It was close to midnight, the day before the first game in the battle of the brains as World Champion Viswanathan Anand was set to take on World No 1 Magnus Carlsen at Chennai. A team of technicians were still finalising the broadcast finer details and retesting the live telecast feed. It had taken them a couple of days to set up all the equipment and they were going over the final testing process.
So when did they first start broadcasting the chess telecasts live? Digicast, the Russian company, has been providing live feed for tournaments since 2010 and the past tournaments they have covered include Alekhine memorial, the Candidates tournament and the Anand- Boris Gelfand World Championship match in 2012 among others. Eight cameras would be used to provide live telecast, the feed given to the rights holder DD Sports, their own website chesstv.com and other online chess websites so that the global fans would be able to follow the match live.
How would the players close-up and the action on the board be followed if the playing area only allows entry to players and arbiters? The Robocam can be operated from the broadcast centre to send the desired images. One would be trained on the clock, two on the players so that the cameras can pan and zoom in on them as they calculate their next move, three to capture the crowd reaction and the playing area and one focussed on the commentators too. It was possible to provide commentary in multiple languages too with four different languages-English, Russian, French and Turkish having been used in the past.
The board positions would be operated by the commentators themselves who would do the analysis and invite fan comments. There are other graphics to show the social media interaction including twitter feeds so that the viewers can interact with the scribes doing the commentary.
The first day saw some huge traffic reputed to be in the region of one lakh users across all applications which meant that there were some servers unable to handle the load initially. But the technical team quickly swung into action and an alternate server came into effect within five minutes. “There was some pipeline problems between Russia and India in the first 30 minutes but the back-up systems were quickly put into place. More servers would be added now to prevent a recurrence of this problem.” said a member of the technical team.