Toronto’s Scotiabank Arena has been one of Canada’s most iconic venues for over a quarter of a century. Home to both the NHL and NBA, it is one of the leading sports stadiums in the country, but it also caters for a multitude of other events every week, from concerts to corporate events.

Live events on this scale take a lot of planning, especially when their workflows and processes are distributed throughout the building. As a live venue, Scotiabank Arena has no single location or presentation spaces to address, and its wide range of activities means that sources and destinations can be anywhere. Outside of scheduled sporting events, the venue can’t control either where these requirements are going to be or what they are, demanding a flexible environment where workflows can quickly adapt to meet changing needs.

Currently in the second year of a significant multi-year reimagination, it is planning for the future, and according to Manager of Venue Technology, Dwayne Brown, it’s keeping its options open with the installation of a Riedel MediorNet TDM routing system.

“Scotiabank Arena is a multi-purpose facility, and the physical setups for a hockey game are very different to a basketball game, or a concert, or a private corporate event,” says Brown.  “Each needs access to different sources and destinations in different parts of the facility, and our requirements are constantly changing too. Live broadcasting and live events may be related and use a lot of the same tools and workflows, but both have different needs and serve very different audiences.”

“Take hockey and basketball, for example. On game days we can be servicing three or more shows simultaneously that make the legacy studio/CER/control room design difficult to work with. TV rights holders bring in their own remote facilities to broadcast the game and we not only provide them with our facility and patching infrastructure but also share camera and audio feeds with them. We simultaneously create an in-house presentation with our own cameras for our center-hung videoboard, and we may host sponsorship activations and tailgate parties from our concourse-level open studio space – all running independently while sharing feeds from us or from our broadcast partners.”

“Concerts and corporate events deviate from all the above and are often located in other parts of the Arena where we don’t normally set up; they may need temporary control setups that can access our in-house cameras and sources, but they don’t necessarily want to be in our control room.”

“We now accomplish all of this through our MediorNet MicroN TDM routing system.”

Meshed Up

Unlike a traditional centralized router system, MediorNet MicroN is a decentralized mesh network, which means that its compact 1U UHD boxes can be placed wherever sources and destinations need to be accessed. This allowed Scotiabank Arena to totally rethink its infrastructure, creating areas across the facility where it is most useful to locate I/O and processing nodes, and quickly create the routing architectures required for different events. 

Building on Riedel’s distributed MediorNet concept, Scotiabank Arena installed 16 MicroN UHD units across its vast facility. Its software-defined hardware can be whatever it needs to be; it can be a throw-down signal processor, a point-to-point link, or a node in a larger de-centralized routing system, and each node adds more bandwidth, more I/O, higher resolutions and more processing power across the MediorNet platform.

Spreading The Load

Ten of the UHD units are located in the Arena’s Central Equipment Room (CER), along with a cold spare. The venue’s five in-house cameras all have Communications Controller Units (CCUs), and those CCUs are all housed in the CER where they are patched directly into the MediorNet UHDs that are there. Scotiabank’s switcher has an I/O frame, while its graphics presentation computers and its replay systems are also located in the CER. 

But the others are all located where it makes the most sense.

“There’s one in our catwalk, and a couple in our control room,” says Brown. “We have a unit located in the interconnect room, one at the event level closer to our basketball setup, and there’s one in a small presentation studio in our main concourse which is much further away. Having them distributed in this way makes our life so much easier. Locating a MediorNet in an electrical closet under the stairs on courtside for basketball, we’re a lot closer to getting that feed to where it needs to be rather than having to figure out how to get it from an equipment room on the other side of the building.”

Easy Access

While all 16 Riedel boxes talk to each other over the network, the first box in the CER connects to one of the venue’s network switches. This gives the venue’s operators access to the entire MediorNet infrastructure, as well as its Riedel Artist system for the Bolero comms system, from any terminal throughout the Arena. Crucially, it also enables them to switch between events and reroute the entire infrastructure with no manual reconfiguration.

“For internal presentations, such as delivering content for our scoreboard displays, we’re operating as a broadcast studio,” says Brown. “The core work for real-time control and monitoring of the network is done in Riedel’s MediorWorks configuration software which enables us to define all the routes, sources, and also runs our multiviewer system.”

