“Everyone was telling us, 'You can't run a sports show – especially a football show – with automation. You have breaking news, extra time, goals...' And we said, 'We want to find a solution for that.' And we found it in Viz Mosart.”
Executive Summary
Sky Germany and Sky Italy are synonymous with premium sports coverage, holding the rights to some of the most prestigious leagues in the world, including the Bundesliga, NBA, Serie A, and the UEFA Champions League. As the demand for content grew – requiring more output across more channels and platforms – both broadcasters faced a critical turning point. They needed to scale operations without compromising their high operational standards or inflating costs, and keep more fans tuning in.
The answer lay in challenging an industry misconception – that live production automation only belongs in the newsroom and not in the fast-moving, unscripted, and often unpredictable world of live sports. By adopting an automated workflow centered on Viz Mosart and the broader Vizrt Sports ecosystem, Sky transformed its sports studio operations. The outcome? Smaller crews now produce more high-end shows for a wider variety of sports. This streamlined approach has reduced costs, boosted production quality, and freed creative teams to focus on what matters most: the story.
“Our sports studios are not just for analysis; they’re truly for sports entertainment”.
Diego Spada
Director, Sky Sport 24 (Italy)
Breaking the “News Only” Perception
For over a decade, Viz Mosart has been the industry standard for live news production automation. However, in live sports, manual production was considered the only safe option; the perception being that automation was too rigid to handle the dynamic nature of sports content, where overtime, goals, misconduct, and injuries require split-second decisions.
Alessandro Reitano, Senior Vice President of Sports Production at Sky Germany, recognized that to meet modern content demands, this mindset had to change.
“We’ve used Viz Mosart for over a decade for news, and we were thinking, ‘Can we implement it here? Can we run studio operations from news to live sports?”
Louisa von Lenthe, Director of Inhouse Operations at Sky Sports Germany, framed the motivation succinctly: “For some of our programs, automation was a cost-saving measurement we had to take. For our biggest shows, it was the best way of guaranteeing show quality.”
Sky’s challenge was twofold:
- Volume vs. Resources: Sky needed to cover more sports (such as handball, tennis, and Formula 1) and more matches without increasing headcount or budget.
- Complexity: Sky Germany and Sky Italy are both known for their visually striking “infotainment” approach, with massive video walls, augmented reality (AR) graphics, and complex lighting cues – all of which were becoming increasingly difficult to execute manually with precision.
“Vizrt really listens to us and gave us a lot of different tools that helped us tell those emotional stories across all different formats."
Louisa von Lenthe
Director of Inhouse Operations at Sky Sports Germany
The Solution: Automating Production with Viz Mosart
Sky implemented Viz Mosart as the central live production automation engine for their sports galleries. Far from being a simple “Take Next” button, Viz Mosart acts as central playmaker controlling the entire technical stack, coordinating video switching, graphics, lighting, audio, and floor management simultaneously, so gallery operators can stay focused on creative storytelling.
Automation is one of the three major impacts I’ve seen in the last decade… it’s how you streamline your entire operation from big shows to smaller shows. Automation doesn’t kill creativity – it's the opposite.
Alessandro Reitano
Senior Vice President of Sports Production, Sky Germany
This transition moved the complexity from the live show to the pre-production phase. By building sophisticated, data-driven templates in Viz Pilot Edge and designing automated sequences in Viz Mosart, Sky’s directors could execute complex, multi-system sequences with a single keystroke.
“Viz Mosart is an extremely flexible system”, says Marco Bellagamba, Senior Manager of Program Directing Management at Sky Italia. “It allows us to change, modify on the fly, but above all, to manage unexpected events quickly.”
Integrating Live Data in Real-Time with Viz Pilot Edge
Viz Pilot Edge ensures more than keeping graphics aligned. The templated graphics platform is critical to the rapid data integration necessary to sync live match statistics to on-air graphics.
“It doesn’t help fans if we present statistics that were relevant two minutes ago but aren’t relevant now”, says Alexander Kohl, Team Leader for Analysis at Sky Germany. “Viz Pilot Edge helps us present match statistic graphics in real-time.”
Empowering Augmented Reality Sports Analysis with Viz Libero and Viz Arena
Sky helps viewers understand game action with in-depth sports analysis powered by Viz Libero, re-creating and visualizing critical moments, tactics, and heatmaps. Viz Arena augments this analysis as AR graphics that presenters can interact with. For example, Sky’s Analysis team can rapidly create a visual heatmap showing the breakdown of activity on the pitch and place it on the studio floor as an augmented reality graphic that Marko Stankovic (Presenter, Sky Sport Austria) can walk around.
As Kohl explains, “Viz Arena has enriched our shows greatly with affordable and efficient augmented reality graphics on the field, on-site, or in the stadium, with quick and simple calibration.”
“Vizrt’s tools have never disappointed me; that makes my job very easy,” says Marko Stankovic, Presenter, Sky Sport Austria. “I can just focus on how I want to present something, instead of thinking ‘does the software work?’”
“Our sports studios are not just for analysis; they’re truly for sports entertainment”, says Diego Spada, Director, Sky Sport 24 (Italy). “With a classic gallery, I need to speak to people about what effect I need on-screen in the moment. With Viz Mosart, I study what I need beforehand, ensuring the result is exactly what I envisioned.”
The Results: Scaling Quality, Not Just Quantity
The deployment of Viz Mosart and Vizrt sports solutions has fundamentally changed the operational model at Sky. The primary value realized wasn’t just “doing the same with less,” but rather “doing much more with the same.”
Unlocking Scalability and Lower Tier Sports
The efficiency gains meant Sky could deploy their top-tier production talent across more events. By reducing the headcount required in the gallery for a standard show, resources were freed up to cover sports that previously might not have justified a full studio production. “We can run a lot of shows at a high-quality standard with the people we have”, says von Lenthe. “Automation with Viz Mosart ensures a certain standard for each show but also helps to make more shows that we wouldn’t be able to do if we didn’t have it”.
Consistency Under Pressure
During high-pressure events like the Champions League, consistency is key. Automation reduces potential human error in gallery device control, ensuring that the branding, camera changes, lighting triggers, and graphic overlays are accurate every time.
Creative Freedom through Reliability
Contrary to the fear that automation kills creativity, Sky found the opposite. Because technical execution is centrally controlled, production teams can focus on storytelling and content rather than the mechanics of the broadcast. “I don’t believe that automation kills creativity”, says Reitano. “It’s the opposite. If you embrace automation, you can overcome scalability problems but keep the innovation and creativity. We push Viz Mosart to the nth degree.”
Key Takeaways for Production Managers
Automation means you can take staff off repetitive device control tasks and move them into content creation, replay, or covering additional sports properties.
Conclusion
Sky Germany and Sky Italia have proven that the future of sports production isn’t about choosing between quality and efficiency. By embracing Viz Mosart as the master orchestrator of their Vizrt ecosystem, they have built a workflow that satisfies the need for cost-efficient scalability and the need for world-class, entertaining content. As they continue to innovate with new formats and channels, automation remains the solid foundation supporting their pole position in sports broadcasting.
