Live From the 2019 FIFA Women's World Cup: Kevin Callahan Reflects on Solid Fox Sports Planning, Execution Network basks in the glow of another run by the USWNT By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director
Sunday, July 7, 2019 - 9:15 am
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The Fox Sports technical and production plan for the 2019 FIFA Women's World Cup took years to pull together and months to make a reality. Later this afternoon it comes to an end as the U.S. and the Netherlands face off in the Final. And while many of the Fox Sports team has had their hearts and minds focused on their hometown of Los Angeles with the recent earthquakes today they will put all their energy on making sure soccer fans at home get all the information they need to cheer on team U.S.A. Kevin Callahan, director of technical operations, World Cup, Fox Sports, sat down with SVG's Ken Kerschbaumer to discuss this year's effort, the lessons, and the successes.
Kevin Callahan (left) and Gabe Nucci, Fox Sports, engineering manager for the World Cup IBC, inside the Fox quality control room at the IBC.
How have things been going here in France?
I'd say everything has gone according to plan and the team has done a fantastic job. We've used more host services than we have in the past, which has been refreshing. I think that we picked the right commentators to do that with who are used to [calling a match off tube] and I would say that, as a result, there's no degradation in quality of the product. We've had matches where we haven't had venue kits out and it changes our communications a little bit, but it goes to the flexibility where we've built it into the system so that we can make changes at a moment's notice.
How have a couple of the big changes and improvements worked out? What are some highlights?
A big change that we did this year was we've moved to [hitless redundancy] on our transmission paths. That's been a game-changer for us. We haven't been without our fiber cuts, and I love playing the game of, Where is today's latest back-home incident? but it's been seamless on-air. It's been seamless to us. The biggest effect that we've seen is that depending on where the fiber has been cut, we'll lose our IPTV contribution from Los Angeles, and that's because of the way we decided to route certain things. It's easier not to let that traffic go on the backup.
Fiber connectivity plays a role in everything from hitless transmission paths to video and audio signal transport and even file transfers.
I guess that was a result of conversations with CenturyLink?
Yeah. We talked with CenturyLink about it. It was really a design consideration that the way that the building is set up in LA, we were always feeding two different sources in. Last year, we had a couple of different times when we were down to our last backup. We weren't using a hitless merge situation, we were using dynamic routing. This year, everything is statically routed. We have a north path and a south path, and it stays that way. The backup for the hitless merge is on the other path.
How are signals being sent back?
We have basically four copies of everything getting into LA, and then two copies come out and go into the system. It's constantly going through, essentially, a voting process as to where it's getting each packet from; if it's coming from the north path or the south path. If a packet is missing from the south path, it'll grab it from the north path.
That fiber connectivity is obviously the key to things like at-home or production anywhere. How does that change the conversation with a backhaul services provider?
It's part of the reason why we went with all protected services this year. The video itself is hitless merge, and the true data is protected the same way with a primary and a backup and a north and south path. We're at the point where we need that old AT&T, Bell Labs, five-nines of reliability. Everything, our whole show, essentially, is now on that. Like I said, our entire tape room is in Los Angeles. It would be like if you cut the fiber to the B unit on a traditional mobile unit, cut the connection to it. We expect that type of reliability.
As for the conversations with vendors, we now have them as part of our design process and they have a more active role. We also now have a network engineer here from the broadcast IT network side of things full time. And we have a third-party company, Beagle Networks, managing the network and the transport. And then we have a member of our IT security team here full-time making sure that none of our links get compromised, and if we do see something weird, that they start investigating right away.
I know one of the things you were looking forward to the most was instant archiving where the feeds are being archived as they occur so that at the end of the match you don't have to do any ingest. What kind of a difference has that made?
It's been fantastic as it allows for much quicker turnaround of pieces, and it gets things directly into edit systems without having to go through, download. And if you know exactly what it is that you're looking for on those feeds, it truly makes it available instantaneously.The auto-archive that we've been doing separate from the Aspera FASP stream has saved five hours a day here of archiving. It's auto-archiving everything as the match is going on. As it's being written here, it's also being written into AWS, Last year, because of that compressed timeline, it would write to the storage here, and then overnight, we would go ahead and move everything up to AWS.
One of the big reasons why we have to do that is we're operating here at 1080p50. Our edit base in Los Angeles are operating at 1080p50. All of the circuits that
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Live From the 2019 FIFA Women's World Cup: Kevin Callahan Reflects on Solid Fox Sports Planning, Execution Network basks in the glow of another run by the USWNT By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director 
