Brainstorm and Mena International, a Sports Services Provider and system integrator from Egypt and Kuwait, were involved in the live broadcast of the Opening Act of the Rafa Nadal Academy in Kuwait, providing augmented reality content and graphics.

Spanish super star tennis player Rafa Nadal is taking his methodology to the Middle East with the recently inaugurated Rafa Nadal Academy in Kuwait. The objective of this academy is to become a leading tennis centre in the Middle East and to support the Kuwait Tennis Federation in the development of a programme that drives the sport with a formative project.

The Opening Act celebrated in February consisted of a series of presentations and tennis exhibitions followed by a tennis match between Spanish top players Rafael Nadal and David Ferrer. More than 1,500 people attended the ceremony and watched the game on-site, at the same time that the full Opening Act was broadcast live by Kuwait Sport TV for millions of viewers at home.

For the live production of the event, Kuwait Sport TV contracted the services of Mena International, a renowned sport services provider and system integrator, and also Brainstorm’s official reseller in the region. «Aston gave us the ability to create, modify and animate all required templates and create the Augmented Reality scenes in combination with InfinitySet, Brainstorm’s virtual set solution. As we weren’t able to use a tracked camera due to scheduling constraints, we took advantage of the Aston Locator feature, which allowed us to do last-minute modifications to avoid changing camera position. All graphics were controlled and sent to air via Brainstorm’s OnDemand, which is an amazing and easy to use playout solution for live production, including live replacing of templates and texts», explained Maged Mahmoud, Mena’s Project Manager. Omar Al-Zanki, Mena’s General Manager, also added, «It was a pleasure to work with Brainstorm. InfinitySet and Aston are wonderful software applications which allowed us to do whatever we wanted without any limitation. Another important factor was the flexibility offered by the Brainstorm’s team: they were always available to support us at any time.»

The whole team performed at its best, the live broadcast was a great success and Kuwait TV also expressed their satisfaction with the results. Mohamed Alteny, KTV’s Sports Director Manager pointed out: «I have worked for many international broadcasters and used many on-air engines, but still Brainstorm’s Aston is the most powerful, flexible and most developed system and is one step ahead of the others. It suits all graphic designer types, whether they like Photoshop, 3ds Max or any other creative software application, and the amazing Unreal Engine allowed us to achieve impressive photo-realistic GFX. Many other software companies push you to buy a lot of plug-ins to create a basic template like tickers or weather graphics, whilst Brainstorm includes everything and there’s no limitation«.