Temple Athletics Enters New Era With In-House Control Room for Live Streaming Built around Ross Video gear, the facility powers live production for ESPN+ By Brandon Costa, Director of Digital
Tuesday, May 4, 2021 - 2:54 pm
Print This Story | Subscribe
Story Highlights
For Kevin Hession, director, video production/broadcast engineer, Athletics Department, Temple University, it was an offer he couldn't refuse.
In fall 2019, he was happily producing live events in the ultra-busy (at the time) Ivy League for Brown University. But, when Kevin Copp, associate athletic director, video production, Temple - a former Ivy League colleague - came calling with an opportunity to oversee construction of a brand-new control room, how could he possibly say no?
Temple University's brand-new centralized control room in Liacouras Center supports live-streaming production to the AAC's media-rights partner, ESPN.
A move down I-95, a global pandemic, and a speedy integration later, Hession and his team of three full-time video-production professionals are ensconced in their new control room, delivering a wealth of live coverage of Owl sports to ESPN
This is an opportunity to bring more in-depth coverage of Temple's athletics programs than our alumni and fanbase may traditionally be used to, says Hession. We have a solid team here now, and we're starting to put some miles on this thing. We needed to do this, and this was an opportunity that I couldn't pass up.
The control room, which takes up space previously occupied by a storage room in Temple's primary basketball venue, Liacouras Center, and can produce live broadcasts of multiple sports from three athletics facilities on campus. In addition to Liacouras Center, the control room is connected via 24 strands of fiber to McGonigle Hall across the street (courtesy of the Temple University IT Department) and by NDI cloud through internet connection provided by Comcast to the Temple Sports Complex, which is about a half mile down the road.
Construction began in earnest in fall 2019 when Hession came on board, but it hit a significant roadblock when the COVID-19 pandemic shut down collegiate athletics in March 2020. The goal had been to have a control room operational for the start of the 2020-21 academic year, which is when the American Athletic Conference's media-rights agreement with ESPN would deliver live sports coverage to the rapidly growing ESPN+ streaming platform.
Integrated by Alpha Video, Temple's new control room is built around a core of gear from Ross Video.
Instead, Liacouras Center became a FEMA overflow center in Philadelphia's fight against the coronavirus, and full integration on the room didn't begin until September.
Working with integration partner Alpha Video, the Temple team built the space in just three months, finishing it five days before its first event: a men's basketball game vs. New Jersey Institute of Technology on Dec. 19.
To go from a storage space to a fully produced in-house men's basketball game in about a year, says Hession. I'm still shocked at how quickly that went.
The control room is built around Ross gear: Ultrix 5RU routing core, Carbonite Ultra production switcher, Carbonite Black 2S 2M/E control panel, a pair of Xpressions (provided by the AAC office to facilitate graphics integration with league media partner ESPN), Abekas Mira+ eight-channel replay system, Yamaha CL3 digital audio-mixing console, and Telex RTS ODIN 64-port intercom matrix.
The gear supports a full-fledged, two-bench primary control room. An additional B-level control room, Hession says, is being constructed in the back. The hope is, having the secondary space will enable simultaneous production of multiple events for live streaming. The need for such ability was emphasized during an extremely busy crossover season this spring, when numerous winter, spring, and rescheduled fall sports overlapped.
After construction and integration that took less than three months, a home men's basketball game on Dec. 19 was the first event produced from the new control room.
In addition to Copp and Hession, Live Production Coordinators Cristian Chavez and Russ Troeller are filling crucial roles as the team looks to make the most of the busy crossover season, delivering live coverage for such sports as men's and women's basketball, men's and women's soccer, field hockey, and women's lacrosse.
According to Hession, things are just getting started. He and the team hope to continue to build out the secondary production space to allow multiple full live productions and to bring even more live coverage to Temple sports in the 2021-22 season, when, hopefully, schedules return to a more traditional cadence.
The main goals are to provide the best coverage possible and to grow that coverage year after year, says Hession. I want to keep it going and keep building. I think Temple and the AAC have given us the tools to accomplish that.
Most recent headlines
05/01/2027
Worlds first 802.15.4ab-UWB chip verified by Calterah and Rohde & Schwarz to be ...
04/08/2026
Dalet, a leading technology and service provider for media-rich organizations, t...
04/07/2026
April 7 2026, 19:00 (PDT) Detective Conan: Fallen Angel of the Highway Opens in...
01/06/2026
In its sixth year, the broadcaster's coverage has become a global brand and ...
01/06/2026
Designed to solve a common problem in broadcasting, the automated workflow detects, identifies, removes, and documents copyrighted music
AudioShake has introdu...
01/06/2026
The sports-analytics company combines its data with proprietary AI to help leagu...
01/06/2026
Category line-up & sponsors announced
Photo: Paul Clarke
The Production Music Awards (PMA) have announced that submissions are now officially open ahead of...
