NBA Summer League Once Again a Breeding Ground for Tech Innovation

NBA Summer League Once Again a Breeding Ground for Tech Innovation By Jason Dachman, Editorial Director, U.S.

Friday, July 19, 2024 - 2:55 pm

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The temperature isn't the only thing heating up in Las Vegas this week during the annual NBA Summer League festivities; the level of technological innovation is sizzling as well. The league's basketball strategy and broadcast ops teams are collaborating on a bevy of experiments that aim to enhance the quality of gameplay, officiating, live production, and the viewing experience.

From a broadcast operations and engineering perspective, Summer League is an invaluable opportunity to try out new technologies and continue to evolve, says Barney Carleton, Senior Director, Broadcast Planning and Strategy. The best piece of the Summer League for us is the fact that not everything necessarily has to make it to air. That opportunity to do offline testing is something that's absolutely really critical to us. It enlightens us and provides us the opportunity to try new things that we can either hold on to or throw away. We can also go back to it in future seasons and continue to develop, iterate, and improve.

Summer League is a critical R&D lab for us for two main use cases, says Tom Ryan, VP, Basketball Strategy, NBA. The first is tactical in that it gives us some final reps and a chance to tune up before the upcoming season. And the second is experimental where we can throw out some new ideas that you might see in the NBA in 3-4 years. It's an amazing forum for experimentation because we have NBA-caliber buildings and there's a lot of games, so it just allows us to get a lot of data and a large sample size in a 10-day stretch, which is pretty unique.

From Vegas to Secaucus and beyond: The HSAN and the Cloud The league has rolled out two of its portable remote HSAN transmission kits - one for each arena in Vegas - and secured additional connectivity from Verizon to create a robust network to connect both the Thomas and Mack Center and Cox Pavilion in Las Vegas with the NBA Replay Center in Secaucus, NJ. This network not only serves the NBA's content creation and international-distribution needs, but it also provides a backbone for the plethora of tests taking place in Vegas.

The NBA is also working with MediaKind and a handful of other vendors to test JPEG XS encoding on the HSAN in an effort to enable more efficient video transmission and overall flexibility in the future.

As was the case last year in Vegas, the NBA continues to test out new cloud-production workflows for both alternate feeds and multi-language broadcasts. As part of this testing, the league is working with Microsoft Azure on running Evertz' DreamCatcher BRAVO production suite in the cloud.

We're really excited by the maturation that we've seen in cloud production when it comes to versioning and scaling up the quantity of feeds that we've been able to produce, as well as streamlining our distribution, says Carleton. This is a continuation from last year and we're taking another step this year that will give us more scalability and flexibility in the future.

The NBA is working with a number of other partners on cloud-based production workflows in Vegas, including Tagboard on their HTML5 graphics platform.

Next-Gen Viewing Experiences: Cosm, C360, and Quintar For the second consecutive year, Cosm (which inked a multi-year deal with the league last year to create 8K shared-reality experiences for fans) is in Vegas testing both immersive and VR capture systems.

We're working with Cosm on a number of different exciting experiences both in the broadcast space as well as some of these emerging markets, says Carleton. The goal of their testing is to look at some new camera angles and continue its development as it relates to creating the best possible user experience for basketball.

Cosm's C360 crew is also collaborating with the league on a proof-of-concept that integrates Hawkeye player tracking data into C360's CX Video Hub platform to create automatically-generated ISO shots.

It's early days so you may not see in the broadcast, but that continues to be of great interest to us here at the league, says Carleton. We view it as an opportunity to create more content and explore how we can use AI in conjunction with our player tracking data to create a better experience for fans.

The NBA is also collaborating with Quintar creating spatial video content for platforms like Apple Vision Pro.

We are working with them to just figure out new ways to create new types of content so that we can reach fans where they are, says Carleton. It's unclear if we'll be publishing any content from this event specifically, but it's an amazing opportunity to experiment and refine the way we can tell stories.

Working with ESPN: New cameras, Mics, and Data Visualizations ESPN continues to produce all of the Vegas summer league games (including broadcasts on NBA TV) this season, but for the first time, all game broadcasts from both the Thomas & Mack and Cox Pavilion are being produced back in Bristol, CT using REMI-production models.

ESPN and the NBA are testing new, smaller digital Q5X player mic transmitter/receiver systems that include various types of lavalier mic capsules and transmitters. In addition, ESPN and Riedel are working with the league on two-way in-game conversations with players similar to what viewers have seen in MLB coverage in recent years.

We continue to work really closely with ESPN on a lot of our testing initiatives and one of the key initiatives is finding opportunities to improve our player access opportunities, says Carleton. That includes getting better player sounds with the Q5X microphones and experimenting with two-way interv

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