All That Jazz: Utah's SEG Media Blazes the OTA, Streaming Trail for New Era in Regional Sports Broadcasting

All That Jazz: Utah's SEG Media Blazes the OTA, Streaming Trail for New Era in Regional Sports Broadcasting By Jason Dachman, Editorial Director, U.S.

Wednesday, December 20, 2023 - 11:27 am

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With the fraught regional sports network model in the midst of a tectonic shift, the Utah Jazz are one of several pro-sports teams opting to shift its live-game broadcasts to an over-the-air station and subscription streaming service. However, while many others were forced to turn to their respective leagues for help or build out an in-house broadcast operation from scratch, Utah Jazz SVP of Broadcasting Travis Henderson and his team had a leg up.

The Utah Jazz worked with Creative Dimensions to launch a brand new studio inside the Delta Center.

We've been [producing games in-house] for several years at this point, so we already had a lot of the infrastructure and operations in place to do the games - [including] the truck and the crew, he says. I would say we were very fortunate in that we were already pretty self-sufficient, which made the transition a bit easier.

With Warner Bros. Discovery's looming closure of AT&T SportsNet, Owner Ryan Smith and team parent Smith Entertainment Group opted to launch their own production company, dubbed SEG Media, to produce games and other content for distribution on over-the-air TV station KJZZ-TV Salt Lake City and the Jazz subscription-based DTC streaming service starting this season.

Our owner Ryan Smith said, we are going to put the fan experience first' and that was our philosophy all summer as we prepared, emphasizes Henderson. It wasn't easy and there was certainly a lot of work involved, but we were very well positioned and prepared to take on the task. So, even with the short [timeline], it wasn't as big as a transition it might have been for some other teams.

Jazzing Up the Game Productions: More Eyeballs Means More Tech Toys Travis Henderson, SVP of broadcast, in the control room for the Jazz game broadcast

The Jazz announced the move in June, giving Henderson and company just four months to build out the new SEG Media operation and prepare to produce all games for the 2023-24 season.

It was a very compressed timeline, but we were very fortunate to be supported by the Delta Center in-house arena group's engineering staff, says Henderson. They were very helpful in getting a lot of the things up and running for us that would normally have been in a separate location like master control.

The Jazz broadcast team continues to rely on its mobile unit from Salt Lake City-based Pure Mobile Productions, as it has for several years for home games. The team utilizes the dual feed model for road games, leveraging a combination of a small crew in a B unit onsite and a small control room back at the Delta Center.

In addition to more than 3 million Utahns having unencumbered access to Utah Jazz games via KJZZ and Jazz , the team has engineered a plethora of deals in outer market broadcast territory that add an additional 3 million potential fans across five states. With more eyeballs on the games than ever before, Henderson and his team are looking for new ways to engage fans in the Beehive State and beyond.

That is exciting from a production standpoint because we know there's going to be more new and casual fans tuning into our broadcast, says Henderson. So we thought about our production approach as far as how we can better reach those fans and put an emphasis on growing our fan base. That's certainly been a very big awareness factor on our side in house we produce games.

For example, the Jazz boosted its camera complement and now has four high-speed cameras - two 6x- and two 3x slo-mos - at its disposal for all home games. In new addition, select games now features an RF Sony Alpha FX3 full-frame cinema camera to capture courtside shallow-depth of field shots throughout the game.

A Whole New Look: Graphics Package and Studio Set Get a Makeover With a fully equipped production truck from Pure Mobile, an in-arena control room, and a veteran production crew in tow, the SEG Media team kept its focus on the small details throughout the summer launch period.

Utah Jazz announcers Craig Bolerjack, Thurl Bailey, and Holly Rowe

Being that we already had a [mobile unit] and a small control room in our arena to handle home and road game productions, the bigger pieces were mostly in place already, he says. So it was a lot of the smaller things - establishing transmission, building a graphics package and music, and launching a new set - that took up the most time.

SEG Media worked with Creative Dimensions to launch a new studio set inside the Delta Center for pre-, half-time, and post-game shows for both home and away games.

Creative Dimensions were really terrific and, even though it was one of the bigger projects this summer, they made the whole process very smooth since they were so professional in their design and construction, says Henderson. I think it's pretty unique for [a set] to come together that quickly and seamlessly and we are very happy with the final product.

As for the new graphics package, the Jazz worked closely with the NBA to develop a new look for its revamped broadcasts. Essentially, he SEG Media creative team took a new package that the league was working on and customized with Jazz branding and sponsorship integration.

It came out of a discussion over the summer about what they were working on and then we took what they had and put our own look and branding on it, says Henderson And for daily game to game [graphics operations], we have a very talented graphic staff here that we're able to tap into for specialty graphics and things like that. So it's been great and we're very happy with how it's tu

LINK:	https://www.sportsvideo.org/2023/12/20/all-that-jazz-utahs-seg-media-b...
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