Legends Behind the Lens: Pat Sullivan The former NFL GM became one of sports television productions most impactful builders By Brandon Costa, Director of Digital
Thursday, May 21, 2020 - 12:00 pm
Print This Story | Subscribe
Story Highlights
The story of American sports television is engrained in the history of this nation, rising on the achievements of countless incredible men and women who never once appeared on our screens. During this pause in live sports, SVG is proud to present a celebration of this great industry. Legends Behind the Lens is a look at how we got here seen through the people who willed it to be. Each weekday, we will share with you the story of a person whose impact on the sports-television industry is indelible.
Legends Behind the Lens is presented in association with the Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame and the SVG Sports Broadcasting Fund. In these trying times - with so many video-production professionals out of work - we hope that you will consider (if you are able) donating to the Sports Broadcasting Fund. Do so by visiting sportsbroadcastfund.org.
___________________________
By Ken Kerschbaumer
When it comes to careers in the sports industry, it is safe to say that few people have worked in as many aspects of the business as Pat Sullivan, president and founder of Game Creek Video, a company that, over the past 20 years, has become one of the industry's leading production-services providers and innovators.
To begin with, his father, Billy, was the founder of the New England Patriots (then the Boston Patriots), and Sullivan was a ballboy for the first team. After graduating from Boston College in 1976, he actually reported for work at Schaefer Stadium without his father's even knowing he was going to work there.
I showed up at the stadium manager's office, and the manager handed me a broom and rake and told me to go clean up the stadium, recalls Sullivan. And, when my dad asked me what he was having me do, I said I was cleaning the stadium, the offices, and learning how to run the sewage plant.
In 1979, after spending two years managing the stadium, Sullivan became the team's assistant general manager and, in 1983, was promoted to GM, a role he held for seven years during which the Patriots made it to Super Bowl XX.
It was a great experience, he recalls. We had some really special people.
In 1990, Sullivan left his post as Patriots GM and began looking for something new to do, knowing only that he really did not enjoy working for other people. It was then that he got his first taste of the remote-production business when Dick Dean, owner of NCP, approached him about financially backing construction of a truck to be used by MSG for New York Yankees baseball coverage. The 10-year contract was unprecedented in the sports-TV business and set a template for future TV carriage deals.
Sullivan, however, was not quite sold on remote production as a career path and spent a year at the Christian Science Monitor Channel working as on-air talent. But, while there, he had a chance to work alongside the likes of Dave Mazza (now with NBC Sports) and Paul Puccio (now with CBS).
I was working with really brilliant people and found myself gravitating towards the technical side, he says. I was fascinated by what they were doing.
The real opportunity occurred in 1993 when he acquired two production units from Sure Shot as well as a small team to get Game Creek Video up and running.
It was really a matter of building a team of people that had credibility in their fields, he explains. Then we went aggressively after engineering with people like Paul Bonar, Mike Copeland, and Jason Taubman.
From the very beginning of Game Creek Video's existence, Sullivan has placed a great deal of value on having a strong team, a philosophy he inherited from his father.
When I started, my dad said to surround myself with really smart people, and I have been fortunate enough to do that in some key spots, he says. It's not just engineering. It's also about having the right people to drive the trucks, the administration of the company, and making sure we have credibility with bank partners.
Game Creek Video's growth over the years has been highlighted by several key moments, according to Sullivan.
First was the construction of Intrepid in 2000, a unit capable of handling big shows and tapped by ESPN to handle the network's final year of NASCAR coverage.
That same year, the YES Network came down the pike and they gave us the contract, which was a huge win, says Sullivan.
Fox Sports EVP, Operations, Ed Delaney was with the YES Network at the time and forged a strong relationship with both Sullivan and Game Creek Video's team over the years.
Game Creek has been the mobile-facility provider for the YES Network since its launch in 2002, Delaney says. Pat underpromised and overdelivered from day one, providing superior facilities that transitioned YES to HD.
