TranSPORT 2017: At-Home Production Has Arrived. Now What? As the at-home model grows, connectivity and data-transfer requirements are exploding By Jason Dachman, Chief Editor
Friday, October 27, 2017 - 4:01 pm
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Whether you call it at-home, home-run, REMI, mic'ers, or - as the Europeans do - remote production, one fact is clear: the concept of using facilities and crew at your broadcast center to aid in production of live sports shows in the field is skyrocketing. As the number of at-home productions rises exponentially, demand for reliable connectivity and tools for data transfer between the remote production and the fixed facility back home is exploding.
A panel at SVG's TranSPORT conference in New York last week addressed the at-home-production phenomenon, with leaders from Big Ten Network, Fox Sports, Pac-12 Networks, NBC Sports/Olympics, Aldea Solutions, and The Switch. Much of the discussion - led by Chris Connolly, senior director, transmission engineering and operations, NBC Sports Group - focused on the risk vs. reward of deploying the at-home production model.
Fox Sports' Mike Davies (center) speaks as (from left) The Switch's Scott Beers, Aldea Solutions' Lionel Bentolila, and Big Ten Network's Wes Goldstein look on.
The risk/reward discussion is interesting, said Pac 12 Networks VP of Production Operations and Technology Michael Harabin. [Some have said] these are very risky productions and things are going to go wrong. But we just counted up the single points of failure and determined that there were far more possible things that could go wrong on a regular production than on a remote production, where we have our best engineers in-house, multiple pieces of equipment to back up. We just found it to be much more secure - including the transmission - than a regular production.
When you see all these trucks pulling in [for large multitruck productions] , he concluded, it's like you're looking at dinosaurs moving around.
College Conference Nets Leading the Way
Big Ten Network and Pac-12 Networks have largely led the way when it comes to at-home production: BTN launched its first at-home shows in 2009, Pac-12 immediately after its launch in 2012. This year, BTN and Pac-12 will produce 600 events (including 12 football games) and 415 events (including three football games), respectively, using the at-home model.
At-home production has allowed BTN to significantly increase the number of events it is able to produce overall, growing its slate of live productions from 400 when the network launched in 2007 to 600+ events.
Doing at-homes has allowed us to produce more events live, especially Olympic [sports], said Wes Goldstein, director of engineering, Big Ten Network/Fox Sports. That growth has [been a result] of being able to produce some of our lower-tiered events, as well as some higher-end events like football. There is no event that we are shying away from at this point.
On the Pac-12 Networks side, Harabin was quick to note that, although many of these at-home productions are lower-profile sports, they are still provided rather sizable production complements, including five cameras, two channels of EVS replay, and 16 channels of audio for 5.1 surround sound.
These may be smaller sports, but they are still produced in a very big way. Just because it's an at-home doesn't mean it's diminished in any way, he pointed out. We have a number of smaller productions that sometimes deserve [more equipment], and, if we have to fly that equipment and crew out or rent it from our vendors, we would never allocate that complement of equipment against that event. But having it all in San Francisco, if we get to January and our conference No. 1 is playing No. 2 [in basketball], we may want to allocate another EVS operator or enhanced graphics. So we are able to add production value that we would never be able to justify before [for these events].
Both BTN and Pac-12 have the benefit of dedicated IP networks (built on Internet2) connecting their broadcast center (BTN in Chicago, Pac-12 in San Francisco) with all the college campuses and venues in their respective conferences. This offers an invaluable advantage over other sports broadcasters (Fox Sports SVP, Technical and Field Operations, Mike Davies joked, We call it cheating. ), which must coordinate connectivity to the broadcast center for every single at-home production.
We have that as our advantage, said Goldstein, but the disadvantage is, we are always fighting all of the other content going on this network. These networks aren't specifically for us; they were put in place to be research networks. We are always trying to find better ways of compression. Trying to get 10 cameras back to Chicago over 500 megs is a challenge. So utilizing H.264 technology and anything that comes down the road is something that we're always looking at.
At-Home Rule #1: Consistency Is Key
Fox Sports produces a number of events using its home-run (its term) production model, from lower-profile events on its FS1 and FS2 cable channels to onsite studio shows at larger events to digital needs on massive shows like U.S. Open golf, where it used BTN's Chicago facility (Fox owns 51% of BTN) to produce all its live-streaming content (Featured Group, Featured Holes, etc.). In those experiences, Fox is quickly learning that deploying consistent facilities across these productions is integral to success.
I would say the biggest challenge in home-run production is communications and audio, said Davies. Sending back video is fairly straightforward, but the complexity of interfacing a communications system between two points can be your undoing many times. I think coming up with a recipe for consistency in your facilities [is key] so that you&
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TranSPORT 2017: At-Home Production Has Arrived. Now What? As the at-home model grows, connectivity and data-transfer requirements are exploding By Jason Dachman, Chief Editor 
