SVG Sit-Down: Pac-12 Enterprises' Michael Molinari Says State-of-the-Art Production Facility Is Open for Business' Besides producing OSU and WSU athletics events, the facility is seeking third-party clients By Jason Dachman, Editorial Director, U.S. Thursday, September 19, 2024 - 3:21 pm
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In advance of the 2023-24 college sports season, Pac-12 Networks moved from its longtime home in downtown San Francisco to a new state-of-the-art production facility in nearby San Ramon, CA. The facility was planned prior to the shocking exodus that left just two schools in the Pac-12 Conference: Oregon State and Washington State. Today, the Pac-12 Enterprises operation in San Ramon is not only serving its two member schools (and potentially the four recently announced programs set to join in 2026) but is also seeking out third-party clients that can benefit from the robust production capabilities the fully SMPTE ST 2110 IP facility has to offer.
SVG sat down with Michael Molinari, who was named SVP of business development and studio operations for Pac-12 Enterprises in May, to get an idea of how the facility is being used today. Molinari also discusses potential production plans for additional Pac-12 Conference members, its partnership with The CW for OSU and WSU football, some of the common misconceptions around REMI production, how he's looking to grow the business beyond member-school productions, and what he's most excited about for the 2024-25 Pac-12 athletics season.
Pac-12 Enterprises' Michael Molinari: The charge for the past 12 years was to produce the 850 events for the conference network; now the charge is to create revenue for our schools. It's a more entrepreneurial model.
Let's start with this week's big news. With four schools joining the Pac-12 in 2026, will the Pac-12 Enterprises facility in San Ramon be handling those productions?
Future details will, of course, be determined by members of the Pac-12. What I can tell you is, after recently producing a Colorado State football game from our facilities in San Ramon, we are excited for the possibilities and confident that we can efficiently produce high-quality broadcasts from football to Olympic sports for our future new members.
How does the current Pac-12 Enterprises model differ from the previous Pac-12 Networks operation?
The biggest change is, we've switched from a 24/7 network model to a model where we produce programs for ourselves, our conference's schools, and [third-party clients]. The charge for the past 12 years was to produce the 850 events for the conference network; now the charge is to create revenue for our schools. It's a more entrepreneurial model.
I believe we can increase from those 850 annual events to closer to 2,000 events. First off, after the Pac-12 academic year, the building was closed during the summer for the most part. And the facility was not really operational on Monday and Tuesday because of the way the Pac-12 sports schedules were laid out.
During the pandemic, we had both FS1 and ESPN doing basketball out of our facility via a packager, so we've had a little bit of outside business prior to now. But, for the most part, we've produced our own events. That has all changed now, and we are officially open for business from anyone looking to produce live events efficiently and with high quality.
Pac-12 Enterprises' new San Remo, CA, facility produces traditional REMI shows, from five large-scale control rooms, and software-defined productions, from four SDP control rooms.
As of today, what events are being produced out of the facility?
Right now, we are scheduled to produce about 100 events each for Oregon State and Washington State this [academic] year. In addition, we are producing 11 of the Oregon State and Washington State home football games for CW. Nine of them will be REMI productions from our facility, and two of them will be full onsite-truck games: Purdue-Oregon State [on Sept. 21] and the Washington State-Oregon State matchup [on Nov. 23].
How does the San Ramon facility produce these events remotely?
We have two main types of productions: traditional REMIs, where we bring cameras and audio into a large control room to create the show, and software-defined productions [SDP], which have fewer cameras and use vMix [live-production] software to create the show. Approximately 25-30 of those 200 events for our schools will be full REMI, and the rest will be SDP.
In terms of REMI, we have five large-scale REMI control rooms that can do a production as small as a four-camera basketball game and as large as a 12-camera show with two SSMOs, which we did for the Pac-12 men's basketball tournament the last few years. In that case, we had another control room producing a three-person studio show so the entire event was taking place in Las Vegas with talent onsite, but the actual production was being done back here.
We have four SDP control rooms, and those shows typically have three or four cameras plus a lock off-camera onsite. We have a vMix operator doing the show in San Ramon plus a graphics person. The interesting thing is that the equipment, including the box that everything runs through, is actually onsite at the event. Essentially the entire operation is remoted in from San Ramon, and we get a full program signal from Oregon State and Washington State.
Four centralized control rooms are built around vMix, a software-based vision mixer. Shows run from these rooms can be produced by as few as two operators. (Photo: Pac-12 Networks)
You mentioned the Colorado State football-game production. Can you provide more detail on how that was handled?
Yes, that was really promising and exciting. We produced the Colorado State football game [against Northern Colorado on Sept. 7]
