With 180 Games in 12 Days, Champ Week Tests ESPN's Production, Operational Versatility An array of production styles will be deployed to meet programming plans By Brandon Costa, Director of Digital
Thursday, March 14, 2019 - 3:23 pm
Print This Story
Story Highlights
Few points on the ESPN calendar get busier - and more thrilling - than Championship Week, the pre-March Madness series of conference tournaments.
Covering both men's and women's college basketball, the ESPN family will broadcast 180 games spanning 32 tournaments (including 24 conference title games) during the span of just 12 days.
How in the world do they do it? As with anything that happens in sports-video production on a grand scale: with a lot of planning and collaboration.
Champ Week truly tests the range of capabilities of the network's basketball coverage featuring everything from the biggest productions featuring all the high-end toys, such as in-arena Spidercams at professional venues, to at-home (REMI) productions out of small mid-major gyms. According to Erin Orr, remote operations manager, ESPN, 15 tournaments will be full-fledged onsite ESPN productions, seven will be covered via at-home production workflows, and 10 will be handled by third-party packagers.
When it comes to deploying specialty production tools, the Power 6 conferences will receive the most love. The SEC men's and women's tournaments will have onsite studio coverage, aerial cameras (Spidercam at men's, Supracam at women's), and added behind-the-scenes, all-access shoots. There will also be onsite studios at the ACC and Big 12 men's tournaments, with ACC getting a Spidercam.
The Power 6 coverage will also feature what ESPN calls REMNAS (Remote Near Access Storage) for file transfer. It allows postgame press conferences and melts to be sent to both Charlotte, NC, and Bristol, CT, facilities in a quick, file-based fashion.
Orr says REMNAS is helping aid the edit process not just onsite but back in Bristol and Charlotte. Every night, feeds are archived directly to Bristol, and using this system and essentially linking Charlotte, Bristol, and all the sites enables information to be passed around quickly. It proves tremendously helpful for personnel working onsite, and they no longer need to stay late following a broadcast day to send melts to the mothership. That work can now be uploaded to staff back home.
The graphics of ESPN's college-basketball property are also receiving a refresh this week. Additional flare for the current package will be weaved in to enhance the magnitude and gravity of the games. ESPN makes it a point to use this variation of its college-hoops graphics package only during Champ Week to add to its special and rare feel. In addition, ESPN's ART and Stats systems will be on many sites, adding enhanced statistical information to feed those graphics.
When it comes to logistics, mid-major conferences present some of the greatest challenges, according to Orr. Top seeds serve as the host in many instances. In fact, tournaments like the America East (men's and women's), Atlantic Sun (men), Big South (men), and NEC (men's and women's) can have a turnaround time of just 48-72 hours between determining the site and opening tip.
Communication with crewing, travel, mobile units, production, and operations personnel is key to the overall success of Champ Week, she says, noting that at least 35 mobile units are deployed to produce tournaments across the country.
Another critical part of the overall process of Champ Week is collaborating with other broadcast partners and rightsholders on truck takeovers and/or interconnects. A truck takeover refers to when one broadcaster produces early-round games of a tournament, and ESPN comes in to produce the semis and/or final using the same mobile production facilities onsite. This year, ESPN has participated in truck takeovers with CBS Sports (Atlanta 10 women's), Pac-12 Networks (Pac-12 women's), Raycom Sports (ACC women's).
ESPN will also work side by side with Raycom for the ACC Network at the ACC men's tournament and Pac-12 Networks for the Pac-12 men's tournament. Trucks will be parked together and interconnected to share various resources.
As mentioned, at-home production will also play a key role in seven of the tournaments featured in Champ Week. On-air talent (and a small collection of below-the-line personnel will be onsite, with a majority of the production handled at REMI-capable control rooms on ESPN campuses in Bristol, Charlotte, and Orlando (Wide World of Sports).
ESPN's studio-operations teams will be plenty busy as well, supporting the live coverage coming in from all across the country while also providing high-profile coverage around the NCAA Tournament when that official bracket is announced on Sunday evening.
