League (LKL) is using the VideoReferee-B for all its matches. The budget systems have been specially developed for video judging in basketball, with the LKL being the trailblazer in using the new model. The VideoReferee systems proved their reliability and ease of use and were therefore selected for video judging during the 2017 Basketball EuroCup in Lithuania. As part of the tournament several matches were played at “Cido” Arena (Panevezys, Lithuania) where Lietkabelis (Lithuania) has its home base, playing against teams FC Bayern Munich (Germany) and Khimki (Russia).

Scoreboard

Because the arena scoreboard controller could not be connected directly to the VideoReferee system, the system was used in five-channel configuration: 4 channels in normal mode for recording the game action and 1 channel for recording the scoreboard view. In this setup VideoReferee made use of its new scoreboard feature, added to the system with a recent update, enabling the display of the scoreboard data during replay directly as a PIP. In order to make the scoreboard available to the judges a selected portion of the scoreboard was included as a Picture In Picture (PIP) during search and playback.

The operator selected the scoreboard area to be displayed at system setup. During playback / search of any channel this part of the scoreboard was displayed in the corner of the screen. For systems with a limited number of channels (VideoReferee-B, -Jr. or -SR) there is a special Scoreboard Camera Option, providing an additional external input channel via the USB interface. In general any camera with SDI or HDMI output or even consumer camcorders can be used to capture the scoreboard.

Video refereeing for the matches was provided by Lithuanian broadcaster Zoom.TV which has many years of experience using slomo.tv replay servers. For broadcasts of these matches the standard Simple R 331 replay server was used.