Importing quality: ESPN on bringing the American gold standard of NBA production to France for All-Access Paris By Heather McLean Friday, January 24, 2025 - 12:15
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ESPN's NBA All-Access Paris 2025 is ready to roll from the French capital
In Paris this weekend, NBA fans are all set to enjoy ESPN's All-Access Paris 2025, where behind the scenes content of the San Antonio Spurs and Indiana Pacers visit to the French capital, as well as exclusive content from the match being played between the two teams on Saturday 25 January, is being made available.
ESPN is making sure that its workflow and key technologies, such as its Above the Rim cameras, match up with its regular standards of production in the US so that fans in America and globally can see the quality on screen that they have come to expect.
On the workflow for this event, ESPN is ensuring the highest quality content is created and transmitted back to the US. The NBA World feed is being produced using ESPN's REMCO on site production model, which it defines as having production hardware on location, and machine control set up to send content straight back to ESPN's base in Bristol, Connecticut.
Meanwhile the ESPN feed is a REMI production model, produced and integrated from a Bristol, Connecticut-based control room.
The broadcast compound for the NBA and ESPN Paris production
REMCO and REMI
Speaking from Paris shortly before the first game that played out on Thursday 23 January, Okuno tells SVG Europe: What we decided to do for the world feed is what we call at home our REMCO model, which is basically production on site. Just like before pre-COVID, everybody's on site doing a production inside the OB truck.
Read more Basketball extravaganza: Bringing the NBA's San Antonio Spurs and Indiana Pacers to global viewers in ESPN's production of All-Access Paris
Meanwhile the production model for the ESPN show is we're sharing the world feed truck, but we're using a REMI model, which means we're sending isolated feeds back to ESPN in Bristol, Connecticut. We have a control room there that's integrating all of our feeds; we have eight feeds and we're putting it all together and they will put out the final show.
What we try to do is try to keep everything from the United States, all our workflows and all of our transmissions and everything else. We wanted to keep it identical so that the learning curve for crew was very small, but we had to make sure that the connectivity from Paris back to the United States was robust and I think we're in a good spot with that right now
The production REMCO workflow is saving ESPN valuable milliseconds of latency. Okuno states: This is the beauty of the collaboration of ESPN and NBA is that and I don't think this has really been done before on the NBA side is that the world feed truck is creating that world feed, it's creating a clean feed, but it's also simultaneously creating an ESPN feed and that ESPN feed basically has all the ESPN logos, the bug, the replay, wipe, all the branded elements of ESPN for NBA games. We're able to do that because our crew, our production folks, are in the control room, so we're able to simultaneously create this feed, which is going to be fantastic, I believe, because we get the quality of the world feed, but it is our ESPN branding.
Our integration control room in Bristol will take all these feeds, glue it all together, plus also take care of the ESPN business in the States so the world feed does what it needs to do.
Hand in hand
ESPN has imported key members of its crew from the US, as well as specific technologies and its preferred workflow, to ensure that the production from Paris is up to the same standard as its US-based NBA productions. Its technical services provider for the production is AMP Visual TV.
Explains Okuno: The NBA has partnered with ESPN, the United States broadcast rights holder, to produce the world feed simultaneously because ESPN is the domestic rights holder for the Paris Games event on Saturday only [not for game one]. So ESPN's producer, ESPN's director, and many ESPN senior lead people flew over from the United States to take key positions, and, along with AMP Visual's crew and OB truck, we are working together hand in hand with to create this world feed [for both games].
ESPN's Above The Rim camera point of view provides audiences at home the opportunity to watch the game from above, with robotic cameras located directly above each basket with full coverage of both ends of the court
He goes on: We are creating up to 19 transmission paths from the mobile unit for all of the feeds. ESPN has brought our REMI technologies over from the States to here, to have consistency in our workflows and our technical workflows. We also are doing file transfer with Tata Communications; they're providing that connection between Paris and back to ESPN and the NBA in the US, and to all of our broadcast rights holders.
Read more Intense detail: Bringing the NBA from Paris to the world with a collaboration between the NBA, ESPN and AMP Visual
Solutions from Creative Mobile Solutions (CMSI) from the US are connected to ESPN's Paris ENG teams and the OB truck to manage, transcode and transport content to and from ESPN in Bristol, Connecticut, and the NBA headquarters in Secaucus, New Jersey.
What we try to do is try to keep everything from the United States, all our workflows and all of our transmissions and everything else, Okuno adds. We wanted to keep it identical so that the learning curve for crew was very small, but we had to make sure that the connectivity from Paris back to the United States was robust and I think we're in a good spot with that right now.
On site in Paris there are three other broadcast ri
