We’re very grateful to be a part of the sports entertainment world. We work with some of the biggest names in the industry from football to fishing, and we’re proud to help our customers produce and deliver outstanding content.
The sports landscape is changing — delivery methods and their platforms are more nuanced than ever before. Players and teams are leveraging social media content to engage with fans on a more personal level. Sports fans around the world are viewing tens of thousands of hours of replays, commentary, and other secondary content. The sheer amount of data is incredible, and this huge expansion of live and VOD content has created new hurdles for broadcasters and the teams themselves, especially as they try to build their brand with this ancillary franchised content.
In this post we’ve selected three examples to showcase how some of our sports entertainment customers are creating content…
Broadcasting NFL’s “Big Game” and the Daytona 500
EVO has been in deployment with the FOX Sports mobile production partner, Game Creek Video, for the last two years, at nearly every major televised sporting event in America. The FOX Sports trucks are 53′ expanding-side high-definition production units and are collectively equipped with audio, video, replay, transmission, production, graphics, tape release/sub-switchers, two Final Cut edit rooms, producer work areas, maintenance, storage, and an HD viewing room. Each truck comes staffed with a production manager and at least one engineer. To put it in perspective: this is not only one of the largest production crews in the world, but they are on wheels.
“Today, there’s a huge demand for the highest level of live production possible…FOX Sports and Game Creek Video have the reputation of delivering the best quality in live sports broadcasting. And we want to keep it that way. That’s why we chose SNS EVO.” – Keith Martin, Engineer, FX HD, Game Creek Video
Check out this behind the scenes video inside the Game Creek control room, and read more about how they’re using EVO in the mobile truck.
Cool Runnings: Bringing the Olympics to the Caribbean
SportsMax, based in Kingston, Jamaica, is the Caribbean’s first and only 24 hour sports cable channel, they distribute their content to 23 other territories in the Caribbean. Three years ago, with little time to work, SportsMax took on a seemingly insurmountable challenge: bringing the 2012 Olympics to the Caribbean with nonstop coverage in real-time from London.
With the standard challenges that face a live production environment, and an inefficient workflow that was described as having “all work and no flow,” they needed a solution. Using EVO as the central storage for this new ecosystem, they we’re able to complete their mission without a hiccup.
“With this new system, everything is more manageable. We could never have pulled off this unprecedented achievement – broadcasting the Olympics to 23 Caribbean countries – without this new system in place. The more we use it the more we love it. SportsMax is well positioned for the future.” – Kerry Gibbons, Production & Technical Operations and Creative Director, SportsMax
You can get more in depth with their story and workflow here
St. Louis Rams: Rams Broadcast Network
The St. Louis Rams have won 5 Emmy Awards, 46 Telly Awards, they produce three TV shows, hundreds of hours of web content, and tons of in-game entertainment. You might say that the Rams Broadcast Network is the most successful arm of the franchise barring the 1999 roster.
(Sorry guys.)
The Rams are at the cutting edge of this secondary content movement in sports, and their cameras are constantly rolling. There is an enormous amount of footage, and most of it goes in to their critically acclaimed Rams 360 — a weekly documentary-style show that has won Emmy’s for Best Show in Sports, Audio-Live or Post Production, and Best Editor-Sports. Before EVO, they were doing what a lot of facilities are still doing: storing everything on external hard drives and running back and forth to the various edit stations, making dozens of back up disks, and scrambling to find their media.
“EVO has been essential to increasing our productivity…Rams 360 has a very intensive workflow and we are a small team, seven people. We are often working on separate features of each show at the same time. EVO fit our budget and gave us the extra storage space to ingest and pull from so our team can easily access our media assets simultaneously.”- Chris Slepokura, Video Manager
Read more about Ram’s Broadcasting Network’s workflow.
Check out more user stories to see how companies like yours put EVO to work for them.