Game Creek's Jason Taubman, Keith Martin Go Inside New Flagship' Mobile Unit's Innovations Ahead of NBA Finals The new mobile unit will make its big-event debut at the NBA Finals By Ken Kerschbaumer Wednesday, May 14, 2025 - 2:07 pm
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The NBA Finals are just around the corner for ESPN, and this year's series will be the first big-time event for Game Creek Video's latest production system to shine. Three-truck Flagship won't take full advantage of its firepower until later this year, when it will be at the center of ESPN's Monday Night Football coverage, but the NBA Finals will demonstrate its flexibility to scale up and down to deliver for big-time events.
Earning ESPN's trust to provide facilities for these signature productions is huge for Game Creek Video, says Jason Taubman, SVP, technology, Game Creek Video. We don't underestimate the responsibility we have to execute at the highest level. We worked closely with ESPN's remote-operations team on this build, and it has been a project easily a year and a half in the making.
Game Creek Video's Flagship production unit will make its major-event debut for ESPN at the NBA Finals next month.
The result is a three-truck production system that builds off previous Game Creek Video production units - Encore, Hollywood, Prime One - but also innovates to better meet ESPN demands and reflect the evolution of technology, in particular IP and routing.
ESPN, for their part, brought their own ideas, says Taubman. They wanted a smaller system. They wanted a Riedel intercom. We talked about a lot of different truck-layout concepts, but, ultimately, what we found was that the designs we had used previously put us in the best spot to iterate quickly: we already know the designs and the weight capacity and capabilities of the trailers in those designs.
At the center of the three-truck system (which can also operate fully with only two trucks) is an evolution in how Game Creek Video's Systems Architecture team builds an ST 2110 IP infrastructure, in this case based on an Arista and Lawo backbone. The IP routing system runs on a collection of 7500R3 Arista modular switches, all 400-Gbps-capable: a 7512 switch for the A unit, 7504 switches for the B and C units. And Lawo's HOME IP video-management platform manages the ST 2110 network as well as the interoperability of all the various devices throughout Flagship. In addition, Lawo's VSM broadcast-control system manages all production devices and broadcast systems, HOME Apps process all the multiviewers, and Power Cores provide complete audio IO (an Adder KVM is also all-IP and on the same IP network).
The Flagship front-bench area in the A unit has full-UHD monitoring and a Grass Valley K-Frame SXP 192 96 fully IP switcher.
We're leaning heavily into the network infrastructure, says Taubman. This is the first truck where we went all-in on IP with systems like the Riedel intercom, which ESPN really wanted. Intercom was one of the last pieces of the puzzle that wasn't sitting on the network with everything else.
Keith Martin, director, technology, Game Creek Video, notes that continued reliance on IP is getting easier especially as the design team (and the industry in general) becomes more familiar with NMOS (Networked Media Open Specifications, which improves interoperability for systems on a network) and how to make sure third-party interoperability is nailed down.
NMOS has allowed us to go after best-of-breed solutions for specific products, target those, and implement them into the system, he explains. We have full control of device integration, and the overall system is also more rapidly scalable because there isn't a time penalty to having to manually build things out.
The biggest evolution with respect to IP, Martin says, is on the input/output side of the truck, where historically those IOs were very fixed to the sides and back of the truck. Flagship introduces flexibility by allowing portions of the IO to be removed and deployed elsewhere: on the sideline, at a remote studio, in the broadcast booth, even on another Game Creek truck located on another side of the stadium.
You can move it to any location where you want to extend baseband video, and it can be any distance, he says. You just need two strands of fiber.
Adds Taubman, This is the first time we're letting the ST 2110 media network escape the boundaries of the truck, and we're also eliminating a lot of physical baseband IO. We're exposing it elsewhere and letting it exist outside the truck, with the explicit intention of removing baseband wherever we can at the side of the truck and providing a networked way to extend the capability of the truck to anywhere we need it to go.
The new IP philosophy also allows Flagship to eliminate about two-thirds of the baseband IO on the back of the truck and, in turn, the weight, which was a big goal for ESPN. ESPN wanted to reduce the number of trucks in the compound, says Taubman. To achieve that, we needed to consolidate, and weight reduction was key to that. The lighter the trucks, the more equipment they can carry, and ultimately that means fewer trucks and the ability to shrink the compound.
IP also provides a lot of flexibility with respect to how the A, B, and C units are managed, based on the size of the production. The A unit is the engine room and features Lawo VSM/.Edge/Home orchestration, a Grass Valley K-Frame SXP 192 96 fully IP switcher, two audio rooms (each with its own Calrec Argo Q console), up to 20 EVS XT VIA replay servers, 384 paths of Cobalt Indigo UDX, Adder IP KVM, and a camera-control-unit area that can handle up to 40 cameras. The truck is currently on the road with 15 Sony HDC-5500 cameras with Canon glass - 122
