The longtime production-facilities provider also continues to roll out new mobile units at its Colorado-based facilitiesFor most of the company's history, when people thought of Mobile TV Group, they thought of trucks. For good reason: MTVG's fleet of mobile units has worked tens of thousands of events over more than three decades and helped fuel the rise of the regional-sports-production business. Today, however, its mobile units are just one piece of something much larger.
In recent years, the company has assembled a complete live-production chain. Designated the MTVG Production Platform, it covers onsite production, contribution, media control, and distribution, all anchored at the recently launched Mountain Media Center (MMC) in Centennial, CO.
The Technical Operations Center at Mobile TV Group's new Mountain Media Center It has been a transformative year, says Mobile TV Group CEO Nick Garvin. We've scaled at enormous speed, and it has changed the conversations we have with clients, especially teams and leagues directly. These [clients] need help with the whole ecosystem, and, with the resources and facilities we've built out over the past few years, we can now be the backbone of that ecosystem for them.
The Vision: End the Finger-Pointing
The thinking behind the MTVG Platform derived from the fragmentation across the live-sports-production chain. Distribution, contribution, master control, and production have traditionally been handled by several vendors, creating a complex operational web for broadcasters.
Traditionally, says Garvin, different vendors have handled different pieces of the production puzzle. But, over the last five or six years, we have seen these pieces begin to meld together, and they need to be controlled by one vendor to be properly optimized.
The simple example I often use is master control and production, he continues. Whenever there's an issue, the finger-pointing begins. One side says, It looks good leaving the mobile unit,' while the other says, Well, we're not receiving it well on our side.' So it's about optimizing a fully managed service for clients to avoid those kinds of situations.
Mobile TV Group unites distribution, contribution, master control, and production at its new Mountain Media Center in Centennial, CO.According to Garvin, these operational issues have multiplied as REMI and cloud-based workflows have grown more popular over the past decade. Having a single vendor oversee the entire production chain reduces potential points of failure. It also creates economies of scale, especially in transmission.
If you want one 10-Gbps [fiber] line from location A to location B, for example, you're going to pay an enormous amount, he points out. But, if you want a thousand of them to every venue 24/7, you start to see pretty solid economies of scale. With the MTVG Platform and our large [roster of] clients, we are able to get economies of scale others simply can't offer.
The Platform: Bringing the Puzzle Pieces Together
Garvin and the technology team at MTVG, including EVP, Engineering, Peter Wehner, have led the charge to make this vision a reality. Their plan brings production, contribution, media control, and centralized production and distribution services together under a single unified platform.
Clients, especially newcomers to the industry [as a result of] all the changes in the regional-sports market, have found it extremely hard to negotiate and optimize all the different aspects that make up a live production, says Garvin. This was a strategy built over the last five years to bring all those pieces together.
One of four Edge/REMI production-control rooms at the Mountain Media CenterOn the content and production side, MTVG deploys and operates onsite production technology, including custom-built mobile units, robotic camera systems, and venue equipment. The company builds its mobile units in-house, handling design, metal fabrication, millwork, and wiring. Its Cloud Control technology supports both centralized and venue-based production. MTVG has built more than 25 Cloud Control rooms across the U.S. and completed more than 4,500 events with it.
For contribution, MTVG manages secure transport of live signals from the venue to the MMC. That work includes booking, management, and encoding/decoding through such carriers as Lumen, AT&T, Verizon, and Zayo.
For media control and centralized production, MTVG operates two technical-operations centers (TOCs) and more than 70 live-event pods. They handle game and ad playout, closed captioning, feed decoration, quality control, cut-downs, as-runs, and 24/7 channel monitoring.
For distribution, the company provides full IP encoding, market switching, transmission management, and content delivery from the MMC to affiliates and streaming services. Infrastructure includes four satellite uplinks, six satellite downlinks, and hundreds of fiber strands from multiple providers.
The platform's first major deployment was Angels Broadcast Television, which MTVG stood up from scratch in one month, ahead of a May 1 debut. The company also provides the full platform for the NHL L.A. Kings, and Garvin says more clients will come online soon.
This centralized Cloud Control room handles graphics, scorebug, and replay operations.Despite the expansion, MTVG has gone vertical only on the technology side. We're not producers or directors; we're technology experts, he notes. We want to empower storytellers so they can be the stars of the show.
We built this at a time, he continues, when many teams and leagues need a full end-to-end technology stack so that they can focus on rights deals, distribution deals, and storytelling. Our job is to let them focus on what's most important to them while we handle the technology in the