In the eyes of Nanci Hyburg, director, production operations, ESPN, it doesn't get bigger for the studio-operations side of the business than on Selection Sunday. The network's Bracketology show (which airs 7 9 p.m. ET, immediately following the unveiling of the NCAA Tournament field) is one of the biggest - and most-watched -studio shows that ESPN produces all year. That show will be produced out of one of Bristol's most-advanced studio spaces, Studio Y, which features some of the newest virtual technology at the company and pushes the limits in terms of in-studio augmented-reality graphics.
ESPN's Studio E in Bristol will also play a key role, having been reconfigured with a new look that launched during this Champ Week. It's bigger than the previous set used for wrap shows and is largely built around a 1080p infrastructure. Its cameras are 1080p as is the new Evertz studio support router. The studio has three fully-robotic Vinten pedestals and
Most recent headlines
06/10/2025
France T l visions, France's leading broadcaster, has received the 2025 EBU ...
04/09/2025
Monumental Sports & Entertainment (MSE), in collaboration with Dalet, has been a...
30/08/2025
WASHINGTON The Federal Communications Commission has adopted its FY 2025 Regulatory Fees Order that establishes the regulatory fee rates for the broadcast stati...
29/08/2025
Australian Red Cross and SBS launch training to help workplaces in the fight aga...
29/08/2025
The National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF), an agency of the Department of Sp...
29/08/2025
L3Harris Technologies has concentrated decades of expertise across the entire enterprise to develop affordable and reliable best-of-breed solutions to rapidly c...
29/08/2025
BURBANK, Calif. The CW Network and the Pac-12 Conference have announced a new media rights deal that will extend their broadcast partnership beginning with the ...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK Gracenote has released a new analysis of its global video dataset showing that the number of FAST channels grew nearly 14% from Q1 2025 and 76% since 2...
29/08/2025
SAN JOSE, Calif. Harmonic has announced a series of improvements to its live sports streaming solution that the company said will improve fan engagement, protec...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK and LOS ANGELES Fox Corp. and YouTube TV last night announced a renewal of the full portfolio of Fox networks, including Fox News Channel, Fox Business...
29/08/2025
Budapest, Hungary, August 2025 - The integration of Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTR) with Lightware's Taurus universal matrix switchers delivers a new level of f...
29/08/2025
Frequency, the engine behind many of the world's best-known streaming television channels, today announced it will launch Studio Live, a next-generation uni...
29/08/2025
In an era when AI and cyber resilience are essential, Scality will mark the 10th anniversary of Scality Day on October 16, 2025 in Paris. This flagship global e...
29/08/2025
Disguise's In-House Creative and Technical Teams Pre-Visualised, Programmed and Delivered Content for the Experience, All Powered by EX 3+
Technology solu...
29/08/2025
Disguise will be demonstrating the latest workflows for TV, film and live events on a number of partner booths at the show
Disguise, the industry-leading tech...
29/08/2025
STOCKHOLM, Sweden Accedo will showcase Accedo Compose, its AI agent-powered modular orchestration layer that assists streaming providers in transitioning client...
29/08/2025
LOS ANGELES Cineverse has announced that it is working with Xperi to bring four of its streaming channels to automobiles for the first time as part of the DTS A...
29/08/2025
DALLAS & ATLANTA Gray Media has announced an agreement with the sports streaming service Victory+ to simulcast 17 Dallas Stars NHL games in 15 television market...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK AND CULVER CITY Comcast NBCUniversal and Amazon have announced new and extended distribution agreements that will expand the content available on their...
29/08/2025
FOOTHILL RANCH, Calif. RED Digital Cinema will feature its Cine-Broadcast Module supporting live broadcast workflows during IBC2025, Sept. 12-15, at the RAI Ams...
29/08/2025
29 Aug 2025
Kyivstar Rings Opening Bell at Nasdaq Marking Landmark Listing and ...
29/08/2025
More than half of all NFL games live on Sky for the first timeFriday 29 August 2025
Sky Sports has announced a new three-year deal with the NFL, extending its ...
29/08/2025
Back to All News
RIV4LRIES: The Trailer of the New Series With Samuele Carrino ...