The 2007 All-Star Game in San Francisco also proved a major moment in the growth of Game Creek Video. Its Southern Cross production unit was on hand for MLB International's host-feed production, and the unit's massive routing-switcher core came in handy when a 30-minute pregame element featuring the 50 greatest players of all time was produced out of Southern Cross.
We assured them that we could pull it off. The MLB guys got out a half hour before air, and, at the push of a button, the monitor wall switched over for the pregame show, recalls Sullivan. And then, after the pregame, a button was pushed, and the reverse happened. Everyone went Wow,' as they had never seen anything like that.
Jerry Steinberg, former SVP of field operations for Fox Sports and fellow Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame inductee, recalls seeing Game Creek's Southern
Most recent headlines
09/11/2025
Dalet today announced a transformative leap forward for media operations: Agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI) that unifies the Dalet ecosystem under one natura...
06/10/2025
France T l visions, France's leading broadcaster, has received the 2025 EBU ...
12/09/2025
Following its acquisition of Telemetrics, EVS continues its push into robotics with an announcement at IBC2025 that it is acquiring XD motion....
12/09/2025
TORONTO The North American Broadcasters Association (NABA) has announced the appointment of Eduardo Ruiz Sanchez, deputy director, broadcast operations at Telev...
12/09/2025
Ed Miller, a longtime broadcast engineer in Ohio and a former national president of the Society of Broadcast Engineers, has died....
12/09/2025
AMSTERDAM At this year's IBC2025, the Advanced HDR by Technicolor initiative will be pushing broadcasters to adopt a more dynamic, frame-by-frame conversion...
12/09/2025
The Late Late Show is back with a bang after the summer break, and Patrick Kielt...
12/09/2025
The World Athletics Championships, Ireland v France in the Women's Rugby World Cup quarter-final, the Irish Champions Festival, and two Sports Direct Men...
12/09/2025
The Records Show starts Sunday at 6.30pm on RT One and RT Player.
Katie Hanno...
11/09/2025
Report: Busy Live Sports Streaming Execs Have Low-hanging Fruit' in Front o...
11/09/2025
Inside Game Creek Video's Big Week as Ovation, Flagship Make NFL DebutsBy Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director
Thursday, September 11, 2025 - 7:00 am
Pr...
11/09/2025
NFL Kickoff 2025: Prime Sports Starts New Season at Lambeau Field; Sets Sights o...
11/09/2025
College Football Kickoff 2025: NBC Sports Pushes HDR Image Quality, Aerial Drone...
11/09/2025
RADAR, Spotify's program for emerging talent, recently hit a major milestone...
11/09/2025
SBS shares Australian National Anthem in over 60 languages to foster belonging a...
11/09/2025
L3Harris showcases advanced Distributed Spectrum Collaboration and Operations (DiSCO) technology on Defence Science and Technology Laboratory's MAST-13 uncr...
11/09/2025
L3Harris recently signed an agreement with Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace to supp...
11/09/2025
Warsaw, Poland, 20.08.25: Nielsen, the global leader in audience measurement, data and analytics, has released its latest July All Screens Video Landscape repor...
11/09/2025
Warner Bros. Discovery to add key Big Data and Advanced Audience capabilities fr...
11/09/2025
Link ping, Sweden, September 11, 2025 - Agama, the expert in video observability & analytics for service quality and customer experience, announced today the la...
11/09/2025
Maxon today unveiled the latest Maxon One release, delivering new innovations across its unified creative ecosystem and introducing a fresh visual identity that...
11/09/2025
Lightware is pleased to announce the launch of the Lightware Enterprise Program, empowering corporations and organisations with its portfolio of scalable, relia...
11/09/2025
CueScript, the leading international developer of professional teleprompting solutions with over a decade of innovation and hands-on industry expertise, is intr...
11/09/2025
MASV (massive.io), the fastest and most reliable secure large file transfer platform for media professionals and an IDC Innovator 2025 for Media & Entertainment...
