A Deep Dive Inside Game Creek Video's Bird and Magic Mobile Units, Home to Amazon's NBA on Prime Video'Prime is also using GCV Encore as studio-control room and master-control centerBy Jason Dachman, Editorial Director, U.S. Thursday, December 11, 2025 - 1:35 pm
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When Amazon Prime Video inked a massive 11-year deal for NBA media rights in July 2024, it tapped Game Creek Video - which also built the streamer's Prime One and Two mobile units for Thursday Night Football - to build and design a new arsenal of production facilities. GCV's mission ended up being threefold: build one mobile unit for Prime Video's East Coast NBA game productions and an identical unit for the West Coast and reappropriate its existing Encore mobile unit to serve as a central production hub at the streamer's new studios in Culver City, CA.
Game Creek Video's Magic mobile unit handle west-coast games for the NBA on Prime Video.
We met with the Amazon Prime team weekly over the course of a year [prior to the builds] to nail down their specific requirements, says Keith Martin, director, technology, Game Creek Video. They were looking for a flexible and powerful ST 2110 ecosystem. We ultimately came to them - [utilizing] our learnings from 2110[-based] trucks over the past few years - and put together a system based on those specifications.
The resulting mobile units - aptly named Bird and Magic for their respective East Coast and West Coast NBA game-production roles - are among the most advanced mobile units Game Creek has ever rolled out. The real challenge for the manufacturer was packing all the technical firepower of its largest ST 2110-based mobile units into a two-chassis form factor that could easily pull into NBA arenas' truck compounds for single-day set/shoot/strike operations.
It's a delicate balance to strike, says Martin. We want to pack a ton of technical power into these trucks, but, if you can't deploy them quickly and efficiently for the job they need to do, what good are they?
All About Automation: Leveling Up the Power-Up ProcessAs the project began to take shape, one thing became clear to Martin and his team: the power-up/boot-up process for the highly complex 2110-based mobile units needed to be heavily streamlined and simplified.
Game Creek Video's Bird mobile unit, built to cover the NBA on the East Coast, has a twin in Magic on the West Coast.
One of the bugs we've come across in these big 2110 IP systems is that you can't just turn them on and have them working in five minutes, says Jason Taubman, SVP, technology, Game Creek Video. You can't throw the breaker and stand back and wait for things to happen; you need to do things very meticulously in a particular order.
For previous 2110 trucks, he notes, engineering teams would have to, first, get the IP network up and running, bring the PTP time-sync system online, and incrementally start powering on the various aspects of the production one by one. It's an extremely complex and time-consuming procedure. So one of the big areas we focused on was automating that power-up process.
The solution came in the form of the Legrand switched PRO4X three-phase power-distribution unit (PDU), which programmatically handles each step in the power-up chain with minimal (or no) engineer intervention required.
The PDU scripting [feature] significantly shortens the boot-up time for the whole system, says Taubman. Effectively, we've scripted the process to the point where you can basically turn it on, go get a cup of coffee, and come back in 20 minutes. That not only helps when we show up and don't have a full set day but also helps if there is any sort of power anomaly.
Martin explains, We bring all three [phases] of power that are coming into the truck and distribute that across the various systems. We're able to deliver 220-V power directly to many of the switching power supplies that exist in all the devices throughout the truck. We can lean on that to balance the power load across the whole truck and predictably understand our power needs.
This also reduces electrical-current draw in the truck, which translates into better cooling performance and significantly reduce heat throughout both the A and B units.
Identical Twins: Bird and Magic Mirror Each Other on Opposite Coasts Bird and Magic are essentially carbon copies, dividing the country with Bird on the East Coast and Magic on the West Coast. This allows the two facilities not only to avoid crisscrossing the country but also to produce doubleheaders on most Fridays from opposite coasts.
Like other recent Game Creek units, Bird and Magic (seen here) feature a variety of flex-space workstations that can be used for a variety of positions, including graphics and replay.
One of the things that was really important to the Prime team early on was that these two facilities were in lockstep, says Martin. Because you have different teams doing different shows on the same day from two different locations throughout the season, they wanted to ensure that whatever was possible in one facility was also possible in the other. We took that approach in how we built them and how we staffed the project-management side.
The respective A units house a large engineering room and the video-routing core, an extra-large production room featuring a Grass Valley K-Frame-XP switcher (192 96 via ST2110), and a turned-sideways audio room featuring a Calrec ARGO Q surround-sound console (96 96 analog, 128 128 waves, 16384 16384 ST 2110-30) powered by ImPulse.
The B units are divided into four distinct spaces, all with flexible sandbox workstations connected via the Adder ADDERLink INFINITY KVM platform. They house the rest of the technical positions, including video, rep
