After 30 Years Globecast Set to Leave Culver City for Four Seasons Westlake By Ken Kerschbaumer
Tuesday, April 11, 2023 - 9:33 am
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For more than 30 years Globecast has called Culver City home, with a 17,000 sq. ft. facility that has satellite dishes, master control rooms, and equipment racks working hard for a wide variety of clients, both national and international. But Eddie Ferraro, Globecast Americas, managing director, and Globecast believe it is time for new digs with more space and a chance to build for the future.
Globecast's move to the Four Seasons in Westlake, CA, will allow for a number of new services for clients.
This facility was just sort of dumped into the middle of LA with a lot of RF capabilities but with 5G and everything else happening in satellite we don't need to be operating a teleport in the middle of Los Angeles, he explains. But we're pretty well embedded here in Los Angeles and we don't want to leave. The ultimate thing is we need the ability to grow efficiently without incurring construction costs.
Finding such a place in the Los Angeles area is not an easy task but Ferraro did that just: the Four Seasons Resort and Spa in Westlake Village. At first blush it doesn't really sound like a good fit, but this is no regular Four Seasons. This is a Four Seasons which has a 21,000 sq. ft. broadcast facility, including a small teleport, a 6,000 sq. ft. studio, and a small sound stage.
Explains Chris Pulis, Globecast, CTO: The new facility becomes a true media center in the terms of the people that know video and our experts are doing all the video manipulation for our customers.
How did a resort and spa manage to have a massive broadcast facility? The owner, David Murdoch (no relation to Rupert), is chairman of Dole Foods and the California Health and Longevity Institute (CHLI). When he built the hotel, he decided to also build a broadcast facility for the CHLI.
The plan was to launch a full-time 24/7 health and wellness channel, says Ferraro. His son, who was supposed to run the channel, was tragically killed in a car accident on the 405 and the whole idea was canned. But there is still a very well-constructed and well-engineered facility that also has a two-antenna teleport on site.
The move will give Globecast a chance to rethink operations, especially with respect to streaming platforms that continue to add more and more sports rights or the possibility of getting into the new remote production workflows.
The configuration of the space allows us to expand our MCR to be able to accommodate more channels and associated operations, says Ferraro. As everything moves into the cloud and/or across fiber networks, we have to have an IP infrastructure that not only supports our customers today; it also supports them tomorrow. This means across developments like UHD, HDR, virtual reality and live event productions, which can include 30 simultaneous source feeds from remote locations. It's a complete paradigm shift and the combination of moving to this new facility and completing our move to IP means we can best serve our customers. An exciting future awaits.
Ferraro says with events like the Olympics and World Cup heading to Los Angeles in the coming years the Globecast facility will be perfect for broadcasters.
I think we can put together a nice solution for broadcasters that come into town for those events, adds Ferraro.
Pulis says the new facility provides an opportunity to begin the move away from HD-SDI as the core switching infrastructure and move towards SMPTE ST-2110 and an IP environment. He says Globecast has been moving to the IP space for several years now and the migration to 2110 away from HD/SDI infrastructure is a needed and logical step.
We need to be in an IP environment, however and that's not something that you easily just switch, he says. But the timing is similar to when we went to the cloud for playout here in Culver City as all of our on-prem systems had reached end of life.
Pulis adds that as Globecast continues pushing into content servicing solutions with added complexity, it will need the flexibility and options provided by standards like SMPTE 2022-6 and 2022-7 to support the increasing complexity of these services.
Synchronization of services such as augmented reality overlays to live events must be done in the IP domain, such as with the Metaverse, so these next-gen technologies will quickly become fundamental, he says.
The Four Seasons teleport will be complemented by a facility in Santa Paula, about an hour drive north of the Four Seasons.
We'll have our key C Band cable program uplinks on site and then occasional use KU band and other things in Santa Paula will be managed remotely, says Ferraro.
The plan will be to keep the Culver City facility and clients fully operational during the transition which will include two investment cycles. The first is new equipment that will propel the migration to IP and the cloud and lay the foundation for business growth. And then there are opportunities around remote production and the studio operations.
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After 30 Years Globecast Set to Leave Culver City for Four Seasons Westlake By Ken Kerschbaumer 