11/09/2025
CROSSPOINT/CROSSMEDIA (part of ES MEDIA Group), in partnership with AMPLIFY, has been selected to deliver the automatic metadata service for RTVE's historic...
11/09/2025
TSL is launching Hummingbird, a unified, interoperable ecosystem of control and monitoring applications and interfaces, designed to drive efficiency and reduce ...
11/09/2025
LucidLink, the cloud-native storage collaboration platform, today announced new innovations at IBC 2025 (Stand 6.A12) designed to deliver faster, more secure wo...
11/09/2025
Under the USD 89.6 Million award, SES Space & Defense will provide global commer...
11/09/2025
Leading Balkan DTH provider adds capacity to consolidate its m:Sat TV platform at 23.5 degrees East and serve more customers across the region
Luxembourg, 11 S...
11/09/2025
LONDON Vizrt has announced that it is providing automation technologies for live sports production to the Viaplay streaming service that are being used to cover...
11/09/2025
LOS ANGELES Cineverse has announced that it has inked a deal with LG Channels to launch Historian, a new free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) channel f...
11/09/2025
WASHINGTON The Federal Communications Commission's Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau has issued a reminder that Emergency Alert System (EAS) partic...
11/09/2025
LOS ANGELES Paramount has announced that tech executive Dane Glasgow, who has extensive experience in consumer product development and management, digital platf...
11/09/2025
PARIS AND LONDON At IBC2025, Orange and Synamedia have announced a new integration of their CDN solutions that they are billing as a first-of-its-kind collabor...
11/09/2025
MELVILLE, N.Y. In a notable example of Nikon's push into video following its 2024 acquisition of RED Digital Cinema, Nikon has announced their first cinema ...
11/09/2025
At IBC 2025, Wowza, a leader in video streaming technology, and the Streaming Video Technology Alliance (SVTA), the global technical association advancing strea...
11/09/2025
VisualOn, a global pioneer in multimedia playback solutions, and ZTE Corporation, a leading provider of integrated communications and information technology sol...
11/09/2025
In today's multi-platform media environment, staying ahead means more than just adopting the right technology, it means using it to its fullest potential. W...
11/09/2025
UKTV's free streaming service U launches on Sky Q
Free streaming service U has launched on Sky Q in the UK, UKTV and Sky confirm today, expanding the footp...
11/09/2025
Back to All News
The journey continues: filming has begun on the Sintonia, spin...
11/09/2025
Back to All News
Netflix Reveals the Release Date of Its New Turkish Series Old...
11/09/2025
From the discreet 2061 lavaliers to 4099 and 4011 mics, the setup delivered clean, natural sound in one of the most challenging broadcast environments.
Read th...
11/09/2025
From rugged build quality to natural, detailed sound, the verdict is clear: big performance can come in a very small package.
Read the full review here!...
11/09/2025
Tonight on Prime Time
RT One and RT Player at 9:35pm
Tonight RT Prime Time...
11/09/2025
RT Statement: 2026 Eurovision Song Contest
At the General Assembly of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) in July, a number of EBU members raised concerns ...
11/09/2025
AI model helps boost pandemic preparedness Scripps Research breakthrough reduces antibody discovery time from weeks to hours, potentially revolutionizing pandem...
10/09/2025
Fox Sports Ups College Football Look as Canon, Sony Power Shallow Focus CoverageBy Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director
Wednesday, September 10, 2025 - 8:00 a...
10/09/2025
SAVE THE DATE: SVG College Summit Returns to Atlanta, May 27-28, 2026By SVG Staff
Wednesday, September 10, 2025 - 10:00 am
Print This Story | Subscribe
St...
10/09/2025
SVG Students to Watch: Chloe Gosk, Monmouth UniversityThe New Jersey native is honing her skills as a replay operatorBy Brandon Costa, Director of Digital
Wed...
Legends Behind the Lens: Pat Sullivan The former NFL GM became one of sports television productions most impactful builders By Brandon Costa, Director of Digital 
