New Broadcast-Control Rooms at UTSA Reflect College Sports' New Media Realities Added capabilities support American Athletic Conference production mandates By Dan Daley, Audio Editor
Tuesday, May 14, 2024 - 7:00 am
Print This Story | Subscribe
Story Highlights
College sports is looking and sounding increasingly like what viewers consume watching major leagues on national broadcast networks. The growing sophistication and capabilities of rapidly growing university-based production facilities reflect a combination of dynamics: the Moore's Law effect (increased digital-technology power with declining costs), the use of broadcast sports as part of recruitment and outreach strategies in the face of double-digit decreases in four-year-school enrollments, and college sports-conference mandates increasing the minimum number of annual productions by member schools.
UTSA's Katie Meyers: [Pandemic-related delay] made it a little bit of a challenge to try to get current, but everything we have now is basically the current model.
What the enhanced technology can allow schools to accomplish is remarkable. For instance, live game broadcasts by University of Texas San Antonio (UTSA) Athletics last March launched two state-of-the-art broadcast-control rooms inside its Roadrunner Athletics Center of Excellence.
The new control rooms, built and fitted out at a cost of $5 million-plus, will allow UTSA Athletics to produce high-quality live productions that meet the standards set forth by the American Athletic Conference and ESPN. The new broadcast-control rooms will produce ESPN+ broadcasts or streaming for all UTSA men's and women's basketball home-game broadcasts, as well as the majority of home-game broadcasts for baseball, soccer, softball, and volleyball. The control rooms will also be used for live videoboard productions at events in the Convocation Center.
Completing the broadcast-production project was no small feat, says Assistant Athletics Director, Creative Services, Katie Meyers, who oversees broadcast production for UTSA Athletics. It took more than two years of planning and execution by a number of parties: UTSA Athletics, the American Conference, ESPN, as well as our external partners who assisted us in the build and execution of the physical control room and the elements in our facilities.
By the conclusion of the 2023-24 academic year, UTSA Athletics will have produced nearly 70 live broadcasts, both internally and in conjunction with Jeff Watts Productions, which previously handled UTSA's sports-broadcast productions. UTSA Athletics expects to produce more than 100 live events annually through the new broadcast-control rooms.
The Technical Package The new facilities deploy Ross video-production platforms: Mira replay units, Ultrix routers, Xpression for graphics, a Tria for clip playback, and two Ross switchers. Audio gear - a Yamaha QL5 board as the main audio console, a smaller Yamaha DM3-D board for pass-throughs and Jumbotron shows - rides on a Dante network. The packages were provided by Dallas-based integrator Digital Resources, which built the facilities, designed over the past three years by a series of staff directors during that period.
USTA's Elliott Griesen oversees day-to-day operations of the athletics department's broadcast and videoboard productions.
A live broadcast is produced by a 12-person freelance staff: a play-by-play announcer, color analyst, producer, director, broadcast engineer, graphics operator, replay operator, camera shader, three camera operators, and an audio engineer. Having joined the staff on April 22, Director, Sports Production, Elliott Griesen oversees the day-to-day operations of UTSA Athletics' live broadcast and videoboard productions.
This all started in about 2020, so it has been a 3 -year process, partly interrupted by the pandemic, says Meyers. The delay, she adds, affected technology choices - positively, as it turns out - as platforms changed and evolved during that time: It made it a little bit of a challenge to try to get current, but everything we have now is basically the current model. Ordering in 2020, 2021, everything was very much delayed, which kind of helped us in the long run to get the newer models.
Staffing Challenges An ongoing challenge for collegiate sports-production facilities is staffing, one exacerbated as the production-output scale increases. Obliged by the American Athletic Conference to produce a minimum of 50 games other than football and basketball annually and expected to produce 100 or more shows a year going forward, the school - in its first year as a member - had to hit the ground running after its March 16 opening. (ESPN's minimum production requirements have been a challenge since the SEC and ACC Networks were founded in 2014 and 2019, respectively.)
At the moment, Meyers says, the facilities are between 15% and 20% student-staffed, with the rest handled by freelancers. However, journeyman broadcast technicians are not easy to find and keep these days.
