Special Report: Will the Cloud Change Everything for Live Sports Production? By SVG Staff
Monday, November 6, 2023 - 3:23 pm
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The Fall 2023 edition of the SVG SportsTech Journal is now available! Among the plethora of content in this free, digital edition is a special report on cloud production. Live sports productions, particularly smaller shows, have begun to embrace cloud-based productions, whereby camera signals are sent directly into the cloud rather than being cut on site. In this piece, facility providers discuss the latest developments in cloud-based production and how your organization can take the plunge.
The conversation below was conducted during the SVG Remote Production Forum in L.A. earlier this year and features Dave DeBuhr, Account Manager, Professional Networked Solutions Division, Sony Electronics; Michael Kidd, Director of Architecture, Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology; Angus Mackay, Product Marketing Manager, Matrox; Costa Nikols, Global VP of Sales Enablement, Riedel Communications; and Corey Smith, Senior Director, Digital, Software Engineering, CBS Sports and Paramount+.
SVG: Michael, what does the cloud mean for ESPN live production? Michael Kidd, Director of Architecture, Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology
Kidd: That's way too big a question. I'm going to narrow that way down. We're just going to talk about remote production a little bit and we're looking to be able to enable remote production to have more capability, more flexibility, more agility, and more capacity than we've ever had before. Our strategy is looking at the cloud as a part of that solution, whether it's live switching in the cloud or adding cloud aspects of it to a more traditional production. Those pieces are going to help us figure out how we do what all of these events at a quality level that we've come to know and expect.
SVG: Michael, at ESPN you have thousands of some of these events going on. How does the cloud make economic sense? Kidd: I think most of the people in this room have some idea that the notion of remote production means cost savings somewhere, whether we're not sending people to the place or we're not renting as much gear or we're capitalizing some of that. You can only build so much capability to do remote production concurrently.
If you build a room or two you will come to the day where you want to do your third or your fourth production that day and you need a control room from somewhere. And that's where this occasional use/not every day gives you the get out of jail free card to be able to say, yes, we can do this.
Smith: Last Thursday, we had our UEFA soccer - I think it was week two now - but we had 16 different soccer matches happening within a 12-hour period of time. You couldn't build that kind of capacity in a control room situation in a facility because it would be way too much money and because it's occasional use, half the space is going to go dark most of the year.
McKay: We have a customer who in January will go to air with our new framework and so they will be receiving camera signals and switching and applying graphics and then putting it to air in a fully cloud-based system. We feel that the industry expected this to take two to five years.
Kidd: It absolutely works today. That said, the people that you have that know how to make television may not yet know how to make television in the cloud. There are a lot of extra skills. There's a lot of skilling up. You may not have a Dev Ops guy yet but you're going to want a Dev Ops guy. The technology is all there, but there is a little bit of a paradigm shift in terms of the skillset you need to make it work.
SVG: Corey, can you discuss the launch of the Golazo Network? Corey Smith, Senior Director, Digital, Software Engineering, CBS Sports and Paramount+
Smith: Sure. I'm proud to be able to run a technology team that focuses on core television technology that is based in cloud and in April we launched our first digital linear network, called the Golazo Network. This digital linear network is a 100% cloud-based: master control operations, packaging, playout, asset management, clipping captions, distribution is all in the cloud.
We have three different live desk shows every single day that originate out of Stamford, CT, and those shows are basically contributing to the live productions, which are in the cloud. The operators are completely remote. My engineering staff is completely remote. I work out of my house in Orange County, CA, my DevOps guy is in Seattle, my technical PM that actually runs a lot of the day-to-day operations for Golazo Networks is in Austin, TX. So, our operators, engineering staff, and basically the employees of all the things cloud for CBS sports are in a completely distributed model.
The cloud for us is also a way for us not just to do cool and unique things like the Golazo Network, which is a first of a kind soccer network here in the U.S., but it gives us the ability to expand not only our ground-based operations but also our facility-based operations because we're not going to build more control rooms. We're going to migrate a lot of those workloads to the cloud because that's where it financially makes sense. We'll take the workloads that are kind of the common denominator of things, MCR type operations, clipping, editing, cloud-based craft edit, that kind of thing. We're moving a lot of that stuff to cloud, but we're there to support our existing professional sports broadcast engineering crews that go out to all of our NFL games, NCAA games, PGA, and more as they move to hybrid operations.
SVG: Following up, there is a lot of talk around cloud and spinning up and spinning down a service. And it sounds very simple. What ki
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Special Report: Will the Cloud Change Everything for Live Sports Production? By SVG Staff 