01/06/2026
New hybrid sample/synthesis instrument revealed
Excite Audio have just released the latest instalment in their Evolve series, which has been developed in co...
01/06/2026
Latest TONEX expansion captures three rare vintage amps
The newest addition to IK Multimedia's ever-growing TONEX line-up introduces a set of three incr...
01/06/2026
Musically intelligent soft synth gets upgraded
Scaler Music will be probably be best known to many for their music theory tools, but their product range al...
01/06/2026
SBS confirms its broadcast sponsors for FIFA World Cup 2026
1 June, 2026
Media releases
SBS has secured Hyundai, Hisense, Macca's, Rexona, bet365, Com...
01/06/2026
Rohde & Schwarz Satellite Industry Days 2026 guided by the motto From Earth to ...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Marshall Electronics is showcasing a comprehensive lineup of next-generation POV cameras, purpose-built to power today's connected AV environments, at InfoC...
01/06/2026
Adobe Announces Concept to Vector
Deepa Subramaniam June 1, 2026
0 Comments
One of the biggest frustrations we hear from designers is how difficult it...
01/06/2026
Vampire Feature Night Patrol Graded with DaVinci Resolve Studio
Brie Clayton June 1, 2026
0 Comments
Colorist shapes dark, gritty tone for horror thri...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Mardi 2 juin 14h00
FilmLight (ARRI), 10 rue Ren Boulanger, 75010 Paris
Rejoignez-nous pour d couvrir comment FLAPI (l'API FilmLight) peut transformer e...
01/06/2026
January 6 2026, 05:30 (PST) Dolby Sets the New Standard for Premium Entertainment at CES 2026
Throughout the week, Dolby brings to life the latest innovatio...
31/05/2026
Olivia P rez-Collellmir to Premiere Original Work at Gaud Centennial in Barcelona The Berklee graduate and faculty member will debut her choral symphony with...
31/05/2026
Back to All News
Netflix Wins 15 Awards at the Canadian Screen Awards - See Pho...
31/05/2026
Taiwan is home to more than 500 NVIDIA ecosystem partners. More than 1 million N...
31/05/2026
As factories move from isolated automation to plant-wide intelligence, manufacturers need AI systems that can connect live machine signals, quality systems, wor...
31/05/2026
The NVIDIA AI Cloud ecosystem is accelerating the global buildout of AI factory infrastructure. Partners are expanding capacity to meet growing demand from ente...
30/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
30/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
30/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
30/05/2026
Zero in on one that says yes (and no)
Andy Marken May 29, 2026
0 Comments
Hero image courtesy of Deposit Photos
For content creators the most difficu...
29/05/2026
With InfoComm 2026 just weeks away, NDI is giving attendees plenty of reasons to...
29/05/2026
Reaffirming a partnership that has defined Canadian sports broadcasting since 19...
29/05/2026
Mobile/tablet is No. 2 device for watching TV, suggesting that the sports-production industry needs to take another look at the format
Ring Digital's Sprin...
29/05/2026
Berliner Ensemble, one of Berlin's five major theater companies, has expande...
29/05/2026
Solid State Logic will showcase its new compact, fly-away TCA Tour audio product...
29/05/2026
Gerald (Jerry) Pierce, a pioneering technologist who helped shape the digital transformation of the motion picture industry, passed away last month on April 12 ...
29/05/2026
Paramount+ will be the English-language U.S. home for Barclays Women's Super...
29/05/2026
Further strengthening its virtualisation strategy to fully support broadcasters ...
29/05/2026
Swiss broadcaster Canal Alpha has deployed Harmonic's award-winning, software-based XOS Advanced Media Processor to modernize playout operations across cant...
29/05/2026
PTZOptics will showcase a new generation of intelligent video workflows at InfoComm 2026, June 17-19, Las Vegas. Visitors to booth N8227 will see how PTZOptics ...
29/05/2026
Arizona's Family has launched the Arizona's Family Sports (AZFS) streaming app, a new direct-to-consumer destination for live, local sports. The app is ...
29/05/2026
Starting in 2027, DAZN will be the exclusive home of The Canadian Football Leagu...
29/05/2026
Comcast Business has detailed the advanced network infrastructure it has deploye...
29/05/2026
In two-day event, leaders from academia and industry explored solutions to chall...
29/05/2026
The Basketball Tournament (TBT), now entering their 13th year of competition, ha...
29/05/2026
Roku has launched FOX One as a Premium Subscription on The Roku Channel in the U.S. Roku customers can now subscribe to FOX One using their Roku account for liv...
Temple Athletics Enters New Era With In-House Control Room for Live Streaming Built around Ross Video gear, the facility powers live production for ESPN+ By Brandon Costa, Director of Digital 
