Levi's Stadium Facelift, Part 1: Full Glass-to-Glass 4K, IP-Based Control Room Tops $200M Revamp Ahead of Next Year's Marquee Events

08/08/2025

Levi's Stadium Facelift, Part 1: Full Glass-to-Glass 4K, IP-Based Control Room Tops $200M Revamp Ahead of Next Year's Marquee Events NFL franchise prepares for Super Bowl LX, 2026 FIFA Men's World Cup By Kristian Hern ndez, Senior Editor

Friday, August 8, 2025 - 2:06 pm

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American and international football's greatest events - Super Bowl LX and the FIFA Men's World Cup - are headed to Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, CA, in 2026, and, in anticipation of two of sport's biggest spectacles, the San Francisco 49ers are bolstering their production infrastructure. As part of a massive $200 million renovation that features numerous changes to the stadium's LED videoboards, lighting, and audio systems, the club has reconfigured its in-venue control room to handle ST 2110 workflows and the influx of technologies that come with the first glass-to-glass 4K production ecosystem in a sports venue.

We're enhancing our fan experience and extending the life of the venue itself, says Laura Johnson, senior director, game presentation and live events, San Francisco 49ers. We brought [this control room] down to the studs and brought it back up for a complete overhaul.

Getting to Work: Diversified, WJHW Join the Systems-Integration Process San Francisco 49ers' Ted Slominski (left) and Laura Johnson led the control room renovation.

In preparation for the project, Johnson and her colleagues did extensive research over the past two years. The NAB Show in Las Vegas was a huge source of information-gathering about the hardware and software on the market, but Johnson consulted her counterpart at other NFL clubs as well as contacts from around the industry. Among those consulted were Mercedes-Benz Stadium Senior Director/Executive Producer, Game Presentation and Stadium Productions, Julia Chongarlides, after that building's upgrade during the 2024-25 NFL season; Green Bay Packers Director, Broadcast and Game Presentation, Kregg Shilbauer, after iconic Lambeau Field added modern touches in the 2023-24 NFL season; and the staff at the Denver Broncos after they integrated 1080p HDR-capable solutions into Empower Field at Mile High during that season. Having formerly worked at Van Wagner, Johnson also gained knowledge from her former co-workers about the setup of SoFi Stadium used for Super Bowl LVI.

The best thing that you can do when you're going through something like this is to use all the resources that you have available to you and to ask questions, she says. All of this information was up for consideration as we were starting to build out the infrastructure and going through this process.

Shortly after the team's final home game of the 2024-25 regular season on Dec. 30, the control room was put together with the help of Diversified and WJHW.

At the same time, the 49ers team reached out to potential partners for help with bringing the new space to life. WJHW was critical as a consultant during the bidding phase of the project, and Diversified ultimately was chosen as systems integrator. Prior to the stadium's opening in 2014, Diversified was systems integrator, so it felt right to tap that familiarity with the control room in this next chapter. The real work began as the control room was taken offline following the squad's final regular-season home game vs. the Detroit Lions on Dec. 30, 2024.

We started decommissioning everything the day after that game, says Johnson. It has been ongoing and nonstop ever since to get us to the place where we're at currently.

Engineering Expertise: Problem Solving, Learning Curve for Glass-to-Glass 4K Workflow From an engineering perspective, the hardest part of the project was the tight turnaround from the end of last season to the beginning of the upcoming one. As the renovation's heartbeat, the control room needed to be ready to go for three key dates on the calendar: the first live event, a Metallica concert on June 20; the semifinals of the 2025 CONCACAF Gold Cup on July 2; and the preseason opener on Aug. 9 vs. the Denver Broncos. Working with Johnson, 49ers Chief Broadcast/AV Engineer Ted Slominski has become essential in pushing the project over the finish line.

Evertz DreamCatchers have been implemented for replays.

It's a behemoth of a project when you're talking about the scope of what we're trying to do and the type of technology that we're trying to put in, Johnson adds. Since his arrival in 2023, Ted and I have been in lockstep with what we're trying to accomplish from production, marketing, fan experience, and technological standpoints. When it comes to IT, we're still learning so many things because it's vastly different from the old ecosystem that we had with baseband. Now that we're working with IP, we have to be completely aligned on our IT infrastructure to know what types of switches we're putting in and if we have redundancy.

Although the arduous planning, detailed research, and constant work has put the 49ers in an advantageous space more than a month before the 2025 home opener, there's unfortunately going to be a noticeable adjustment period. The decision to trail-blaze in adopting a complete 4K production environment is an ambitious endeavor, and, after years of producing games in a certain way, it's totally normal to need some time to ramp the workflow up to its fullest potential.

Camera shaders assist the Sony HDC-3500's and Sony HDC-5500's in the lower bowl.

A big part of that was getting buy-in from the top of our organization and bringing in our game-day operators to train, says Johnson. There aren't too many teams that have this infrastructure, so there's always going to be a learning curve.

Being bullish on creative ideas in production or in

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Levi's Stadium Facelift, Part 1: Full Glass-to-Glass 4K, IP-Based Control Room Tops $200M Revamp Ahead of Next Year's Marquee Events

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