Fox Network Group Transmiion Plan for Super Bowl LI inks Big (and Redundant)

Super Bowl LI has led to Fox Sports taking over Houston and all week long the happenings for various Fox entities have had reverberations across the U.S. And for Keith Goldberg, Fox Networks Group's VP, global operations and transmission services, and his team the goal is to make sure a complex network of fiber and satellite transmission systems operate to perfection.

This set up is overwhelmingly larger in scale and scope than any Super Bowl we have done, he says. And it has many more areas of complexity with IP and the routing of IP with multiple remote locations. But with the amount of circuits and bandwidth this is larger than what we did in New York in 2014

Keith Goldberg says Super Bowl LI exceeds the transmission effort of Super Bowl XLVIII, held in 2014.

.

Fox is making use of a fully diverse architecture at both Discovery Green Park and NRG that are providing upwards of 40 Gbps of IP connectivity and video transport using a combination of SDI and EVPL or Ethernet Virtual Private Line circuits.

Level 3 is providing onsite support and paths, adds Goldberg. We also have a lot of HD-SDI 2 Gbps circuits and some J2K circuits.

The move to IP has increased greatly over the years to support digital platforms and to move video. The Fox Broadcast Data Network (BDN) team, which specializes in the convergence of broadcast and digital infrastructures, is supporting the Fox Sports team with 20 Gbps of support.

We have a team of about 12 on site in Houston and then the vendors are providing their own support for transmission, power, and everything else, says Goldberg.

True transmission path diversity is the name of the game for an event like the Super Bowl and Fox is using both fiber and satellite at NRG Stadium and Discovery Green with satellite trucks on site at the team hotels. There are eight diverse fiber paths out of NRG Stadium as Goldberg says there's never enough with respect to the need for backup paths. There are also backup control rooms that will shadow the main control room in Pico. The Fox network facility outside of Houston, in Woodlands, TX, is the ultimate backup in case of a major outage in Los Angeles.

LINK:	http://www.sportsvideo.org/2017/02/01/fox-network-group-transmission-p...
	See more stories from svg

Most recent headlines