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As head of NewTek and later its NDI subsidiary for decades until last year, Dr. Andrew Cross was a big advocate of making technology accessible and affordable to a wide range of people. It just made good business sense to create an ecosystem and then allow users to experience some of it for free and build up from there.
With this year’s Super Bowl LVI telecast coming smack dab in the middle of the Winter Olympics, NBC Sports crews will have their hands full. Having to navigate both high profile events on the same day, NBC is calling it the “one of the greatest days in the history of television sports [production]” and a “Once In A Lifetime” event.
The pandemic has affected the system design and operations of live sports production in a myriad of ways. At first it was difficult for many to figure out but then evolved into the deployment of innovative types of distributed workflows and crews that drastically altered the physical positioning of technology and human resources.
Although latency and resource coordination continue to challenge those considering cloud-based remote live production, the distributed architecture model is steadily gaining traction as a cost-effective alternate to hardware-based on-premise projects. To date this IT-centric architecture has not been deployed for high-profile productions like the Super Bowl or World Cup, but remote IP-video contribution, production and distribution has allowed second-tier sporting events to be televised globally whereas they might not be - due to cost and fully remote access - using traditional production methods.
Though mostly a publicity stunt, Major League Baseball’s Field of Dreams Game live telecast on August 12th proved to be a hit for everyone involved—including the Fox Sports team and production company Game Creek Video—tasked with putting it on.
In the high stakes world of auto racing, every second counts so whatever a team can do to improve its performance, both on and off the track, is put into play. For the highly successful Corvette Racing team, which competes in endurance races that last 24 hours to the finish, it’s secret weapon is reliable two-way communication between its drivers and crew.
We move on to looking at developments in noise cancelling technology and the role it can play in achieving clarity and comfort within headsets for intercom use.
Core to any successful television production is the effective application of clear and precise communications. Camera operators, sound assistants, playout, slow-mo operators, and floor managers all need to hear direction from the production teams. Without comms, the production would soon degenerate into a chaotic cacophony of incoherent images and sounds.