“We have recruited and trained a dynamic group of broadcasters who will deliver the Games in their native languages,” says Keith Pelley, President, Canada’s Olympic Broadcast Media Consortium. “Hosting the Games on home soil gives us the perfect opportunity to celebrate the country’s diversity and share in the magic of the Games like never before.”

Training for first-time broadcasters included workshops with broadcast veterans, in-studio prep work, and online instruction through a portal and website specially created by the Consortium.

In addition to live event coverage, the multilingual broadcast team will deliver the Opening and Closing Ceremonies in a record 13 languages.  Olympic Games highlights will air in news broadcasts on OMNI Television, APTN and ATN in multiple languages while OMNI News and APTN National News will be on location in Vancouver to provide stories geared specifically toward their respective audiences.

The Consortium’s coverage of the Games will be delivered in the following 22 languages: Bangla, Cantonese, Cree, Dene, English, French, Gujarati, Hindi, Inuktitut, Italian, Mandarin, Mechif, Mi’Kmaq, Mohawk, Ojibway, Oji-Cree, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Tamil, Ukrainian and Urdu.

“We did a whole lot of research among our team of three, but we also hired an outside consulting company to assist us with our upgrade, to make sure that we didn’t forget the little things,” Kindinger says. “I’ve worked at a couple other arenas, so I knew what industry standard was.”

High Quality, Low Cost
While Old Dominion does not have the budget of the Dallas Cowboys to produce its live scoreboard shows, Kindinger and her team are committed to producing a quality show. Their HD upgrade included the purchase of five Panasonic cameras, three AG-HPX500s and two AG-HPX170s, and a Click Effects Crossfire single-channel HD 4U clip server.

For the production server, it was critical to Kindinger that the HD version could continuously record. When she read about the release of the Abekas Mira server in an SVG newsletter, her team went to the NAB show in Las Vegas to take a look at it in person.

Continuous Content
“For our HD server, we wanted to make sure that it was going to always be recording,” Kindinger says. “That was one of our big problems with the system we had in the past: if we were playing back a replay and another big play happened, then we wouldn’t be able to get it. There aren’t all that many HD replay options that are always recording, and most of them would have taken up too much of our budget. The Abekas really gave us the best bang for our buck.”

When the ODU Monarchs take the field or court, the Mira server continuously records from three HD 720p cameras televising the event; the fourth channel on the Mira can be used for instant replay of any of those recorded cameras. A DMAT-AB hardware control panel from DNF Controls allows the user to quickly access any of the recorded content to create slow-motion instant replays or create highlight play lists.

Kindinger’s team produces five-camera shoots, complete with replay and graphics, for every men’s and women’s basketball game and wrestling match that takes place in the Constant Center, as well as the football games played at Foreman Field, which is connected via fiber to the center.

“We’ll produce a full show starting pre-game all the way through post-game based on that five-camera shoot, and we have a mix of local freelance professionals and ODU students that we use to staff it,” Kindinger says. “Some students are in the broadcasting major, but some are not. We have an accounting major who just loves it.”

Team in Training
Kindinger trains all of the students herself, with the help of her local freelance crew.

“I’ll try to pair them up as best I can, so that some of my guys with less experience are working side by side as a grip with my local freelance guys,” she explains. “For basketball, we don’t have grips and utilities, so we use pre-game and setup time for the non-freelancers to learn from the freelancers.”

For smaller events, such as wrestling meets and high school basketball tournaments, ODU does not hire freelancers, so students get the chance to work with the handheld cameras and fly solo on some of the production duties.

In addition to the Abekas Mira production server, Click Effects clip server, and Panasonic cameras, ODU’s HD upgrade included Anton Bauer mounts; Telecast camera, audio, and intercom fiber transport; Neutrik connectors; a Clear-Com intercom system; a For-A HVS-1000HS EOU switcher; a Miranda Kaleido-X16-D DVI; a Yamaha 01V96VCM-CA digital mixer; and Evertz transmitters and distribution amplifiers.

In addition, XOS has announced the launch of a new website, xosdigital.com.

“When XOS was established in the late ‘90s, the company’s main focus was on athletic facilities design and integration and coaching software products,” says Chris McCleary, CEO or XOS Digital said. “We have continued to enhance and improve all of our current technology solutions and now we are integrating them with our advanced content management offerings to meet the next-generation digital technology needs of our client base.”

XOS recently launched the SEC Digital Network, a fully integrated multi-platform content management and media distribution property that serves the Southeastern Conference and its 12 member schools. The XOSxNet content distribution and storage network is assisting the conference officials at the Big Ten and Big 12 in stabling wide area secure access to conference game content. The company also debuted the new XOS HD Replay System earlier this year.

Bexel, a unit of the Vitec Group’s Services Division, has purchased from Panasonic more than 20 additional P2 HD VariCam 3700 (HPX3700) and 2700 (HPX2700) camcorders, HPM200 P2 mobile edit stations, PCD35 E Series P2 readers and more than 300 P2 memory cards.

“This purchase of the Panasonic HD camera equipment is extremely timely considering this new gear will immediately go into service at the Vancouver Winter Olympics,” says Craig Schiller, VP.GM, Bexel.  “The 2700’s and 3700’s are known for being durable, reliable camcorders, especially in the extreme weather conditions that are common in Vancouver.  The addition of this premium equipment helps us further service our clients’ demand for the latest in HD camera technology.”