29/08/2025
Get ready for an inspiring and emotional insight into the world of competitive Irish dancing with My Story: Tomi Champion of the World airing on RT 2 this monda...
29/08/2025
RT has today announced that David McCullagh is to be the new presenter of RT Radio 1's flagship Today programme, which airs every weekday at 10am, replaci...
28/08/2025
By Kristin Feeley, Director, Documentary Film & Artist Programs
If you want to tell untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got ...
28/08/2025
Directed by Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert, Sundance Institute-supported Amer...
28/08/2025
Corridos have been a cornerstone of M sica Mexicana for generations, telling stories rooted in everyday life. Now, a new chapter is taking shape: motivational c...
28/08/2025
Los corridos han sido un pilar de la M sica Mexicana durante generaciones, contando historias enraizadas en la vida cotidiana. Ahora, un nuevo cap tulo est tom...
28/08/2025
Earlier this month, we promised our Verano Forever party would bring the heat, a...
28/08/2025
L3Harris will provide the Polish F-16V fleet with the Viper Shield electronic warfare system as part of an upgrade program....
28/08/2025
Bilbao, August 26, 2025 - AgileTV, an international television and video technol...
28/08/2025
Ken Wilkinson is an Emmy Awards nominated New York audio engineer who specialises in production sound mixing for film, commercial, episodic and documentary work...
28/08/2025
NEW YORK FuboTV today announced that it will launch Fubo Sports, a skinny bundle that focuses on sports with a subscription price of $56 monthly....
28/08/2025
NEVADA City, Calif. At IBC2025, Sept. 12-15 at the RAI Amsterdam, Telestream will debut its new Global Ingest strategy, introducing a next-generation ingest arc...
28/08/2025
Dr. Rhoda Bernard Releases Groundbreaking Debut Book on Accessible Arts Educatio...
28/08/2025
TAG Video Systems, the leader in software-based IP end-to-end workflow monitoring, deep probing, and real-time visualization, has named Oliver Gappa as Sales Di...
28/08/2025
AI-based voice enhancement will be among a series of innovations making their IBC 2025 debut on the DHD stand B46 in Hall 8 at the RAI Amsterdam Convention Cent...
28/08/2025
Telef nica Servicios Audiovisuales (TSA), the leading system integrator and service provider in the media sector in Spain, with the support of Appear, the globa...
28/08/2025
To fully immerse sailing fans in the world's biggest offshore yacht race, production company, Optical Media turned to LiveU's On-site Production solutio...
28/08/2025
Working with Calrec on its most recent overhaul, radio and television broadcaster, WNED has migrated to a fully IP infrastructure with multiple Type R consoles,...
28/08/2025
Cleeng, the Subscriber Retention Management (SRM ) inventor, has unveiled Cleeng Pro, the first-ever direct-to-consumer (D2C) subscription management platform t...
28/08/2025
Zixi, the industry leader in live broadcast-quality video over IP, today announced that French media distribution platform OKAST has selected Zixi to enable rel...
28/08/2025
Solution offers a streamlined, speaker-free architecture to optimize integration with premium external loudspeakers and advanced loudness metering
Nixer Pro Au...
28/08/2025
Cinegy, the premier provider of software-defined television technology, has announced a strategic partnership with Vision One Touch Film Production Services L.L...
28/08/2025
Telestream, a global leader in media workflow technologies, will debut its new Global Ingest strategy at IBC2025, introducing a next-generation ingest architect...
28/08/2025
Tier 1 operator selects Broadpeak to power high-performance, unified CDN solution across Norway, Sweden and Finland
Broadpeak, a leader in streaming and moneti...
28/08/2025
Leading video software provider, Synamedia, today announced that 24 Frames Digital, one of India's leading live event streaming service providers, has chose...
28/08/2025
Meet VisualOn at IBC2025: See What's Next in AI-Powered Video Streaming Join VisualOn at IBC2025 and discover how our AI-driven Optimizer and advanced media...
With 180 Games in 12 Days, Champ Week Tests ESPN's Production, Operational Versatility An array of production styles will be deployed to meet programming plans By Brandon Costa, Director of Digital 