Probably my biggest challenge getting the studio up and running was to just find [staff], she notes. A lot of the students we talk to want to be on camera and not behind the camera. It has been a struggle to find people that are interested in doing this. A lot of the people that worked with us also work with the [NBA] Spurs, so, when there were conflicts with those games, it was definitely a challenge to find 11 people to run a show.
Currently 15%-20% student-staffed, University of Texas San Antonio Athletics productions target 100% student-run by the end of the 2024-25 season.
Another big challenge was that the facility very rarely had the same people every day for every game, resulting, Meyers says, in a sometimes inconsistent outcome. The goal by the end of the 2024-25 season, she says
Most recent headlines
11/12/2025
Dalet, a leading provider of cloud-native, end-to-end media workflow solutions, ...
20/11/2025
LONDON The winners of the Rise Awards 2025, which recognize women and companies whose achievements have stood out in the media technology industry, have been an...
20/11/2025
SANTA MONICA & NEW YORK Lionsgate's Worldwide Television Distribution Group and Debmar-Mercury have launched MovieSphere Gold in more than 30 million homes....
20/11/2025
ALAMEDA, Calif. Clear-Com has introduced its four-channel HelixNet beltpack, a next-generation advancement of its widely used two-channel model, and anticipates...
20/11/2025
NEW PROVIDENCE, N.J. Streaming technology and services provider Kiswe has launched Kiswe Core, a next-generation cloud-based platform designed to simplify the s...
20/11/2025
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. Dolby Laboratories has signed on as an official signature partner of the Bay Area Host Committee (BAHC) for the 2026 Super Bowl and the we...
20/11/2025
STUTTGART, Germany 3 Screen Solutions (3SS) has announced that the Canadian multiservice operator Telus has launched its Telus TV+ entertainment platform on Sam...
20/11/2025
Major League Baseball has announced deals with ESPN, NBCUniversal and Netflix covering 2026-2028 that make ESPN the exclusive rightsholder of MLB.TV, see regula...
20/11/2025
Berklee Presents Holiday Extravaganza: Duke Ellingtons The Nutcracker Suite and ...
19/11/2025
Sphere Sound Kicks Up Its Heels at Radio City Music HallUltra-immersive system from the singular Las Vegas venue is also ready for sportsBy Dan Daley, Audio Edi...
19/11/2025
The Future of Stadium and Arena Video Control Rooms: Tech Leaders Talk 4K, IP, a...
19/11/2025
One Year at Intuit Dome: Walking Through the Stunning Arena's Advanced Video...
19/11/2025
SVG Sit-Down: IMG's Francois Westcombe Goes Inside IMG's Annual Digital ...
19/11/2025
Inside Brighton & Hove Albion's fan-first media machine By George Bevir
Tuesday, November 18, 2025 - 10:10
Print This Story
Brighton & Hove Albion'...
19/11/2025
Rock Chalk Rebuild, Part 1: Kansas Athletics Brings New Production Power to Rebu...
19/11/2025
Rock Chalk Rebuild, Part 2: A Pro's Guide to Kansas Athletics' New Video...
19/11/2025
MLB Media Rights Shakeup: NBC Inks Three-Year Deal for Sunday Night Baseball, Pe...
19/11/2025
Rohan Parashuram Kanawade attends the premiere of Sabar Bonda (Cactus Pears) at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival at Egyptian Theatre on January 26, 2025, in Pa...
19/11/2025
Awards season is heating up, and the International Documentary Association just ...
19/11/2025
Aerojet Rocketdyne President Ken Bedingfield and Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders were joined by state and local officials to celebrate the groundbreaking o...
19/11/2025
L3Harris and PentenAmio formalise their teaming agreement at MilCIS 2025, streng...
19/11/2025
Calrec gives Phoenix Broadcast Solutions its full support in strategic multi-year enterprise partnership New Singapore OB company invests in Calrec technology f...
19/11/2025
October brings a larger audience in front of TV screens. The cooler autumn weather and the continuation of new programming schedules brought increases in both t...
