Behind the Scenes at Sinclair's New Media Operations Center Powering Bally Sports, Marquee Sports, and YES Network Besides a 25,000-sq.-ft. facility, the broadcaster is building its own video network By Jason Dachman, Chief Editor Tuesday, May 25, 2021 - 4:14 pm
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Nearly two years after acquiring 21 Fox RSNs from Disney, Sinclair Broadcast Group officially rebranded them Bally Sports earlier this year. While the rebranding project was among the largest undertakings in the history of the RSN business, Sinclair faces an equally daunting task in building the backend technical infrastructure to replace the Fox RSN master-control center at The Woodlands in Houston, which will revert to Disney control on Aug. 23.
The multichannel monitoring room sits at the center of Sinclair's new Media Operations Center.
To serve the master-control needs of the 19 Bally Sports RSNs as well as YES Network and Marquee Sports Network, Sinclair has erected a 25,000-sq.-ft. SMPTE ST 2110-based Media Operations Center at Encompass Digital Media's headquarters in Atlanta. In addition, the broadcaster is in the process of building a Sinclair Video Network (SVN) to replace Fox's existing VAN (Venue Access Network), which connected all the RSN studios and trucks to venues across the country.
This has been a huge, unbelievable logistical juggling act - not just building the facility but now bringing all the RSNs online with the new [SVN], says Don Roberts, VP, sports engineering and production systems, Sinclair Broadcast Group. And we are on a very tight timeline to get all of this done before the deadline in August. We still have a long way to go, but It's amazing what this group of people has done in an incredibly short period of time without any real drama or hiccups.
Deciding on Encompass The central equipment room houses 84 racks of gear.
After the deal with Disney was finalized, Roberts and his team took two trips to the Woodlands facility to understand the task of replacing it. At that point, Sinclair began exploring two options: building a facility on its own that could replicate the Woodlands workflows for the RSNs or partnering with another organization to create the facility. Given the ultra-short timeline to launch such a robust facility, Sinclair opted to partner with Encompass to create its new Media Operations Center.
We had done some work with Encompass in the past, says Roberts, and they already have our Marquee Sports Network operation there. So we sat down and spent a lot of time with them planning it out, and it was a very collaborative environment.
Sinclair came up with a plan to take over the entire underutilized east wing of Encompass's facility (previously home to Crawford Communications' Satellite Services Division, which Encompass acquired in 2010), providing a 25,000-sq.-ft. canvas on which to create the new Media Operations Center.
There was basically nothing there, says Roberts. We gutted the building and built out what we needed in terms of power and [infrastructure]. It was as close to being a ground-up buildout as you can get without its actually being a new building.
Building an ST 2110 IP Facility Sinclair has built 40 control-room pods (with room for 12 more) to handle individual game feeds.
Encompass and Sinclair tapped Diversified to be system integrator and elected to build a native end-to-end SMPTE ST 2110 facility. IP-based facilities were nothing new for Sinclair, which had just rolled out new ST 2110 studios for Tennis Channel, Marquee Sports Network, and Bally Sports Florida/Bally Sports Sun. These projects gave Sinclair the confidence to move forward with a fully IP-based Media Operations Center in Atlanta.
We certainly could have built an HD-SDI facility, says Roberts, but we needed to put an infrastructure in place that would support 1080p, 4K, and HDR someday and also build for growth and for potential cloud environments and playout workflows. It made sense for us to build an IP facility. It has taken longer, and the cost is a little bit more compared with HD-SDI, but it's not like it was when IP was still a science experiment a few years ago. It has gone very well, and we're really happy with it.
The primary operating area within the Media Operations Center is the multichannel monitoring room (Centralcast), where operators monitor the multitude of feeds coming into master control. Around the outside of this Centralcast room are 52 live-event pods (40 fully equipped, with room to expand to 12 more in the future). Supervisors operate from workstations just outside these pods.
Supervisor workstations oversee the control-room pods.
If the Cincinnati Reds are playing tonight, says Roberts, an operator will occupy one of those smaller rooms and actually switch that [RSN's] feed from there for the duration of the game. When the game is over, that operator goes back out into the main [Centralcast] room.
Inside the central equipment room are 84 racks of gear (a much smaller footprint than what would have been needed for HD-SDI), including 104 Imagine Versio playout servers (10 UHD) controlled by ADC automation and Imagine Magellan SDNO Orchestration and leveraging an Arista red and blue spine-and-leaf IP network. Nevion's Virtuoso software-defined media platform manages 71 channels of IP decoding and 24 channels of encoding with Video iPath control. Among other key gear are 52 Imagine Selenio network processors used for multiformat conversion and multiviewers; two fully redundant C-band transmission chains with Synamedia encoders, muxes, and control; Telestream/Tektronix primary PTP sync with Meinberg backup; and Qligent compliance recording.
We went with a lot of Imagine products that Sinclair has worked with before and are proven for us, says Robe
