CFP National Championship 2025: Van Wagner To Hype Up Buckeyes, Fighting Irish Fans From New IP-Based Control Room Facility was upgraded prior to latest Atlanta Falcons, Atlanta United seasons By Kristian Hern ndez, Senior Editor
Monday, January 20, 2025 - 11:33 am
Print This Story | Subscribe
Story Highlights
Fans of the two best college football programs in the nation - the Ohio State Buckeyes and the Notre Dame Fighting Irish - will fill Atlanta's Mercedes-Benz Stadium tonight for the title game of the College Football Playoff National Championship. The venue will be alive with excitement, and the Van Wagner crew will fire up the fans even more with a videoboard show from a new IP-based control room.
The in-venue production team during rehearsals at Mercedes-Benz Stadium over the weekend
This has been one of our lighter shipments of equipment because of the new workflows, says Patrick Stedman, tech manager, Van Wagner. The building can pretty much handle most of what we need.
IP-Driven Show: Team Adapts to New SMPTE 2110 Workflows Mercedes-Benz Stadium isn't unfamiliar territory for Van Wagner. The in-venue-production company played a role in back-to-back major events shortly after the stadium opened in 2017: the CFP National Championship in 2018 and Super Bowl LIII in 2019. A lot of the LLED video displays are still the same, including the massive Halo Board above the playing surface, but the behind-the-scenes workflows received an upgrade after the conclusion of the 2023 NFL season. Among the changes are routers upgraded to SMPTE 2110, new Ross Video Acuity production switchers, and a communications backbone bolstered with 35 Riedel Bolero beltpacks.
I supported their NFL games for the Falcons during the 2023 season, so I know the facility relatively well, says Stedman. The bulk of their workflows went to IP, and they're still in that process: they're building a secondary control room to produce smaller shows without activating their full control room.
The view of the field from the control room
When the venue opened, the massive Halo Board display was one of the largest double-sided LED fixtures in any building. Now seven years old, the stadium is still a huge draw for fans and still requires much coordination and planning in laying out content. After many seasons of Atlanta Falcons and Atlanta United games, populating the display and executing a show with it at the center has become easier, but the new IP-centric workflows need to be factored in.
MORE FROM THE COLLEGE FOOTBALL PLAYOFF NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP GAME:
It's All Hands on Deck for ESPN's Massive Production in Atlanta
ESPN To Deliver Main Game Telecast in 4K for the First Time
ESPN's MegaCast Menu Highlighted by REMI Production of Field Pass With The Pat McAfee Show
Inside Ohio State Football's Creative Storytelling at Monday's Title Game
It's an added layer, notes Daniel Zerunyan, senior producer, Van Wagner. There have been little challenges that have taken away from our programming time, but preparation has gone really well. We were lucky that the Falcons didn't have a home game because a bunch of contingency plans were put in place. It wouldn't really impact us if there was a game two weekends ago, but, if there was one this past weekend, we would have been in and out of the control room.
Collaborative Effort: Stadium Staff, Ross Video Offer Helping Hand As with any large-scale show that Van Wagner participates in, the host stadium's internal staff and vendors are crucial to the show's success. In this case, the staffers responsible for Falcons, Atlanta United, and other sports events at Mercedes-Benz Stadium are assisting on the production and operations fronts. From Stedman's point of view, any tech or engineering inquiries have been answered by Chief Broadcast and Network A/V Engineer Cole Gallagher. Zerunyan's team worked with Senior Director/Executive Producer, Game Presentation and Stadium Productions, Julia Chongarlides, but the main production contact has been Producer, Third Party Events/Game Presentation, Steve Smith.
The IP-based control room will house Van Wagner's crew as well as staffers from the stadium.
A key contributor to many of Van Wagner's shows, Ross Video Senior Graphic Programmer, Content and Workflow, Sports and Live Events, Josh Weber is onsite to manage and troubleshoot graphics-related issues.
Josh has been helping us on the content side of things for the last few years, including at the NCAA Final Four, says Zerunyan. [The stadium] has full-timers that handle a lot of their XPression [solutions], but he's working with their in-house team and being our lead [contact] that reports to their team.
Telling the Story: Production Folds-In Content From Each Program's Postseason Run The culmination of the college football season is an opportune time to tell the fans in the stands how each university got to the championship game. In previous years, Van Wagner would mix in regular-season highlights with footage from their respective semifinal games. In the new era of the 12-team expanded playoffs, Zerunyan and company couldn't possibly fit everything in this short hype video played before kickoff.
We're just going to focus all of our footage from the College Football Playoff and not the regular season, he says. Since they played in the first round [of the bracket], we had more footage to utilize from ESPN and Two Circles, the social team that the CFP hires.
Another view from the control room
With the Halo Board available, Van Wagner is supplementing its open with other elements. An NFL-style venue offers a variety of capabilities for entertainment in the lower bowl, including a top-tier lighting system that adds to the cinematic atmosphere.
We're going with this d
North America Stories
23/07/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
23/07/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
23/07/2026
David Dvir, 2D founder (left), Sundeep Reddy (center), and Jean-Marc Bouchut (right), both of Zeiss...
23/07/2026
Lock in and load up the cloud. GFN Thursday brings fresh updates and new adventu...
22/07/2026
Among other tweaks to coverage, the broadcaster added announce positions in the ...
22/07/2026
The Australian Sports Technologies Network (ASTN) has reported a sharp acceleration in Australia's sportstech sector, with revenue growth rising from 10% in...