Bexel has already used the Panasonic P2 gear for several television productions, including coverage of the Senior Skins golf tournament in Hawaii, this past January.

The tables were modified to meet the NBA’s player safety requirements. Gas-loaded springs are now incorporated into the updated design to allow the entire face of the display to “give” should a player or referee run or bump into the display.

“We feel that LED technology does indeed provide a better in-venue experience for fans with its incredible wide-angle visibility, while also showing very well for the television audience,” said Steve Griggs, Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing for the Magic. “And our corporate partners love the flexibility to change messages quickly and easily, as well as the potential for even greater engagement with fans. We are looking forward to having this kind of display integrated with the rest of the Daktronics LED system in the new building next season.”

The tables are configured into a single courtside display measuring approximately 48 feet wide and display crowd prompts, event information, sponsor messages, real-time statistics, and out-of-game scores.

NFL Network will air Arena Football 1 (AF1) games live on Friday nights at 8 p.m. ET beginning April 2 and running through the league Championship game in late August.

AF1 features 16 teams and aims to serve as a replacement for the now defunct AFL. Several of the leagues teams are existing franchises from the AFL and arenafootball2.

For the full story, click here.

“Strategic does all of the UFC pay-per-view events, as well as all of Showtime and Top Rank’s televised events,” says Jason Land, VP of Strategic Television, a division of PSSI Global Services. “Each of the events came to us as the schedules were finalized.”

In addition to the UFC-110 fight in Las Vegas on Saturday, Strategic managed transmission for the Valero vs. DeMarco fight in Monterrey; Rios vs. Teron in McAllen, TX; and Adamek vs. Estrada in Newark.

Throughout its 30-year history, Strategic has handled more-difficult simultaneous transmissions — two high-profile HD pay-per-view events in September are one example — but Saturday’s foursome posed plenty of challenges.

“Each project manager put together their portion, and then we met together to discuss,” Land says. “We worked with each other to make sure that we were not doubling up on resources, looked at what our routings were, and moved some things around.”

Individual broadcasters sometimes pick up the transmission for more than one of Strategic’s events, but, on Saturday, few broadcasters picked up more than one event, so that simplified the transmission process. One wrench thrown into the works was the snowstorm that blanketed the East Coast over the weekend.

“There was some bad weather in Washington, DC, so we had to have some backup plans in place to reroute things,” Land says. “But there wasn’t a lot that we had to do differently to accommodate four events. We’re a company that can deal with four simultaneous events that are all going domestic and international.”

Over the course of the four-event weekend, Strategic dispatched a range of satellite trucks from the PSSI Global Services fleet of 26 C- and Ku-band uplink units, HD and SD fiber-encoding packages, fiber-optic feeds, satellite space, International teleport services, and on-site management for all four locations.

“With all the memorable story lines going into Super Bowl XLIV combined with the awesome power of the NFL, we are thrilled with this rating, and I am extremely proud of the way the entire CBS Television Network produced, sold, and promoted the most-watched television show in history,” says Sean McManus, president of CBS News and Sports.

The CBS Television Network’s coverage of Super Bowl XLIV earned an average fast national household rating/share of 45.0/68, up 7% from last year’s 42.0/64 (Pittsburgh-Arizona), making it the highest-rated Super Bowl in 14 years (1/28/96; 46.0/68; Dallas-Pittsburgh).

Sunday night’s Super Bowl HH rating/share peaked at a 48.5/70 from 9:00-9:30 p.m., with an average of 114.1 million viewers.

Nielsen estimates that CBS’s coverage of Super Bowl XLIV was seen in-all-or par by 153.4 million viewers, 1% higher than last year’s previous high of 151.6 million (NBC).

In advance of the 2009 season, Sun Life Stadium implemented Cisco Stadium Vision; an end-to-end video and digital content-distribution solution that delivers live HD game video, advertising, and customized content to displays around the facility. Using Cisco StadiumVision, Sportvision and Cisco teamed up to deliver new graphic effects and content for Sun Life Stadium’s plethora of displays, including the Yellow 1st & Ten Line, Down & Distance, Synthetic Video, and Feature Tracker technologies.

“We are excited to collaborate with Cisco and combine our assets to deliver an enriched experience for all fans [in attendance at] the Super Bowl,” says Hank Adams, CEO of Sportvision.  “While our graphics have become part of the fabric of network telecasts, this marks the first time that fans in venue [were] treated to this level of compelling game content.”

Luxury suite guests at the Super Bowl were treated to two new channels. The first channel displayed live effects seen on the network broadcast, including the Yellow 1st & Ten Line and Down & Distance graphics, while the second served as a replay channel, integrating Sportvision’s Feature Tracker & Synthetic Video effects to offer replays of key plays throughout the game.

Feature Tracker is an advanced tracking and data gathering tool, which combines a 2-D graphic with 3-D player trails, offering relevant performance data, such as a player’s speed, total distance traveled, and separation distance from other players. The Synthetic Video System essentially recreates replays in a full 360 degrees Virtual Environment, enabling fans to see a key play from multiple angles and revealing how a play developed and breakdowns in coverage.

A result of the slow economy as well as NBC’s growing technological capabilities, the network will use 1,000 less crew members than it did four years ago in Salt Lake City and an International Broadcast Center (IBC) that is a third smaller.

For the full Broadcasting & Cable story, click here.