TCU’s sports-broadcasting curriculum will not be acknowledged as a full-fledged major until 2010, but students in the university’s sports-broadcasting courses are already getting plenty of real-world experience. The 20 students in the program will fulfill all of the production roles for three volleyball telecasts that will air this fall on The Mtn.–Mountain West Sports Network. Through this new partnership, TCU students will produce up to 18 live broadcasts for the network this spring, including women’s basketball, baseball, and soccer games, and the network hopes to get more schools’ broadcasting departments into the game as well.
“The Mtn. is a great opportunity for all of these schools to provide programming to us, and we’ve looked for a long time to have a partnership like this,” explains Jon Rees, VP of operations for The Mtn. “Finally, there’s recognition that there’s this vehicle called The Mtn. that’s a 24/7 network, and we’re always looking for programming.”
Putting a Video Board on TV
The students in TCU’s sports-broadcasting classes already produce the video-board shows for men’s and women’s basketball and baseball games, but tailoring a video-board production to a televised broadcast takes some work.
“They are similar in some aspects, but there are some things that we have to add to pull it off,” says Mike Martin, professor in the Film, Television, and Digital Media Department at TCU. “For the video board, we don’t have talent, and we don’t worry that much about audio, so this will be an adventure.”
The added challenges of using announcers and catering to commercial breaks are elements that have not previously been incorporated into the curriculum, which is focused on video-board production.
“During timeouts in a game, the video board is very busy, because you’re getting shots of the fans or giving presentations,” Martin says. “With television, it’s just the opposite. Our expectations are high, but we understand that we’ll make our biggest improvement from the first broadcast to the second.”
Gearing Up for Network TV
The student-produced broadcasts will eventually use five cameras, although only four will be available for the first volleyball game.
“Our control room is centrally located in the Film/TV/Digital Media department,” Martin explains. “All of the venues are connected via fiber to our control room, and we’re in the process of getting up to speed with five cameras.”
A Ross switcher anchors the production. All four cameras will be connected to replay with the help of a two-channel EVS and two additional replay sources. A two-channel Chyron Duet is on hand for graphics, but The Mtn. will be chipping in there as well.
“We’re supplying them with a graphics package that is a generic version of our package so that the look won’t be completely foreign,” says Steve Hurlbut, senior executive producer and director of programming for The Mtn. “There won’t be Mtn. logos on the graphics — there will be a TCU logo — but the look of it will look similar to our show from the graphics standpoint.”
The Mtn. is also providing TCU with an element reel, so it will have some additional graphical elements to throw into the mix.
“We are in the process of modifying our control room to handle these live broadcasts while our control room is still serving the video board for football,” Martin says. “That’s been an ongoing project and probably will not be completed until about five minutes before we go to air. We’ve already created a professional live-broadcasting situation because things usually happen at the last minute.”
All Hands on the Broadcast
All of the students in the sports-broadcasting classes will be involved in these productions in one way or another, from pulling cable and operating cameras to working the EVS and serving as technical director. Martin will be on hand for each broadcast, as will his broadcast engineer and “audio guru,” and professor Charles Lamendola will provide play-by-play for the first volleyball game, but the production belongs largely to the students.
“All of the students will be involved, but we’re not just going to turn the keys over to them and go home,” Martin says. “I will probably direct the first game so that everybody can get a feel of how these are going to go.”
Working Out the Kinks
The first three productions will be shown on a same-day, 30-minute tape delay to accommodate existing programming windows and time zones. Still, The Mtn. will treat each broadcast as if it’s coming in live. Working with Glowpoint for video communications and Streambox for encoding and decoding hardware, all of the games will be shipped along four bonded T1 lines along Glowpoint’s managed service from TCU’s campus in Fort Worth, TX, to the Comcast Media Center in Denver.
“In terms of bandwidth, we’ll hopefully get about 4.5 Mbps and see how that looks,” Rees says. “It looked really robust in the early testing that we did, and the Streambox equipment handled it just fine.”
The Mtn. already had single T1 connections on each Mountain West Conference member school’s campus to power its Campus Cam system, but the network had to put in new routers, new T1 lines at the campus end, and four additional T1 lines at network headquarters. The Streambox hardware also had to be added on both ends of the connection.
“It is a big project,” Rees says, “but, when we looked at it with TCU providing the production expertise and the talent, for us, it was very economical to do.”
Spreading the Wealth
If all goes well with the TCU productions, The Mtn. hopes to expand this program to other Mountain West Conference member schools. San Diego State, for example, has a robust in-stadium video-production group already in place for baseball.
“If we were to be able to add a couple of things there — maybe another camera or two and some graphics — we can make that work,” Rees says. “This really starts to blow open the amount of events we can get done at a reasonable price, without us having to roll production trucks.”
The partnership also brings together the academic and athletic departments at each member school, which helps to create better programming across the board.
“We’re pleased to be in the unique position to be able to offer these types of opportunities to the academic departments at our institutions,” Hurlbut says. “The hope is that some of the other schools will look at it and say, ‘These guys are getting all of these extra games and exposure for their teams. We in the athletic department need to talk to our academic departments and see how we can do a cooperative venture and get some of our games on as well.’”
The first student-run, student-produced volleyball game, UNLV at TCU, airs Thursday Oct. 15 at 7:30 p.m. MT on The Mtn.
Featured Blogs
Upcoming Event
Industry Initiatives
SVG TV
Careers
SVG Mobile
e-Newsletter
Social Web
Report a Safety Issue
Team SVG
Sponsor Microsite Spotlight
Sponsor Microsites
Hall of Fame
SVG Audible
