From The Jump to Korean Baseball, ESPN's Live From Home' Efforts Keep the Content Factory Churning At-home studios, remote commentary kits, and ViBox REMI workflows have played key roles By Jason Dachman, Chief Editor Wednesday, May 13, 2020 - 3:56 pm
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When the coronavirus pandemic brought the sports world to an abrupt halt two months ago, ESPN quickly formed a Live From Home committee to evaluate options that would allow on-air talent and crew to produce live studio shows from the safety of their own homes. In the months since, efforts by the committee - led by the Remote Operations department and comprising 30+ staffers from several ESPN departments - have resulted in the launch of more than 60 at-home studios for talent, five remote-commentary kits for live KBO League (Korean Baseball Association) telecasts, and a full REMI production workflow for several ESPN studio shows.
ESPN MLB analyst Eduardo Perez prepares for a KBO telecast using the a remote commentary system at his home (credit: Eduardo Perez/ESPN)
Obviously, we all continue to plan for live sports to return, says Chris Calcinari, SVP, remote operations, ESPN. We're on calls every day with our production partners and our league partners trying to work through scenarios and plans to come back once it's safe to hold sporting events. But, in the meantime, we've been keeping busy coming up with homegrown, innovative solutions that allow our production teams to work from home. And we believe these innovations will prove to be extremely valuable once live sports return.
Live From Home' Studios: Keeping Commentators Active
ESPN's Live From Home studios have become the backbone of the network's studio operations since reduced staffing measures were put in place at ESPN's Bristol, CT, campus. Although several shows are still being hosted out of the Bristol studios, nearly all analysts and reporters have been outfitted with robust studio facilities at their homes to enable them to contribute to ESPN programs.
ESPN college hoops analyst Jay Bilas using his remote home studio (credit: Shea Byram/ESPN)
We had a pretty strong network of home studios even before the pandemic happened, says Shea Byram, senior remote operations manager, ESPN, but we've taken it to the next level now. Thankfully, we had a good system in place, which allowed us to get things done as quickly as possible and get the [studio kits] out to our talent.
When the sports world suddenly shut down on March 12, Byram and her team anticipated an increased need for at-home studios and ordered gear for an additional 30 studio kits.
A three-person team composed of Byram, Senior Remote Operations Coordinator Ryan Bastek, and Remote Ops Coordinator Leah Morgenstern constructed the kits and deployed them to talent throughout the country. In addition, Byram relied on the entire ESPN remote-operations team to perform the installations at commentators' homes, walking them through the process via Facetime.
ESPN FC soccer analyst Frank Lebeouf's at-home studio in Paris (credit: ESPN)
That has been a lifesaver, says Byram. Normally, we are out on the road every week installing home studios at different locations. But, as soon as we got our travel ban, we had to enlist the help of everyone else in remote operations. At this point, we have a nice network of installers that are able to help us. We're still [installing at-home studios] in the Tri-State area ourselves, but we are getting as much help as we can around the country from the rest of the team.
The sophistication of the kits varies from a simple system comprising an iPads, lighting lights, and a transmission app to higher-end systems that are equipped with an IP-based PTZ camera and a more advanced transmission device for hosts who are on-air for several hours at a time. The 60+ systems installed over the past two months are in addition to ESPN's pre-existing installations, and the team will continue to deploy more in the coming weeks.
Leveraging Seaport Studios: REMI Workflows
After initially exploring a variety of cloud-based solutions to produce studio shows remotely, ESPN quickly pivoted and opted to leverage the Simply Live ViBox multi-camera production system and other resources at its South Street Seaport Studios in Manhattan to create a fully REMI (remote-integration) production workflow.
ESPN's Chris Strong supports the REMI studio-show productions from his home office in Texas (credit: Chris Strong/ESPN)
We were tasked with coming up with a solution to help the company put shows back on-air without straining folks in Bristol that are already producing shows safely using [social distancing] and using resources that we already had available, says Chris Strong, senior remote operations specialist, ESPN. We decided to leverage equipment and resources that were already at our Seaport [location], where we have a ViBox and an open studio available.
Prior to the pandemic, ESPN had deployed ViBox to streamline several of its productions, including most notably at the U.S. Open as well as for its coverage of Little League baseball/softball, high school basketball. Strong says the thought of controlling the ViBox remotely had been considered for years and the company had already been testing a REMI ViBox workflow with SimplyLive for the past eight months.
Just one EIC - such as Wes Glogg seen here - is on-site at a time to manage ESPN's Seaport Studios in NYC for the REMI productions (credit: Wes Glogg/ESPN)
When we first started this review to create Live From Home workflows, says Calcinari, the main goal was to give our production teams the tools that they're used to having. We evaluated a lot of cloud-based solutions and found a lot of limitations in terms of large volu
