Live From CFP National Championship: ESPN's MegaCast Adds New Technologies to Already Packed Arsenal This year's highlights include options in 4K, PTZ PylonCams By Kristian Hernandez, Associate Editor
Monday, January 13, 2020 - 3:51 pm
Print This Story
Story Highlights
ESPN's traditional telecast of the College Football Playoff National Championship Game is one thing, but the alternative and often tech-laden behemoth known as MegaCast is in a whole different area code. Despite more than a dozen options for fans on either side of the Battle of the Tigers, the network has continued to serve up a wealth of new offerings, include one feed in 4K, the debut of Refcast, and flexible PTZ PylonCams.
We have a great relationship with the conferences, schools, and officials, so it's an area where we've been most productive with getting things approved, says Ed Placey, content innovation lead, ESPN. Our relationship has allowed them to trust that we'll be bringing things to the forefront for all of the right reasons and not just to make a quick splash but to make a difference and show how the sport is officiated, with things like replay. The MegaCast has influenced things that we do in the regular season, and it has helped the overall perception of this event and our coverage.
MORE FROM CFP NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP
ESPN Readies a Camera-Filled Feast for the Eyes in The Big Easy'
ESPN Operations Turns NOLA's Jackson Brewery Into a Home-Away-From-Bristol
ESPN Colleagues Celebrate Operations Legend Bob Braunlich, Working His Final CFP
ACC Network Battles Weather for Onsite Studio Programming
SEC Network Brings Experience to Jax Brewery, Mercedes-Benz Superdome
Van Wagner, Saints Team Up on Massive In-Venue Production
The SVG Podcast: Live From College Football Playoff National Championship in New Orleans
The Tech Freshmen: 4K, Refcast Make CFP Debut in New Orleans
In the technological barrage at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome are a handful of notable appearances. For the first time in the College Football Playoff era, 4K feeds will grace the airwaves. With more efforts on this front in the regular season and during the recent Sugar Bowl, a partnership with Samsung QLED TV will bring Field Pass in this particular format for customers with Comcast, Altice, and DirecTV. For the showing on ESPN2, a pair of duos will call a casual, free-flowing game from field level. Using fan interaction via polling technology from Sparx Technology, Adam Amin and Pat McAfee will man the sidelines of LSU while Steve Levy and Dan Orlovsky reside on Clemson's.
Skycast is just one of the offerings available for fans tuning into ESPN's MegaCast.
Bristol, CT-based Refcast will be leveraging technologies seen in past years but will also provide a new flavor of commentary.
We had done something in 2015 when we re-created a mock replay booth with real replay officials and the exact equipment and feeds that they used, says Placey. We liked that so, in the last couple of months, we spoke about different possibilities. John Vassallo [senior coordinating producer, ESPN] has taken a bit more time with Rogers Redding [officials coordinator, SEC], the officiating community, and the different conference coordinators and got us talking about how interest about the work of officials has never been higher. John Parry from the NFL has really been a talented guy that has taken to putting on a headset and talking about officiating, so we decided to bring four of them [Matt Austin, Judson Howard, Parry, and an additional official] together and give them our cameras that focus on the officiating.
Some of these feeds include a RefCam mounted on the hat of four game officials, up to 10 active PylonCams (including one Line-to-Gain version on each side of the first down line), and a MarkerCam. With these features available to a staff seasoned with officiating knowledge, Placey wants fans tuning into this game to hear an authentic, real-time conversation about the rules being showcased on the field.
We're not going to have a host there to ask them questions, he says. We want them to talk at the officiating level instead of teaching audiences abut officiating. It's about how they communicate and interact with each other rather than if they were being interviewed by someone else. The people who are going to watch this are really into officiating, so we want [the commentators] to use the jargon.
Up, Down, and Around: PTZ Enhances Visual Dimensions of PylonCam
The PylonCam system has slowly become a mainstay on all college-football productions. When Placey and the technical crew were seeking a bit more from this application, they approached a familiar vendor.
We've been working pretty aggressively with C360, who we've been working with for a couple of years when they first demoed some of their products for us, Placey says. We liked the basics of what we saw, but it needed other elements to really make it productive for a live television show. We said, Hey, if you added this and made it capable of doing these things in a quick-turnaround fashion, we'd have a good product.'
In a development that will ultimately benefit both main and secondary experiences, ESPN will be using another iteration of the device.
They accomplished [an upgrade], says Placey, and we ended up putting their camera systems into wireless pylons, which have become Line-to-Gain PylonCams. We had a 1.0 version of that last year with a fixed lens, but now, we have the ability through its internal optics to pan, tilt, and zoom throughout the entire scene.
These new robotic cameras will sit within the pylons along the back line of both end zones. In terms of replays, what used to be captured by luck will now be captured with skill.
We get to see everything that happens in a play, he not
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...
Live From CFP National Championship: ESPN's MegaCast Adds New Technologies to Already Packed Arsenal This year's highlights include options in 4K, PTZ PylonCams By Kristian Hernandez, Associate Editor 
