ITV Streaming Audio Helps ESPN Cover Five Courts at Once
By Dan Daley, Audio Editor
For those who want to see more than one US Open court at a time, ESPN’s ESPN3.com ITV is the way to go. The network’s streaming channel is covering as many as five courts simultaneously, and ITV senior audio mixer Steve Fisher is creating the audio mixes for all of them and sending them to both ITV and DIRECTV (for which he also integrates its commercial breaks).
The feed from five US Open courts is fed to DIRECTV, as well as to ESPN3.com
He’s working out of Bexel Broadcast Services’ BBS1 truck shell, mixing on a Calrec Omega and monitoring through Genelec 8030A speakers.
Fisher takes in the effects sound feed from the international host broadcaster and mixes the natural sound from each court in with one of five pairs of announcers in portable booths set up courtside. In the process, he is creating the template for the harried-mixer model of the future, as sports broadcasting increasingly migrates to the Web.
A survey of 1,000 U.S. consumers conducted by consumer-electronics shopping site Retrevo showed that the majority of Americans — 64%, according to the survey results — get at least some of their TV content online. Eight percent of respondents said they watch most of their TV shows online, and 5% watch television programs only on the Internet. For people under 25, almost a quarter of respondents said they watch most of their TV shows online, and 6% said they watch TV only online.
“Right now, this is content that wasn’t previously available,” says Fisher. “But you can see how this is going to become the norm for some people in the future.”
This year’s US Open was complicated by the arrival in the New York metro area of Tropical Storm Irene the weekend before Opening Day. Instead of nearly two full days of setup, Fisher found himself with barely a few hours on Sunday before the matches began the next morning. To get some of that back, he deployed a Lance Designs ADX-120 Announce unit, which provides inputs for a headset microphone and IFB, two-channel wet PLs (i.e., private phone lines using power on the intercom and IFB circuit), and an additional mic or line input, plus an additional two-channel wet or dry IFB, in a single unit.
“It’s a cost-effective method of connecting an announce booth with fiber without additional components, while providing the highest-quality audio,” Fisher says.
A pair of Lance Designs ADX-120s provided [capabilities] for the Court 17 announce booth; the other courts remained connected via existing copper or point-to-point fiber systems (including the Telecast Adder system), and Fisher says that being able to compare the two modes side by side convinces him that fiber, with the Lance system, is the way streaming remotes are going to have to move, especially if the weather continues to trend towards the volatile.
“I got the Lance-connected booths up in about 20 minutes. The copper connections took a couple hours and just sound adequate, and, at the booth end, there is still a lot of wiring and ‘wetting’ of PLs that must be done,” he says, adding that he’s proposing to move all streamed audio for the US Open next year to fiber connectivity. “We’re going to need new tool sets to deal with the kind of volume that streaming sports is going to demand.”