Live From Super Bowl LVI: No Place Like Home for NFL Media as it Tackles Super Bowl Programming, Halftime Show, NFL Honors from Home Facility

Live From Super Bowl LVI: No Place Like Home for NFL Media as it Tackles Super Bowl Programming, Halftime Show, NFL Honors from Home Facility By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director

Saturday, February 12, 2022 - 10:57 am

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The Los Angeles Rams aren't the only ones playing at home this weekend in Super Bowl XLVI. The NFL Network's home production and operations center, NFL West, is located right next door to SoFi Stadium. The 450,000 sq. ft. facility opened in September and with 74,922 sq. ft. of studio and studio support space it gives the NFL Media production team to be more creative this week and the technical team to be more responsive.

(l-to-r) NFL Media's Jessica Lee, Tony Cole, AJ Wainwright, Bruce Goldfeder, and Dave Shaw.

It's one thing to do the Super Bowl, which we do every year from whatever city the Super Bowl is in, says Dave Shaw, NFL Media, VP, head of media operations. But it's another thing to do it from our own facility. We have had some curve balls as there were things we planned for and then other things that were added, like doing the Halftime Show from here and supporting NFL Honors. But our whole team has kept focused and everything we planned is coming through.

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The facility is busy enough during a regular week let alone a Super Bowl week. The NFL West production space houses five stages and six production-control rooms and audio-control rooms that serve the five stages and the podcast studio. The studios are led by the 5,970-sq.-ft. Studio 1, which serves as the primary studio for NFL Total Access, Good Morning Football, and Super Bowl Live this week. On Thursday night a control room produced NFL Honors all told the facility cranked out 90 hours of coverage leading up to Super Bowl Sunday which sees the Network offer up live coverage from 9 am to 5 pm EST and then NFL GameDay Final after the game.

One of the big challenges this week has been accommodating a lot of one-time requests. Jessica Lee, NFL Media, senior director of operations, has been tasked with managing those requests and making them a reality.

When you go around the facility, we have production teams that just want to shoot everywhere because of the decor all over the place, the backdrops of the stadium, and it's just a beautiful place, she says. Whether it's an ENG shoot or an event, everyone just wants to be here as we're so close to the stadium. So, it became a natural thing when our partners were looking for what they wanted to do during Super Bowl week to look here. They're doing events, whether it's football ops doing different events or the social team doing things to service clients or partnerships. That's all the extra stuff that really came with the Super Bowl.

Shaw says managing those requests required a committee to be formed as requests were coming in from all directions.

We kind of sorted them by events that needed to be televised and needed our technical facilities or things like a pure party, he says. It's been a stress but a fun one.

A big part of the facilities capabilities is a result of a COTS IP routing switch featuring the Magellan SDN Orchestrator (SDNO) to manage the mix of SMPTE ST 2110 IP and HD-SDI baseband infrastructure. To serve the various operational needs throughout the building beyond just the video-production portion, the NFL created three separate IP networks at NFL L.A. that interconnect with one another: an IT network for back-office needs, a SMPTE ST 2110 Amber/Blue network for broadcast ops, and a production network that connects to NFL Media's media storage and handles user authentication. The NFL L.A. building also boasts a dual-power A/B plan with UPS and generators with original power backed up by separate city substations.

Bruce Goldfeder, VP, Engineering, NFL Media, says being at the home facility instead of on the road has offered an extra level testing and making sure things were good to go.

We could check all the fibers ahead of time and last week we checked our cameras on everything around the place, says Goldfeder. We're using about 60% of the 1,400 strands of fiber we have as we're supporting a lot of different entities that are cross patching because the stadium did a good job fibering inside the stadium but the only fiber outside the stadium is ours.

Tony Cole, NFL Media, Vice President, Media Operations, says the big advantage of being so close to the actual game site is that when production comes up with a new idea that creates the usual series of technical requests it is easier than ever to fulfill them without having to bring in extra gear.

We have something technically that can match the production needs, he says. Creatively there's hardly anything that they can't request that we haven't been able to respond to and that's pretty d

LINK:	https://www.sportsvideo.org/2022/02/12/live-from-super-bowl-xli-no-pla...
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