“The snapshot feature in the MediorWorks software has been amazing for us. Not only do hockey and basketball have completely different routing architectures with different feeds required for each sport, but each is from different locations within our facility. With MediorNet, when we set up for either event, our engineering team can simply pick the dropdown snapshot they want to use for that game and seconds later they are ready to go. Our multiviewers are already set up the way that they want them for each sport at each individual operating station, and all of our shared coach and broadcast feeds are all routed to the appropriate places through the interconnect room.”

“Snapshots mean we can change hundreds of routes with one click of a button; I can’t overstate the impact of how snapshots have simplified our entire workflow.”

Outside of game days, the flexible network also enables Brown to adapt source and destination patching to any number of ad hoc events, whether it’s a concert, or a corporate event across any of the stadium’s internal venues and restaurants which need access to PA systems and display TVs. But for broadcasters it is the venue’s interconnect room that is a critical part of the puzzle.

Plugging In

Although the MediorNet system provides control over internal connectivity, Scotiabank’s broadcast partners don’t touch the Riedel system at all.

“Remote facilities interface directly in our interconnect room and can patch into any of the 70 media bulkheads that we have stationed throughout the facility. Each media bulkhead has fiber, camera connections, video coax, XLRs and so on, and every one of those connections is a dry line from that media bulkhead back to the interconnect room. They don’t need to access our technology infrastructure; they need our passive dry line patching infrastructure to do their show because all of their gear is in their truck.”

“Having the UHD unit in the interconnect room allows broadcast partners to give us camera feeds that we can use in our presentations, and it means we can supply our camera feeds to them too, so it benefits all parties.”

Moreover, Brown says that the next iteration of its development plans is to adopt a Riedel HorizoN unit on the edge of its network in the interconnect room. This will enable IP-native trucks to easily share resources, irrespective of whether they are on an IP or a baseband infrastructure.

Closed Facility

The decision to continue to use most of the Arena’s existing infrastructure was not taken lightly, and although Brown is focused on future growth, he argues the Riedel network offers the same benefits as a full IP network, but without the uncertainty.

“A lot of people are talking about ST2110 and IP, but IP is only good for us on the edge when we need to share with somebody else,” he says. “We are a closed facility and there is no benefit to us going to an IP infrastructure; it’s twice the cost and it’s twice the management. We have a baseband SDI infrastructure that is already built on cost-effective fiber which is robust, easy to manage and can deal with distance, and it gives us the same flexibility as an IP network.”

“While there are some fixed utilities on the Riedel MediorNet system, there is huge flexibility in terms of the number of inputs each one can access, and redundancy across the system is very robust. First of all, it’s a mesh network, so if any one of the boxes or fibers goes down during an event, every other route in the mesh network continues to flow and traffic will find its way around the bottleneck. Meanwhile, we have a cold spare on the shelf which can become any one of these other 16 boxes in a matter of minutes.”

Future Focused

As a stepping stone to the future, the fundamental advantage of the MediorNet install enables Scotiabank Arena to prepare for anything that comes down the line, and that, says Brown, is where the real value lies.

“We’re currently renovating a space into an open bar area with potential to host a DJ, live bands, new displays and a big LED screen which will need content and a connection to the rest of the Arena,” he explains. “We might not know at this point how we want to use that space, but MediorWorks constantly monitors how much traffic goes across the topology and if we ever need more, we can just add another box to increase our processing power. Once we do that, it’s on our mesh network and becomes part of the system.”

“MediorNet gives us the latitude to not worry about the next ask. We’re not even halfway through our renovations, but I don’t have to worry about whether I have the infrastructure to tackle what the next phase is going to throw at us. Even though we’re renovating an existing facility as a brownfield development, this technology enables me to approach it from a greenfield perspective because I’m not worried about meeting the needs of the renovation. I know I can accomplish anything by simply adding another MediorNet box to the network.”

The Scotiabank Arena system was designed and deployed with the help of system integrator Matrix Video Communications Corp. (MVCC). Troy Gallant. Snr Account Manager at MVCC had this to say; “Scotiabank Arena was built for world-class sports and live music, and the Riedel system is key to adapting seamlessly - from hockey to concerts to basketball - thanks to its flexible fiber backbone connecting every corner of the venue.”