19/11/2025
IRVING, Texas Nexstar Media Group and Tegna filed applications on Nov. 18 with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) seeking its consent to transfer broad...
19/11/2025
Vitec has acquired Datapath, a developer of real-time video processing for large-scale video walls, AVoIP content distribution and KVM control in mission-critic...
19/11/2025
NEVADA CITY, Calif. Telestream has introduced ARGUS Version 2.3, which introduces Live Look, a feature that lets operators inspect live and on-demand streams vi...
19/11/2025
STAMFORD, Conn. and NEW YORK Charter Communications, Inc. has announced a major deal with Amazon Web Services (AWS) that establishes AWS as one of Charters stra...
19/11/2025
TOKYO Atomos has announced a major firmware update that brings integrated camera control to the Ninja TX GO and Ninja TX its new CFexpress-based monitor-recor...
19/11/2025
Berklee's Signature Series Reimagines the Musical and Visual Artistry of Col...
19/11/2025
PlayBox Neo departed the NAB Show New York 2025 on a high note. The company's all-new PlayBox Neo Suite made a splash on the show floor, drawing strong inte...
19/11/2025
AAVBR (American Audio Visual Baton Rouge), a leading full-service event production company serving Louisiana and the Gulf Coast region, has enhanced its product...
19/11/2025
In its mission to deliver live event services combining advanced engineering with a creative approach to captivating live sports and entertainment experiences, ...
19/11/2025
NEW YORK Short-form vertical video has exploded across platforms like TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, but a new survey commissioned by Media.net, a provider of c...
19/11/2025
NEW YORK YES Network, the regional sports network home of the New York Yankees and Brooklyn Nets, and CAMB.AI have struck a partnership they said will leverage ...
19/11/2025
WASHINGTON The Federal Communications Commission has issued detailed guidance on filings that were disrupted by the government shutdown. While many of those fil...
19/11/2025
NEW YORK The popularity of NFL games is largely responsible for continued seasonal momentum in TV viewership into October (measured Sept. 29-Oct. 26), according...
19/11/2025
DirecTV has announced that its MyFree DirecTV streaming service has added seven new channels. Those include four sports services, NBA FAST, Red Bull TV, DAZN Ri...
19/11/2025
SURREY, U.K. Mark Roberts Motion Control (MRMC) has launched Flair Bridge, a compact device that transforms how operators control the company's motion-contr...
19/11/2025
WASHINGTON The Federal Communications Commission, which is continuing to rapidly ramp up its operations after the end of the federal government shutdown, has se...
19/11/2025
IRVING, Texas Nexstar Media Group and Tegna filed applications on Nov. 18 with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) seeking its consent to transfer broad...
19/11/2025
Martin Freeman, Jessie Buckley, Wu-Tang Clan's Raekwon, Eddie the Eagle and ...
19/11/2025
Rohde & Schwarz collaborates with Broadcom to enable testing and validation of n...
19/11/2025
Back to All News
Innato, starring Imanol Arias and Elena Anaya, arrives on Netf...
19/11/2025
Back to All News
Guillermo del Toro Sits Down With Troll 2 Director Roar Uthaug...
19/11/2025
Some projects feel monumental from the moment the first phone call comes in. When BCE, the host broadcaster appointed to coordinate the national coverage, asked...
19/11/2025
November 19 2025, 08:00 (PST) BAY AREA HOST COMMITTEE AND DOLBY PARTNER TO DELIVER IMMERSIVE FAN EXPERIENCES
During the Week of Football's Biggest Game...
19/11/2025
Michael D. Higgins: Ireland's Ninth President features RT Archives footage and interviews across seven decades
Watch Wednesday 19 November at 9:35pm on RT...
19/11/2025
Scripps Research scientists receive $1.1 million to advance AI modeling for HIV vaccine development New AI system helps scientists rapidly pinpoint the most pro...
18/11/2025
Independent media across Central America are operating under intensifying financial pressure, yet there is a clear appetite for models that can sustain both ind...
New Broadcast-Control Rooms at UTSA Reflect College Sports' New Media Realities Added capabilities support American Athletic Conference production mandates By Dan Daley, Audio Editor 