22/07/2026
From a retrofitted broadcast bus to packed Match Day Live! events, Bennett detai...
22/07/2026
TMRW Sports has named Brendan Donohue as President, Flag Football, where he will lead the company's professional flag football business in partnership with ...
22/07/2026
Stephen Arnold Music (SAM) designed and produced soundtracks for nine projection...
22/07/2026
Harmonic has announced a $25,000 donation to Global Empowerment Mission (GEM) fo...
22/07/2026
Telemundo has announced it has acquired from UC3 exclusive U.S. Spanish-language...
22/07/2026
The Rest Is Football, hosted by Gary Lineker, Alan Shearer, and Micah Richards, ...
22/07/2026
Sports Studio has announced a partnership with TheSoul Group to distribute Free ...
22/07/2026
Daktronics has concluded its 2026 High School Video Summit, a two-day hybrid event combining virtual sessions with hands-on host school visits across the countr...
22/07/2026
FOR-A America will exhibit at the MMCA Show in Pensacola, Florida (July 21-24), marking the company's first appearance at the house of worship AV event. FOR...
22/07/2026
The New York Yankees have selected Lumen Technologies (NYSE: LUMN) to connect Ya...
22/07/2026
Calrec will exhibit at IBC 2026 (Stand 8.C47) with demonstrations of its IP-native audio ecosystem built around the Argo console range, and will announce two ne...
22/07/2026
Solid State Logic has announced the appointment of Algam EKO as its distributor for SSL large format consoles in Italy, covering the Live, Broadcast, and Studio...
22/07/2026
FloSports has announced the launch of the FloSports Channel, a free ad-supported streaming channel premiering on Prime Video in the U.S. on July 21. The channel...
22/07/2026
Banana Ball TV (BTV), the broadcast operation of the Savannah Bananas, has insta...
22/07/2026
SiriusXM and Audacy have announced an agreement bringing 42 Audacy sports, news, and talk stations from 29 U.S. markets to SiriusXM. Twenty-three Audacy sports ...
22/07/2026
The collaboration produced more than 500 short-form videos across four cities th...
22/07/2026
At 2,600 sq. ft., the new home of digital content houses a main studio, podcast space, and an auxiliary control room
NFL franchises are accelerating their prod...
22/07/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
22/07/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
22/07/2026
Proven managed IP solution helps broadcasters confidently navigate the future of broadcast distribution
LTN announces it has completed successful satellite-to-...
22/07/2026
Today, Chaos announced V-Ray 7, update 4, eliminating the need for asset conversions and tool switching, which slow down media and entertainment pipelines. Arti...
22/07/2026
An AI playground for the Project Indigo camera app
Marc Levoy July 22, 2026
0 Comments
At left is the user interface of our Playground, running on an ...
22/07/2026
Custom Consoles announces the completion of a large technical furniture project for Radio T l vision Suisse (RTS) at the networks recently inaugurated productio...
22/07/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
22/07/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
22/07/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
22/07/2026
Culver City, CA, July 21, 2026 3D streaming infrastructure provider Miris today announced glTF intake, including the binary .glb form, to its spatial streamin...
22/07/2026
Documentary Lo Invisible Captured with Blackmagic PYXIS 6K
Brie Clayton July 21, 2026
0 Comments
Camera's versatile design allowed filmmakers to c...
22/07/2026
AAF Bridge converts AAF and XML Timelines to Ableton Live - and back
Jerome Gardier July 21, 2026
0 Comments
A two-way converter for macOS and Windows...
22/07/2026
From Class to Concert: Explore a Student-Led Production of David Bowies Work Thr...
22/07/2026
NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang today visited the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, to commission an NVIDIA DGX GB300 system - bringing one...
22/07/2026
Before a healthcare robot can be useful in the real world, it has to learn how the physical world pushes back. Anatomy varies. Instruments bend, press, slip and...
21/07/2026
With winners Spain having already paraded the World Cup trophy through Madrid in front of millions of fans and the dust now settling on an epic tournament of th...
21/07/2026
In a time of disarray in regional sports broadcasting, the league will provide c...
21/07/2026
When NEP designed one of its largest recurring mobile production unit fleets for PGA TOUR
coverage, the leading media services provider faced a familiar challe...
21/07/2026
Warner Bros. Discovery's unbroken lead is interrupted as sports and live mus...
21/07/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
21/07/2026
Across the TV and streaming ecosystem, industry players face mounting pressure to do more with less. They must simplify operations, protect premium content and ...
21/07/2026
Tuxera, a leading prover of quality-assured file systems and networking technologies, is bringing its latest advances in connectivity performance to the media w...
21/07/2026
COW Jobs: Apple Motion Expert for Custom FCP Rigged Graphics Package
Brie Clayton July 21, 2026
0 Comments
HIRING: Apple Motion Expert for Custom FCP ...
21/07/2026
Cinegy GmbH, the premier provider of software-defined television technology, will use its presence at IBC2026 (stand 7.A01, Amsterdam RAI, 11 14 September) to...
21/07/2026
Calrec will be located in Hall 8, on Stand C47
Beyond bigger
For years, broadcast facilities were built around one assumption: provision for the biggest pro...
21/07/2026
Pebble, the leading automation, content management and integrated channel specialist, will discuss its future-facing developments for the new generation of medi...
CFP National Championship 2025: Van Wagner To Hype Up Buckeyes, Fighting Irish Fans From New IP-Based Control Room Facility was upgraded prior to latest Atlanta Falcons, Atlanta United seasons By Kristian Hern ndez, Senior Editor 
